By now, you probably know James Gunn's The Suicide Squad was given the hardest of R ratings, seeing as 90% of the marketing campaign has revolved around most of these characters dying horrible deaths. (There's also some "graphic nudity" thrown in, and you know deep in your soul it should be King Shark.) But what exactly does it mean for Gunn to get to that R-rating for a big-budget, studio comic book movie? "It just allows me to do anything we want," the writer/director told Collider and a roundtable of journalists on the film's Atlanta set back in 2019.
He continued:
"It really is a more grounded story. It's a sad story. One of the most fun things is, at the end of the day, even though we do kill Guardians of the Galaxy, we kill some of them, but in this movie...you don't know who's going to get killed. I think with the Guardians, you start out knowing these are guys who may have different problems, but at the end of the day, they're all really good people....that isn't the case with this. It's a much more complicated story. Some of these characters may end up being good. Some of them are definitely not good. Most of them are somewhere in between with different shades of gray and that moral drama, that moral play. The fact that you don't know anything that's going to happen. I don't think most people think that Star Lord's head is going to explode in the middle of the movie, but any of these characters, their heads could explode in the middle of the movie. So it's that unknown, that being on edge, that really not knowing what's going to happen is much different than the Guardians."
According to Gunn, The Suicide Squad has two main inspirations: The original 1980s comic book run from Suicide Squad creator John Ostrander—who has a brief cameo in the film, so keep an eye out—and the "war capers" of the 60s and 70s, most specifically The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, and Where Eagles Dare. And to bring that chaotic vision to life, the filmmaker has assembled a team proficient in building big sets and promptly blowing them to hell. Production designer Beth Mickle is responsible for some jaw-droppingly large practical sets, including a warehouse-sized jungle piece that not only features a full-sized, eight-foot-deep bamboo cage—Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) will find herself in there at some point, we were told—but was straight-up littered with prosthetic body parts. I personally picked a severed hand up off the floor. Who did it belong to? Impossible to say, but whatever caused the destruction is probably down to special effects wiz Daniel Sudick–who Gunn tells us is doing "more live special effects in this film than all of the Marvel movies he's ever done combined"—as well as longtime stunt supervisor Guy Norris.
When the roundtable sat down with actor Steve Agee, who plays "John Economos" and provides mo-cap for King Shark, he described the bloody joy of watching Norris at work:
"Our second unit director, as well as the stunt supervisor, is Guy Norris, who was the stunt supervisor for The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Fury Road. There werea few days where I didn't get to finish some shoots...so I got to go and work with second unit outdoors while they were filming stunts. While I waited to shoot my weird little stuff, I got to sit and watch Guy map out these huge explosions. And like, people die, just like Fury Road. I was like, 'Oh my god. This shit has been going on the whole time. We're indoor shooting, our weird little conversations. Guy Norris is out there on the back lot blowing shit up.' It's mind-blowing. I'm like, 'Oh my God, this is really action-packed.'"
Agee's co-star, David Dastmalchian, who has the distinct honor of playing Polka-Dot Man in the film, emphasized the way the guts and gore are an extension of Gunn's vision, not just empty bells and whistles. It's embedded in the character work, the actor said:
"It's James unbound...It's not like he's making an R-rated movie, he's making just the movie that's in his mind. And then they've taken the cuffs off, in the sense that it can be whatever it's going to be...lives are actually on the line, and the stakes really are life or death. And there's like in [The Belko Experiment, written by Gunn] some moments that are kind of hilariously like, 'Holy shit, a head just blew up.' Yeah, some heads will absolutely blow up. There will be brains on this camera, but there are some [deaths] that you're just like, 'Hmm.' It adds a weight of dramatic intensity to me as a viewer and now player in it."
Be on the lookout for more dispatches from The Suicide Squad set, including new details on Jotunheim, King Shark, and more. The Suicide Squad hits theaters and HBO Max on August 6th.