Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Guardians director James Gunn is aiming to save cinema

SINGAPORE — Guardians Of The Galaxy director James Gunn is a man on a mission: He’s out to save the summer blockbuster, which he says have become boring and repetitive.

“Spectacle films — the big huge movies — have gotten sort of stale,” said Gunn. “I think it’s time to inject a little bit of something fresh.”

This “something fresh”, oddly enough, comes by taking audiences back to the atmosphere at the start of the modern blockbuster era, when huge genre movies consistently wowed audiences.

“I wanted to create a movie that would make audience members feel what I felt like when I saw Raiders Of The Lost Ark for the first time, or The Empire Strikes Back, or Back To The Future — these movies really moved me emotionally, made me laugh, and made me excited and felt in peril,” said Gunn. “And I think that’s what Guardians Of The Galaxy does.”

Gunn, who was recently in Singapore for the South-east Asia tour for Guardians, about a group of galactic misfits-turned-heroes, vouches that even those who already love the Marvel movies — such as Iron Man, Thor and Avengers — will be in for a treat. The first Marvel studios movie to take place almost entirely in outer space will be the biggest Marvel movie yet, he said.

“There’s more action, there’s more comedy, there’s more drama. I think that it’s just a more extreme film than the other Marvel movies have been up till now.”

A cult favourite director before directing Guardians, Marvel is so confident about Gunn’s work that they’ve signed him for the sequel even before the movie premieres. And there are even rumours of him being in negotiations for Avengers 3. To entrust a whole new franchise and its sequal to this self-professed “weirdo” director even before box-office takings are in might seem crazy, but that’s what makes Gunn such a perfect fit.

“I never think anything I do is crazy; I guess I’m just crazy!” said Gunn. “I think with Guardians Of The Galaxy, (Marvel) allowed themselves to go even further because it’s such a far-out property, it’s such a different type of movie and it is creating a whole new wing of the Marvel universe.”

Despite a two-year process that never felt overwhelming, directing Guardians still wasn’t the easiest thing to do.

“(Directing) feels like giving birth at times,” said Gunn. “It’s very painful, but when you get the thing that’s trying to get out of it — which when you’re giving birth is an actual baby — and this is a cinematic baby, you feel good about it after the fact.”

And to a very baby-focused Gunn (he kept bringing up Marc Quinn’s Planet in Gardens By The Bay, which you might know as the “giant baby”), the Guardians are his children, and he had to listen to his “inner voice” to bring them to life.

“By creating a movie ... I have to believe in that inner voice that leads me in the direction of where I’m going,” said Gunn. “And I trust that voice more than I trust (a) ‘Joe Schenkman’ who lives in his parents’ basement in New Jersey — he might know a lot about the Guardians, but he doesn’t know about the movie Guardians. These are my children, and hopefully he’ll come to love them as people have seemed to do.

“That said, I have a group of people around me that I really trust and when I start going in the wrong direction, they’ll say, ‘Hey James, slow down’.”

He added: “I’m just not sure if I’m going to find those voices in the message boards of Badass Digest.”

Guardians Of The Galaxy opens in cinemas on July 31.

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.