Ricky Church chats with Injustice director Matt Peters…
Across DC’s vast multiverse of alternate stories on some of their most famous characters, one of the most recent is the hit video game Injustice featuring a Superman who has taken over the world to enforce a long-lasting peace in the wake of a devastating tragedy to him while Batman and a small resistance try stopping him. The game spawned a prequel comic detailing the events leading up to the game, chronicling the death of Lois Lane and the destruction of Metropolis and how Superman and Batman’s friendship was fractured and now a feature-length animated adaptation of the story has been released.
As Injustice hits Blu-ray shelves, we spoke with director Matt Peters on the appeal of a dark Superman, the fractured friendship between Batman and Superman and adapting the prequel comic Injustice: Year One to film. Check out our interview below…
Ricky Church: Injustice is a pretty popular game and comic book series. What made you want to adapt it into a film?
Matt Peters: What happened was I was approached by Rick Morales, our producer, and he came at me because he knew I was a big fan of Superman and he said “Hey, I got a Superman project” which made my ears perk up. And then he said “Well, wait, don’t get too excited because Superman is the bad guy in this one.” That actually made me even more motivated because by that point I felt like I wanted to make sure it was done right. I thought it’s easy to make Superman a bad guy. It’s easy to turn him into a villain. I felt like I had a responsibility as a fan to make sure that if we did do that, that it was done right.
I find that’s one of the interesting things about Injustice, especially those early years that the comics detailed because it focuses on a version of Superman who slowly goes, not necessarily evil, but down a darker route after suffering a huge tragedy and he takes all of these steps to prevent something like that again. What is the appeal for you of a dark Superman story?
I think for me what it is is it shows an aspect of Superman as a character that we’ve never really seen before. Superman is obviously a hero and he’s fantastic and we all love him, but it’s interesting to see what would happen to him if he kind of lost his way, if he started to go out of the parameters of being a hero and started to behave in ways that are not heroic. And that to me was kind of interesting. It would be simple just to have him be hit with a brain ray or something that turned him evil, quote unquote, but that’s kind of boring. I think it was more interesting to actually ask yourself what would it have to be that would turn a heroic character and someone so noble, what would actually make him turn to the dark side? And then also how would he behave once he was in that dark side? I found that just incredibly fascinating.
With most video game adaptations you only have the game to go off of, but Injustice is a bit unique because there is that lengthy comic prequel Tom Taylor did to draw from. How did pulling from Injustice: Year One and the other years affect your process developing it?
I think we were always going to go with the idea of adapting the comic more than we were the game, but really Ernie Altbacker, our writer, just did an outstanding job. I mean, he took so many issues of so much stuff and was able to condense it into a story that made sense and hit all the points that we were hoping to hit. I’m still stunned when I was doing my own research for the comic and reading it to see every time I looked at it I was like “Yeah, Ernie’s right. This is the part we should be focusing on. This is the stuff that we should be listening to.” He really is the guy who deserves all the credit for condensing the story as well as it is. It’s through no small amount of hard work of Ernie. He just did such a great job.
Yeah, for sure. I spoke with him the other day and it was really impressive how much he used the comic while also taking liberties with it to make a new story.
Yeah. I think Ernie has a deep love for these characters too and it always comes off. I think he looked at it as, I don’t want to speak for him, but I really felt like he had a deep love affair for these characters that he wanted to make sure that the stuff that we wanted was going to be put in and that it would actually pace out balanced and properly. He did an amazing job.
We’re talking all about Superman here, but what I find interesting about Injustice is Batman as well because Batman and Superman are usually such strong allies that it hurts whenever they’re on opposite sides. Injustice kind of flips their roles with Superman being the dark one and Batman being the more hopeful one or thinking he’s got the moral high ground where it’s usually the other way around. What do you think of Batman and Superman’s relationship in the story?
It’s heartbreaking. It’s just, like you said, it’s really fantastic that we actually see the flip and see Batman be the more optimistic character. To see him tell The Joker that Joker is wrong and that Superman is going to come out of this damaged, but still be the noble hero that he was. The fact that The Joker ends up proving Batman wrong, it’s soul crushing, but I really loved the scene. At the heart of it, between Superman and Batman, there’s still a friendship that they try to work. They try to get through the awkwardness. Superman is always trying to extend an arm of friendship to Batman, but Batman has to stay true to his morals on the situation. Then as soon as people are ready to turn on Superman, it’s Batman who is there to defend him, to say “this is a hero who’s dealing with hurt.” There’s even moments where they end up helping out one another even when they’re in pain and even though they’re not speaking with one another. It’s too much to get into just how much we play off of these two characters and the kind of conflict that they’re dealing with. It’s emotional for any fans to watch.
Yeah, definitely. One fun thing for me watching the movie too was spotting the use of several of the game’s moves and knockouts in the animation. Did that help when developing the fights to already have a sort of blueprint for how the characters would move and interact?
Yeah. We really focused on the comic to adapt it, but we also didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that this is all inspired from a video game too. So the video game was, we would just go find references for it. We tried to find the best kind of ways we could pay homage to it in the movie itself. That’s something that we can do in animation, but comics can’t do so that was always fun. I feel like we’re standing on the shoulders of some really creative people who’ve made a fantastic video game and also made a really great comic series so hats off to them for being as fantastic as they were.
Yeah, for sure. I don’t know if you had any part in the casting, I know that’s usually Wes Gleason, but Justin Hartley as Superman really surprised me. I like him in This is Us and the Smallville seasons he’s in, but him as Superman was really good. What are your thoughts on his take on Superman?
I consider it a blessing that we got to work with Justin Harley. He’s just an unbelievably nice guy. He’s super talented. Like you, I was a fan of the work that he did on Smallville. I was also a fan of his work on the Aquaman pilot, which I don’t think a lot of people got the chance to see way back when. I think he’s just an incredible performer. What’s great is that he really kind of carried the spirit of what we wanted for Superman, which is a real hero. Somebody who’s really noble and really does what’s right, but is being taken down an unfortunate path for him. I think Justin threw himself in the role fantastically. I consider ourselves lucky we got him.
Thank you to Matt Peters for speaking with us!
Injustice is now available to own on Blu-ray and digital.
Ricky Church – Follow me on Twitter for more movie news and nerd talk.
