Producer Charles Roven is being congratulated on a job well done. Wonder Woman has been given warm reviews by critics, as the Patty Jenkins film gave Warner Brothers and DC a much needed win for their DCEU franchise.
Yet the filmmaker told Collider that the blockbuster was not without growing pains, having to endure a number of creative inclusions and exclusions that halted their progress. Given the issues experienced for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad, it would be the arrival of Jenkins in the wake of a completed script that changed their fortunes around.
Dime a Dozen Writers Congested The Process
Some of the criticism for the movie has revolved around the setting of World War I. Seen as trivializing an event that wiped out millions, Roven explained that they were always looking to position Diana in a real life situation.
"Really early on, before Patty (Jenkins, director) came on the project, we put our toe in the water with two writers," the producer reflected. "They took completely different approaches on the material. One was the Crimean War and one was World War I - but a completely different World War I experience... We had a lot of writers and then there were proceeding writers in the other incarnations of Wonder Woman. For our ultimate take, we didn't like either of those scripts, even though they're talented guys."
Scrapping these concepts out of hand, Allan Heinberg's edition eventually received full screenplay credit despite a state of confusion behind the scenes.
"Zack (Snyder) and Allan Heinberg then collaborated on a story. We had a different director (Michelle MacLaren) on at that time. That director - which was OK'ed by the studio - brought a number of writers on. We had more writers working than in all the history of the movies that I had done. It never worked out that way before. While there are things that most of them contributed into the script, there wasn't anybody who ended up making such a contribution that they were able to get a credit."
Roven: 2017 WW as Compassionate as Reeve's Superman
Having a history in the DC world before, Roven said that he was not surprised one bit in Jenkins' decision to have no deleted scenes or extras.
"Not really, because don't forget - I made three films with Christopher Nolan and we had no extra scenes either," he remarked. "It does happen. We did come back and do some additional photography but it was all inter-scene."
With such a positive public response for a character that is unashamedly a superhero in the best sense of the word, does he see a parallel between her and DC's first real on screen savior?
"The thing that I think that Superman (Christopher Reeve) had and our Wonder Woman has is the genuine compassion for man. Wanting to see the best in him and help mankind... What the character also had in every incarnation was her desire, from the time that she was a very young girl, to be a hero. Her mother was a hero. Her aunt was a hero. She felt it was hero destiny with the other Amazon's to be heroic. She wanted to fulfil that destiny."
Source: Collider
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