Fresh off last night’s incredibly tantalizing trailer, a new interview with the creatives behind this summer’s Man of Steel has landed online.  Getting a new version of Superman off the ground was no small task, but screenwriter David S. Goyer and producer Christopher Nolan came up with an interesting take on the character that hadn’t been seen before and enlisted director Zack Snyder to bring the film to fruition.  We’re now less than a month away from Man of Steel’s release, and the trio has taken the opportunity to discuss the film and it's development.  Hit the jump to see what Nolan, Goyer, and Snyder had to say about Man of Steel, including making a wholly sci-fi Superman movie, why Snyder was the right man for the director's chair, and more.

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Speaking with the New York Times, Snyder said the character’s contradiction of being beloved but not necessarily relevant to the modern world was intriguing to him:

“He’s a really cool mythological contradiction. He’s incredibly familiar Americana and alien, exotic, bizarroland, but beautifully woven together. All of us, in a weird way, are that same kind of contradiction — no one’s that simple.”

In trying to bring a fresh take to the character with this contradiction in mind, Snyder and Co. settled on a wholly sci-fi iteration of the story:

The result is an unapologetic science-fiction spin on Superman, and while that may shatter audiences’ expectations for pure, unalloyed realism in Man of Steel, Mr. Snyder said this approach was built into the DNA of the character. “If you follow him back logically and try to understand him,” he said, “you end up at a sci-fi solution.”

Goyer adds that it was approaching the character as an alien in a foreign land that was the initial nugget of an idea that got the ball rolling on Man of Steel:

“If he really were an alien, when the world finds out that he exists, that in itself would be the biggest event in human history. That would change the world forever.”

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Image via Warner Bros.

As for finding the right filmmaker to bring this idea to fruition, Nolan explains why they settled on Snyder:

Mr. Nolan, a producer of Man of Steel, said he thought of Mr. Snyder to direct the film because of his stylized takes on 300 and Watchmen, and his “innate aptitude for dealing with superheroes as real characters.”

“That was what a new approach to Superman required,” Mr. Nolan said. “He understands the power of iconic images, but he also understand the people behind them.”

With regards to the fact that Snyder essentially deconstructed the entire superhero genre/mythology in taking on Watchmen, Nolan says the irony is not lost on him:

“It’s ironic but it’s a very productive irony. You’re dealing with a filmmaker who has deconstructed this mythology and now has to reconstruct it. That’s a fascinating challenge for him.”

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Image via Warner Bros.

Snyder went on to discuss how Man of Steel fits into the director’s larger filmography:

“I feel like my movies have always been very subversive, even when people haven’t perceived how subversive they really are. For me, what’s subversive about Superman is that it’s not subversive.”

Head over to the New York Times to read the full interview, which includes Snyder’s defense of his 2011 film Sucker Punch.

Click here to catch up on all of our Man of Steel coverage, or browse the links below:

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