quote:

Snyder had given the actors exceptional license with the script, encouraging them to ad-lib dialogue. Whedon expected them to say their lines exactly as he’d written them. “That didn’t go down well at all,” one crew member told me. Some actors criticized his writing. By Whedon’s account, Gal Gadot, who played Wonder Woman, suggested that he, the director of the highest-grossing superhero movie at the time, didn’t understand how superhero movies worked. At one point, Whedon paused the shoot and, according to the crew member, announced that he had never worked with “a ruder group of people.” The actors fell silent.

The actors, at least some of them, felt Whedon had been rude, too. Ray Fisher, a young Black actor, played Cyborg; it was his first major role. Snyder had centered the film on his character — the first Black superhero in a DC movie — and he’d treated Fisher as a writing partner, soliciting his opinions on the film’s representations of Black people. Whedon downsized Cyborg’s role, cutting scenes that, in Fisher’s view, challenged stereotypes.​​ When Fisher raised his concerns about the revisions in a phone call, Whedon cut him off. “It feels like I’m taking notes right now,” Whedon told him, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “and I don’t like taking notes from anybody — not even Robert Downey Jr.”

Gadot didn’t care for Whedon’s style either. Last year, she told reporters Whedon “threatened” her and said he would make her “career miserable.” Whedon told me he did no such thing: “I don’t threaten people. Who does that?” He concluded she had misunderstood him. “English is not her first language, and I tend to be annoyingly flowery in my speech.” He recalled arguing over a scene she wanted to cut. He told her jokingly that if she wanted to get rid of it, she would have to tie him to a railroad track and do it over his dead body. “Then I was told that I had said something about her dead body and tying her to the railroad track,” he said. (Gadot did not agree with Whedon’s version of events. “I understood perfectly,” she told New York in an email.)

As for Whedon’s claim that he doesn’t threaten people, an actress on Angel told me that hadn’t been true back when she knew him. After her agent pushed for her to get a raise, she claims Whedon called her at home and said she was “never going to work for him, or 20th Century Fox, again.” Reading Gadot’s quote, she thought, “Wow, he’s still using that line.” (Whedon denied this too.)

The United States posted:

It shouldn't be a surprise when the man who made a name for himself with 300 has a big fash fanbase. He's done some work to distance himself from it over the years but they're definitely how he got here and they're not all leaving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9-S0KwtzYo

LesterGroans posted:

There's absolutely no way Snyder has a bigger contingent of reactionary right wing fans than stuff like Star Wars, the MCU, Nolan, etc. It's blatantly silly.

Gresh posted:

All the reactionary right wing youtubers who hate star wars now because its "woke" are all big Snyder pushers...rightly or wrongly they see him as one of their champions of sorts. I think thats in part why his aggressively obnoxious fanbase has such a toxic reputation because a lot of them watch those channels.

Burkion posted:

He made a name for himself with the Dawn of the Dead remake, which is decidedly not popular with those people

LesterGroans posted:

There's absolutely no way Snyder has a bigger contingent of reactionary right wing fans than stuff like Star Wars, the MCU, Nolan, etc. It's blatantly silly.

Pirate Jet posted:

Why do so many people base their opinions on things based off of the feelings of crazy people on the internet

bushisms.txt posted:

We really gonna say the movie that presents the spartans as bad guys from the beginning is the issue

2house2fly posted:

You'll never see any of those chumps apply themselves to analysing the supposed right-wing themes of a Zack Snyder movie.

Metis of the Hallways posted:

Seriously, if you think that interview is trying to redeem Whedon, you haven't read it:

What a piece of poo poo!

The United States posted:

The United States posted:

No poo poo, because he doesn't have a fanbase anywhere near the size of Star Wars or the MCU or Nolan.

bushisms.txt posted:

Linking a bad read doesn't mean anything. It's also incredibly bad faith to try to pin anything on 300, like Nancy Reagan bad.

And again, for any film literate person, the movie proclaims the spartans as bad in the opening monologue. Agreeing with infanticide is beyond being a snyder fan.

LesterGroans posted:

I obviously meant as a percentage of their fanbase

The United States posted:

Bad reads are all the right wing propaganda apparatus has. And yet, bad reads were all that existed. It's not like Snyder or Miller or anyone else involved ever said any differently at the height of the Iraq war.




"It's me kids, your pal, Neo-Marxism!"

Zack Snyder posted:

I’d say “300” is a movie that is made from the Spartan perspective. Not just from the Spartan perspective, the cameras are the Spartans, but it’s the Spartans sensibility of the Battle of Thermopylae. If you had Spartans sitting around a fire and they were telling you before anything was written down what happened at Thermopylae, this is the way they would tell it. It’s not necessarily down to the fact that they don’t have armor on. Everything about it is just to make the Spartans more overwhelming.

Zack Snyder posted:

The Canadian actor and sometime activist Sarah Polley, who worked with Snyder on his remake of Dawn of the Dead, suggested I ask him about his politics. “Just for the freak show that it is," she chuckled. “You’ll be like, ‘People like him actually exist?’” She claimed he once brought a blown-up photograph of an American soldier with his boot on Saddam Hussein’s neck to the Dawn set, with his own face plastered over the Marine's. “It wasn't a joke. He’s like, ‘Is that cool?’ That's f****** psychotic.”

“She’s a piece of work,” Snyder says later, grimacing. “I could kill her. I love her, though. You know I do.” After a day of interviews, the fast-talking 41 year old is well aware of what people have been saying. “It’s kind of fun for me,” he says unexpectedly. “I’m a genre filmmaker so for someone to call me a 'fascist filmmaker' is like the best compliment in some ways.” He checks himself. Compliment is the wrong word. What he actually meant was, "it’s pretty awesome” people are taking the film so seriously.

“If I was Paul Verhoeven, and I had made this movie, I probably would have won the fricking festival with it,” he laughs. “Because everyone would be like, ‘Oh my God, it’s genius.'”

On the other hand, Snyder says he had expected a more sophisticated response from the media in Berlin and was surprised by how many people were unable to transcend the “simple knee-jerk politics of the movie”. In the same way that Dawn of the Dead was a “movie that loves that it’s a zombie movie”, 300 is “a genre movie that knows it’s a graphic novel", he says. "It’s very particular. It’s on the edge of being camp. It rides the line.” Asking what it really means, he argues, is to miss the point. “It is a movie for people that love movies. It’s a movie on steroids.”

As for his personal politics, he believes a director’s job is to “get out of the way of the movie as much as you can”, especially when it is an adaptation like 300. But for the record, he did not vote for George Bush. Nor, he says, recalling a question by a journalist earlier in the day, was the film funded with the Iraq war in mind.

bushisms.txt posted:

Why are you even giving air to them? They only can claim it because the "left" went so hard at snyder, that's the irony. The article you are highlighting is from 2020, that's post almost a decade of the "left" calling snyder a fascist with no backing. So then you have dumbdumbs doing the bare minimum and reacting to that and claiming him. All you have to do is look at how snyder handled actual fascist losers to their faces.

https://youtu.be/s3FWuPGbr9I

They're anti intellectual by choice, agreeing with their read or allowing them to claim something puts you in the same boat.

2house2fly posted:

Lol at the dumb rear end poo poo right wingers say about 300. Yeah the Spartans loved freedom bro!

The United States posted:

It shouldn't be a surprise when the man who made a name for himself with 300 has a big fash fanbase. He's done some work to distance himself from it over the years but they're definitely how he got here and they're not all leaving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9-S0KwtzYo

Gresh posted:

All the reactionary right wing youtubers who hate star wars now because its "woke" are all big Snyder pushers...rightly or wrongly they see him as one of their champions of sorts. I think thats in part why his aggressively obnoxious fanbase has such a toxic reputation because a lot of them watch those channels.

The United States posted:

It's almost like propaganda is dumb and anti-intellectual and ahistorical... but as long as it's visually effective it works. And we've seen it working overdrive for over 20 years.

You beg for an answer to this very question and then when it comes you plug your ears and ask "why are you even giving air to them?"

And yet the answer remains, staring you right in the face.

Gresh posted:

All the reactionary right wing youtubers who hate star wars now because its "woke" are all big Snyder pushers...rightly or wrongly they see him as one of their champions of sorts. I think thats in part why his aggressively obnoxious fanbase has such a toxic reputation because a lot of them watch those channels.

YOLOsubmarine posted:

Please stop treating YouTube and Twitter like they are reflective of real life.

Snowman_McK posted:

They also champion Alita, a film about a brown woman fighting Capitalism. Culture war poo poo is dumb.

The United States posted:

It shouldn't be a surprise when the man who made a name for himself with 300 has a big fash fanbase. He's done some work to distance himself from it over the years but they're definitely how he got here and they're not all leaving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9-S0KwtzYo

Gresh posted:

Its less to with Iraq war politics and more to do with cultural fears/anxiety. 300 is movie about a handful of brave chiseled white guys going against the cowardice liberal elite council to prevent the Muslim hordes from taking over Europe.

i wonder why right wingers love that movie and made so many Trump memes out of it in 2016.

Gresh posted:

i wonder why right wingers love that movie and made so many Trump memes out of it in 2016.

Roth posted:

Welcome to the "United States make a post without a billion tweets and youtube videos linked in it" challenge

Gresh posted:

Its less to with Iraq war politics and more to do with cultural fears/anxiety. 300 is movie about a handful of brave chiseled white guys going against the cowardice liberal elite council to prevent the Muslim hordes from taking over Europe.

i wonder why right wingers love that movie and made so many Trump memes out of it in 2016.

RBA Starblade posted:

I used to work with a few Iranian-Americans, years ago. They had a lot to say about 300. It wasn't positive.

Personally, I think it and Man of Steel are his best movies (and dislike the rest, tbh), and get what it's going for, but I also understand that maybe it's not awesome to see yourself represented as a man-monster with sword-arms or a faceless nightmare that exists only to oppress, even if it's only a satire

Violator posted:

I think Snyder is a wonderful human being, makes terrific movies, and deserves better from popular culture and Hollywood. But even I think this thread gets too defensive some times. “Even discussing a topic means you agree with it”? Woof.