Anticipation has slowly been building for DC Comics’ The Flash finally hitting the big screen in his own solo movie, something that’s been in development for seemingly decades.  With The Flash, as played by Ezra Miller, already appearing, albeit briefly, in Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, as well as having a bigger role in next year’s Justice League, Flash fans who aren’t satisfied by the CW television show can just taste that movie happening!

They’d probably feel better about The Flash if the movie hadn’t already lost a number of directors, including Seth Grahame-Smith (screenwriter of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) and more recently, Rick Famuyiwa (Dope).

Earlier today at the junket for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, we spoke with Miller, who plays Credence, a sullen young man with foster mother problems, and we asked him if he had any insight into why all these directors were departing the project.

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Image via Warner Bros.

Surely, they didn’t have a problem with “The Ezra”?

"These processes are complicated, and I think it can—from afar—appear to be, as you say, something interpersonal or dramatic,” he told us. “That is rarely the case. These are groups of people taking the development of projects extremely seriously, and the teams are changing all the time. There’s often a lot of flux in who the team of the production of a film is before that production starts, and in this case, you hear about it, because it’s a critical figure—the directors that have been coming on and leaving. For me, it’s sort of a tragic relay race, and we’ve had a couple really incredible people carry this baton, and their marks are left on that baton, and the work that they’ve given to the project will certainly be represented in whatever the final product comes to be."

Since we’ve already seen Miller’s Flash in other movies, we wondered how he’s been developing the character through his various appearances.

"I mean I’ve been investigating and composing the character since the moment I started considering doing the screen test,” he said. “Fortunately, a lot of that research is extremely fun and involves reading Flash Comics and other comics from the world of DC, The Brave and the Bold, and I’m really interested in the early history and some of my favorite stuff is Silver Age. Even the Golden Age and the Jay Garrick stuff, the original Flash. It’s just so fascinating, so endlessly compelling. It’s such an incredible set-up for exploration, all these fascinating concepts in physics, in mysticism, in fantasy… he can go anywhere. He’s that figure of the DC pantheon who transcends the realms, sort of like Hermes or Mercury before him in the respective Greek and Roman mythologies that the character’s (creator) Gardner Fox clearly very much based (him on)."

A big part of the upcoming DC Universe film productions is going to be the newly-named DC Films Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns, who is a big Flash nerd in his own right, having written the character for over a decade.

“Yes, he’s a good guy to have around,” Miller agreed. “He keeps us full of information and he keeps us from making ignorant mistakes that would upset the fans across the world because you pretty much can’t get someone with a deeper knowledge of this universe than Geoff Johns.”

“I’ve had glimpses of various points in the development of it,” he said when asked whether he had seen any of the scripts for The Flash yet, “And I’m extremely excited.

Look for the rest of the interview with Miller before Fantastic Beasts opens on Friday, November 18th. Justice League arrives November 17, 2017.

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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.