James Gunn’s Superman is as human as anyone. “I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can,” the Smallville-raised Kryptonian (David Corenswet) tells his anti-alien archnemesis Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) in the film’s climax. “I screw up all the time. But that’s being human, and that’s my greatest strength.” The heated exchange between Superman and Luthor is a response to the villain exposing a translated message from Kal-El’s birth parents, in which Jor-El (Bradley Cooper) and Lara (Angela Sarafyan) tell the Last Son of Krypton his purpose is to rule his adopted home planet Earth.
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At first despondent over the message, Superman is reinvigorated after an emotional heart-to-heart with his adoptive father, Jonathan “Pa” Kent (Pruitt Taylor Vince), during a visit to Smallville. “Your choices, your actions,” a mushy Pa reminds his son, “that’s what makes you who you are.”
In the behind-the-scenes documentary Adventures in the Making of Superman included on the film’s home release (available digitally Aug. 15), a refreshingly candid Gunn and Corenswet recall a quarrel over Superman‘s climactic “being human” scene.
“This speech, if it works, the movie works. If this speech doesn’t work, we’re going to have a problem with the ending of our film,” Gunn says in the special feature interspersed with on-set footage. “David comes in, he gives the speech, and is really good. I’m like, ‘Thank God.’ I’m so happy this is going to work. I said, ‘David, do one louder, more intense.’ David comes in and he does it, and it’s even better. I said, ‘Let’s do it again. Just give me another one like that.’”
But by the third take, the costume-clad Corenswet paused mid-sentence. “We start to film it, and then all of a sudden, David stops,” Gunn says, prefacing the anecdote by saying, “I love David. [He’s] one of my favorite actors I’ve ever worked with. He is wonderful. He also questions everything.”
Corenswet, a Juilliard trained actor, admits he can “piss people off” by “talking about text and what each word means and what each punctuation mark means.”
“What I need is, I need it to make sense. I need to know what I’m trying to do,” Corenswet explains. “So James is saying, ‘No, no, it’s more emotional.’” The actor recounted “yelling back” at Gunn over in the video village, “‘I feel that this isn’t giving the intensity at the level you want, to go low. I feel weak with me yelling at [Luthor].’”
In response, Gunn says into a microphone, “It’s a moment of you acknowledging your own weakness, your own hurt feelings, so that everyone who hears Superman knows that that’s okay for all of us to feel that way, and it’s not okay for the Lex Luthors of the world to be telling us, ‘We shouldn’t feel this way, we shouldn’t do that, we shouldn’t think this.’ That is what makes you different from the other heroes.”
“I was saying, ‘You want it to be emotional, but I don’t understand why,’” Corenswet recalls. He asked Gunn, “‘Don’t I feel better now that I’ve heard that thing, that really important moment that happened earlier with my adopted father? Didn’t that make it better? Didn’t that make me immune to this? Isn’t that the whole point?’”
Gunn, still in video village, listens as Corenswet talks through his reasoning. “Now I know that Pa Kent gave me what I need. If [Luthor] says, ‘You’re an alien,’ that doesn’t do what it did to me before, right?” Corenswet remarks from off-screen. To that, Gunn says, “I think it’s not a magic bullet. Pa Kent told you that you are who you are, that’s what makes you human.”
“We’re doing this in front of everybody,” Gunn remembers in the documentary. “He starts saying, ‘I just, I don’t know if I feel this.’” Corenswet then recalls walking off set to talk to the director in footage captured by the documentary.
“He came in and came off set, and we get into this thing,” Gunn says in the confessional. In the clip, Corenswet passionately argues his case, reasoning that having Superman yell his line to Luthor about being human means he’s “trying to prove it still.” As Gunn listens intently, the actor asks whether Superman was wrong to feel “like s–t” about himself in light of the message.
“That’s exactly where the issue is, right? Because what [Pa] didn’t tell you is that it was wrong to feel that way. There are feelings and there are thoughts. Your feelings about feeling bad are okay,” Gunn says emphatically. “It’s not wrong for you to feel that way. You should just, it’s not right or wrong anything — none of it is right or wrong — but all of it is being vulnerable and being a human being. And in this moment, for you to talk about how it’s okay to be vulnerable, you have to be vulnerable. Which means showing Lex that your f—ing feelings are hurt.”
With that, it clicks into place, and Corenswet’s Superman marches back to set and locks in. “The sentence that James said to me at the end of that conversation perfectly clarified what the character was doing in that moment and what I should be doing in that moment,” Corenswet says.
“I just remember hitting his chest, is what I remember,” Gunn laughs now. “Like, ‘You’re feeling this!’” Adds Corenswet, “I went out there, I did it, and it was right.” Gunn grows visibly emotional watching the take that ultimately made it into the finished film.
“I got emotional a second ago because I really do think that what this movie is about is, why do we love Superman so much? Is it because he can punch planets or pick up skyscrapers? I don’t think it is,” Gunn says. “I think it’s because of his innate goodness and his humanity, even though he’s an alien. And it’s okay that he’s being optimistic, it’s okay that he’s vulnerable. That’s what the scene was about.”
“All of the credit goes to James for saying that sentence, and for sticking with me and the conversation long enough to get to that sentence. Because I didn’t make it easy for him,” Corenswet says now. Gunn, who knew he’d found his Superman on day one, points out, “There’s no anger in any of this at all. There’s no ego. There’s a reason why he’s asking these questions, because it makes it better.”
“David wrote me that night, he texted me, he said, ‘That was my favorite day ever on set with a director,’” Gunn continued. “I said, ‘I think that was my favorite day, too.’”
DC Studios’ Superman is available to own August 15 on digital HD.
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Image courtesy of Marvel Studios.
