I Am Superman with Patty Jenkins | Development Hell

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I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, and I study human behavior.

On my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, I talk to people who have experienced major

upheaval.

Moments that instantly divide their lives into a before and an after.

This is who I am.

And if I don't do this, why am I here?

What is my worth?

I have none.

If I can't do this, then do it well.

confronting illusions about ourselves that we are then forced to let go of.

And that process of letting go can be very messy and very painful.

you get your podcasts.

Yeah.

Is there a fairy tale that you were inspired by?

Which fairy tale is this?

I think it's...

So the opening of the movie is, and this will just tell you the tone, there's a voiceover

throughout the movie.

And the opening shot is, you're pushing in on this kennel in the middle of nowhere.

And it's out in a field.

And it's like, there once was, you know, an animal named Bandit.

And Bandit used to have had dreams of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you're pushing in, pushing in, pushing in until you get to this pit bull sitting

at the center.

And it's a thing of fighting pit bulls.

And he named himself Bandit, and you see a flash of a little boy that the dog had seen

from his kennel far, far away, playing with his puppy named Bandit.

And Bandit had dreams of one day being that dog.

And he hoped that one day someone would give him a chance and believe in him.

And this dog trainer comes, the fighting trainer, and takes Bandit out and is like, come on,

get out of here, and is pushing, dragging him along.

And then he's like, but that's many, many years ago.

And Bandit suddenly turns around and just fucking launches at his trainer and kills

the dude.

And at this point in Bandit's life, all Bandit ever wanted was just revenge, you know, like

just bloody revenge for the life that he's lived.

I'm not remembering it verbatim, it was a long time ago.

But it's like, and all he wanted was just one shot just to get payback and nothing more.

And then you just push in on him, and he's just got blood down his neck.

This episode is about a film starring a dog, a misunderstood dog that the filmmaker Patty

Jenkins wanted to make.

You've heard of her, I'm sure.

Her debut feature was Monster, an incredible portrait of Aileen Wernos, a prostitute who

killed seven of her clients.

Jenkins wrote and directed Monster, Charlize Theron took the lead role, and went on to

win the Best Actress Oscar for it.

Patty Jenkins next toured a force, directing the 2017 version of Wonder Woman.

The movie was a hit with critics and made more than $100 million in its opening weekend.

But somewhere between those two hits, Patty Jenkins had the idea of telling a different

kind of story.

them and came up with this story, which is kind of a fairy tale that takes place in a

dog prison program where the lead character is the dog.

And my ambition was to make a rated R dog movie where I wanted the dog to give a performance

so good they discussed whether to give it an Oscar.

You know, that was my whole goal.

But there was a heavy, there's a serious tour de force role for a man.

made.

But this is our first story involving a woman.

It's not for lack of trying.

We made call after call.

We recorded a truly fantastic episode with a prominent female screenwriter, and then

she asked us not to run it, with good reason.

Her movie never got made because she ran into a male director who didn't get the most

beautiful and brilliant part of her script.

And she didn't want to out him, not if she wanted to keep working as a screenwriter.

And she's right.

Women in Hollywood play by a very different set of rules than men.

They don't have the same freedom.

And more specifically, they're not allowed to tell the same kinds of stories, which was

the brick wall that Patty Jenkins ran into with her fairy tale about a misunderstood

pit bull named Bandit.

For sure.

You end up realizing as the story goes by, these trainers beat the shit out of these

dogs.

They abuse them.

And so, yeah, every once in a while they're going to turn on and kill somebody, and that's

life.

I obviously, having made Monster, have sympathy for why people do the things that they do

and interest in why they do the things that they do.

But I think that's also what the core of the story is.

By the end of the movie, you've seen that Bandit is this wonderful dog if someone had

just given him a chance to prove what he's capable of doing.

Back up.

Dog prisons.

So tell me the story.

Tell me the story and tell me what a dog prison is.

in with inmates, and they have those inmates rehabilitate the dogs.

And what's an incredible thing about it is that the closer you get to studying why and

what's happening in these prison programs, you realize, and this is very much what the

movie was about, that you're talking about a population of people that no one gives a

second chance to.

And this is, this will come back around to because it's ironically, I think, related

to why I could not get the movie made.

Everybody wants to believe that these are bad guys.

They're only interested in like having them suffer and pay their dues.

But the truth is that the closer you get to prison, the more you realize that prisons

are mostly full of just poor people.

The prisons are full of guys who have changed, never were that bad, have been in since juvie,

and there's no way out.

So the incredible thing about these dog programs is that they, you're looking at a population

of people that nobody is interested in anything other than having them pay their dues.

And then in come these animals that don't see them that way and need them to be their

hero and the men just come alive.

So you're using their time to do this incredible thing.

And it ends up being an absolutely stunning program where the inmates that end up being

enrolled in this have their recidivism rate drops to almost zero.

And that's what the movie was called, I Am Superman.

The guy who gets paired with this dog names him Superman.

Yeah.

So what is the, what's the, can you, can you be more specific about the emotional journey

of the actor in this?

out and that they can have their life changed.

And it's crushed when the prison shuts down the dog program and sends the dog away to

be put down and all hell breaks loose.

The journey of the actor is very much the journey that I've seen happen with many guys

in prison, which is like, oh, I got tricked into thinking that I could get a GED and I

could go and change my life.

But the truth is no, because even when you get out, nobody's really going to hire you.

They're not going to give you a chance.

They're not going to ever believe that you're different.

They're only going to be interested in the tough guy that you were.

And so what are you going to do?

You're going to become a criminal again because it's, at least there's some integrity of being

a bad guy, you know, like there's no integrity of being a loser.

And so it's, that's his journey and it ends up going differently than that in the end,

but only by a miracle.

And so the movie was a fairy tale about a single dog and the dog's opening scene of

the movie, the dog kills its trainer, who's like sitting on top of him with blood dripping

down its mouth.

It's a fighting pit bull.

And he gets put in a shelter and is supposed to be put down, but this dog gets accidentally

put in the program.

And the inmate that gets paired with him has just been brought back into prison after being,

he had just paroled and he's been accused of another crime.

And but because he had, you know, had been a good history when he was in prison before,

they let him get into this program, but he hates dogs.

And so it's the story of this terrible pit bull supposedly, and this terrible man who

are paired together, who actually hate each other, who have to go through this program

together.

And I can't tell you the whole story because I still may make this movie.

And I don't want everybody to know everything.

But the truth is, it doesn't go the way you think.

It's not a touchy feely.

I'm not interested in just straightforward issue movies.

So this is very much a fairy tale and the story goes slightly differently than you think

it would.

But it's wonderful.

You would, one would assume and will assume that it is that the man and the dog change

each other.

and by the administration and by the corruption, which is exactly what really is going on in

these prison situations.

And things turn out very, very differently.

Like a bunch of different people go a different way.

Yeah.

misunderstood they are completely and how disinterested in anybody is in what's really

their story.

Except they figure out what's up with each other, but nobody else cares or is open to

it.

It's magical.

No, it is.

It's magical.

The movie is bleak and it seems like it's going to be, but it ends up being magical.

And I love the ending and it's wonderful, but really it's, it, it, it, you'd like to

think that, you know, there are these great programs and that they're changing people.

And so of course we're going to continue to do them, but not only does that not happen,

but then the, it goes a very different way.

And, and that goes to the point of why I think no one ever made the movie because the movie

is all about the main character is already changed.

He's already a changed guy.

And so it's a, it really ends up being about the corruption that surrounds these guys where

even if you've changed and you've become a better person or you've never really done

anything, there's no way out because everybody's only interested in seeing you as the tattoos

that you have and, and the history.

On my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, I talk to people who have experienced major

upheaval, moments that instantly divide their lives into a before and an after.

This is who I am.

And if I don't do this, why am I here?

What is my worth?

I have none.

If I can't do this and do it well.

illusions about ourselves that we are then forced to let go of.

And that process of letting go can be very messy and very painful.

you get your podcasts.

Are you a dog person?

I love dogs.

But I've had Pitbulls my whole life.

I mean, yes, my mom didn't want us to have a dog, but I was always finding a way to get

dogs.

And so, yeah, I had different dogs.

And also my grandparents lived in Mississippi when I was young.

And so I would spend every summer down there with them in Mississippi and there were like

20, 30 Pitbulls there.

And this is kind of before Pitbulls had this bad reputation.

And so I grew up around Pitbulls and I understand them and know them and love them and think

that they're so smart and interesting.

And so that's another thing.

And by the way, it's not to say that there aren't some people breeding hyper aggressive

ones.

I've never been the person who says, oh, they're just like any other dog.

They're dangerous dogs.

You need to know what you're dealing with.

If it does bite somebody, it can do a lot of damage.

They're not very likely to bite somebody.

And they are incredibly smart and independent and emotional dogs.

One of the most intelligent breeds.

principal characters are a person and an animal, what challenges does the dog present?

I mean, huge.

My goal was to get an honest performance out of a pit bull.

They are incredibly emotive dogs.

And so you can just read what's going on on their face.

So that got me really interested in how do we do this?

Not just having a trainer, you know, be over here.

Really what it was going to come down to was putting the actor in a cell with the dog and

actually trying to elicit that real performance out of the dog with almost no crew around.

I was always, when we would talk about budget, I was saying, I want to get the tiniest crew,

but I want to shoot a lot of days.

And so it was just going to be slow to try to wait until you get that right expression

out of the dog and elicit that actual performance from the dog.

So it's a whole, you know, it's a whole story.

So you would need the dog to dislike the guy and be hostile.

You'd need the dog to become curious and interested, but apprehensive.

And then the dog to, you know, start to fall in love with the guy.

You'd need the dog to all kinds of things.

He has to have a moment where he flips out.

And so you would need everything.

And that was going to be kind of the sport of it.

is aware that there's someone with a camera.

So if you hid enough cameras around and left, you know, like the way that they do like reality

shows where there are cameras mounted all over the car and, you know, or comedians in

cars with coffee or like whatever, you can hide different cameras.

I would shoot it differently than all of my other films because everything else I've done,

I've done on film and, you know, it's a very big, big production.

This I would actually be open to shooting digitally for this very reason, just so that

I could get cameras everywhere.

The addition, the other thing I wanted to do was I wanted to shoot it in a real prison

with inmates as part of the crew.

There are a couple of prisons that have like two different, they have a very busy prison,

but they also have like a closed down section of the prison nearby.

And so I was working on that idea as well, where, you know, just the same way you would

run a dog program, you run a very, you know, the yard where the kind of vetted inmates

are, you have them come and be trained to work as crew on the film.

The problem is it, you know, it becomes a little tough if there's lockdowns and things

like that.

And that happens all the time.

But this was all going to, you know, I was going to try to figure out how much of it

I could do that way.

You and that actor would be on a ride trying to figure out how to do this film together

and try to figure out how, they'd have to love dogs.

They'd have to be interested in the endeavor.

And it would be, you know, interesting to find out how it went.

You'd have to be learning the dog as you went.

So in the first part of the relationship, you have to act that you don't love dogs.

When I've worked with kids before, you sometimes have moments where the actor is directing

the kid off camera.

I've had one where this adult actress was, Jean Triplehorn, was acting out for the child

what the child should do.

It was wonderful because we couldn't get the kid to totally do it.

So you know, there are many ways to get, you know, you might be having to do something

strange to the dog to get the dog to react strangely.

You're not doing your part.

Yeah.

So before we even get to the studio, you've got to find an actor who's willing to do something

very unorthodox.

Mm-hmm.

such a juicy, like, it's such a juicy performance for an actor.

It's such a good role.

I had been talking to Ryan Gosling about it at the time, and this is way back.

This is 2006, 2005.

And then Ryan and I were going to sort of do it alternately off and on, but then he

kept not being able to do it or wanting to do it because he wanted to go make money or

various different things.

When I would try to go to other actors but Ryan Gosling, I would get the same sort of

thing from the guys.

They wanted to be tough and scary and stab somebody and whatever.

And I thought that was such a telling thing that that was a story people struggled to

embrace, a non-redemption story about prison.

That was the issue I had more of.

Interestingly, when I tried to make the film, even the most liberal people in Hollywood

and the most issue-y companies that make these films would always say, yeah, but can't he

stab somebody at the beginning and be about his redemption?

And I would say, no, you're very much missing the point of the movie.

The point of the movie is that you're romanticizing prison if you think it's a bunch of super

dangerous people in there.

It's not.

I've walked around the main line of some of the most dangerous prisons in the country

and I'm not afraid at all because 99.9% of the guys were just sad.

It's just a sad sack situation.

It's very organized.

It's just a warehouse for human beings with no way out.

And that's what I found so fascinating about people not wanting to make it is that no one's

interested in the story about prison not being just.

makes it hard for the studio or an actor is what makes it so intriguing for an audience

because you're messing with our expectation about an animal movie.

We've seen animal movies.

We know how they work, right?

you can't make a rated R dog movie.

I was like, but everybody said you couldn't make a dog movie at all.

And every time they make dog movies, they're huge.

We love dogs.

And so what are you talking ... It's not like only kids like dog movies.

Adults like dog movies.

So yeah, you can definitely make a rated R dog movie.

But it's just ... Listen, I make myself feel better by saying you can't both want to do

things that nobody's ever seen before and then be frustrated that nobody understands

why it's going to work or why you believe in it.

But this plagues me in my whole career.

I've never done anything anybody thought was going to succeed.

Everybody thinks everything I do is like, oh, Wonder Woman, that's going to be terrible.

Oh, Monster, that's going to be terrible.

Oh, the killing is going to be a bad TV, whatever.

Did you think this is a slam dunk?

Someone's going to help me make this?

But I knew how very happy I was with it and the people who read it had the same reaction.

People would say ... I've had still people, some people write me and say it's still one

of their favorite screenplays they've ever read.

But I knew it was going to be a little bit hard, but I didn't ... And I still don't understand

why no one would roll the dice on my very low budget second film other than to speculate

that the sexism that I was so very, very disinterested in throughout my career, but see much more

clearly now, weighed into the fact that if a guy makes an Oscar winning first film, then

you roll the dice on their second thing.

Whereas throughout my career, people have not been interested in, or not had confidence

in what I want to do.

They've embraced me and wanted to hire me for what they want to do.

But still to this day, when I have what the stories I want to tell are, people are like,

eh, we've never seen that before.

And I'm like, yeah, but you'd never seen Monster before either.

You want to just give it a shot.

So looking back, it took me all the way until now to be like, wait, how did nobody just

say, yeah, we'll give her $5 million to make her second movie?

Different thoughts of.

is that you're talking about sexism here.

Sexism, discrimination of any kind, takes all kinds of different forms.

And in this case, what we're talking about is someone is perfectly capable of saying

you made a brilliant movie.

So the sexism doesn't prevent them from seeing the genius of Monster.

It prevents them from seeing that you could do it again.

In other words, the way they make sense of Monster is, oh, it's a one off.

And I also think it's that, of course, it's not anybody's fault that the that the

industry is based on looking backwards.

So if it's something this this is what I think is the real gender issue.

And by the way, not just gender issue, diverse stories issue in Hollywood is you can

want to invite as many people behind camera and into these positions as possible.

But as long as you're still basing what can and cannot succeed on the past, you're

basing it on a blueprint of a very specific voice.

And so I think that when I want to tell a different like maybe a guy wouldn't think

of that story that I'm coming up with and maybe the way the emotions work are slightly

different. Whatever it is, the combination of the fact that they haven't seen it before

and also they don't like to think of women as auteurs or artists or take it as serious.

Like there's a there's a romantic desire to look at guys who do like crazy art things

and be like, oh, my God, they're a genius, much less so with a woman, you know.

And so I think it's like the combination of those things that make it tough.

So you take this script out, you want five million dollars, which just for those of you

listening in Hollywood terms, not a lot of money at all.

Like they there was a there was a big lawsuit about it.

And one of the sides tried to say that it cost eleven million dollars.

So that's what they thought.

Monster costs actually cost one point five.

But it's that was as little money as a movie can be is five million, really.

You're hearing a people want they want to first of all, they get that they want a

different perspective on the prisoner.

You said that they they feel more comfortable where they have a very clear, redemptive

narrative when it comes to the to the actor.

But what else? Keep going.

What else? What else is in there?

saying like, it's great, we love the script, but it's not for us.

There's always a million different reasons.

It's only as the years have gone by.

And my husband's always pointing it out, too, that we've had so many things that I

led that were my idea.

Like I wanted to do an MMA show called The Fight about people in the MMA world.

No, no, we don't.

It doesn't make sense. Then sure enough, that goes on and becomes huge.

It's like I when I go and pitch things that I want to do and what my ideas are, so

often it's been met with with like, no, but we'd love you to do this hooker with a

heart of gold script or this, you know, other thing.

And I'm so grateful to have been embraced to do other people's things.

But there is something about it.

And so, yeah, it's always something different.

I don't think that they're ever even aware of it.

But I do think that there's something about.

Confidence and excitement in in in women's artistry that is slightly less on, you

know, they're less confident in.

There's a a much more constricted view of of your talent.

It's like you're this desire to see to if you can explain away a big success by

saying it was like a like a fluke.

It was a it was an anomaly.

I remember people saying to me when I made Monster, one studio executive actually

said to me, she came into the editing room and she actually watched a part of it.

And she goes, sweetheart, no one wants to see a film like this.

Oh, no one wants to see a movie like this.

And she wrote me an email saying like, oh, you're a great kid.

I know you're going to make it one day.

I'm just really too bad, you know.

And this is before, of course, the movie comes out and ends up succeeding and

making 80 something million dollars, by the way.

And then I would hear everybody saying like, oh, do you have any more female

serial killer things?

And you're like, that's the take home lesson.

The take home lesson is that they want female serial killers.

And the same thing I felt with Wonder Woman.

I felt like Wonder Woman was.

There was just so much emphasis on gender where it was like, oh, everybody wants to

see a woman directing a woman's story.

I'm like, is that it?

It's not because of the movie.

It's not the hero's journey.

It's not, you know, it's like and then there are 100 women in the movie.

Women get women action things made on the it's like it's always it's the wrong

lesson. And but but I think in the there's so much focus on the woman part of it

versus being like, oh, it's a good film and it's an unorthodox film, but they pulled

it off instead. It's just like, oh, female serial killers.

That's it. That's what everybody wanted.

Like, give me a hypothetical.

What would have to happen in your career for people to say you want to do it?

Given your track record, let's go for it.

successes are also we all behind closed doors whisper about how it sort of doesn't.

I think the world is a really, really long way away from that, though it's not going to

happen in my lifetime. I think it's, you know, I may find my own financing and have my

own people and get my own movies made.

But I, I think that the world is still genuinely run way behind closed doors by, by,

by the same people who, who have a desire for the interests that they have.

And no matter who they're putting on the lower levels, the mandate is still bumping up

to that level. And the truth is, like, we're real far from from really diverse voices

being understood and and embraced.

And it's not about money either.