Wonder Woman Director on the Film's Influences and Pressures

CBR

By Anthony Nash

Published Dec 10, 2016

Patty Jenkins discusses her love for the DC Comics superheroine, and the importance of making her “vulnerable, loving, and warm."

The upcoming "Wonder Woman" is incredibly important in that it's not only an expansion of the DC Films universe but that it's also the first solo feature for the 75-year-old superheroine and feminist icon. With that comes a lot of pressure, and no one knows that more than director Patty Jenkins.

"Because of my love of Wonder Woman and the genre, I felt this project was absolutely the right thing for me to do," the acclaimed director of "Monster" tells The Hollywood Reporter, "though I definitely knew what I was taking on — that there’s a huge amount of responsibility that comes with it. I knew just making a movie about Wonder Woman for the first time was going to matter to people and what I was stepping into with that."

Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot on the set of Wonder Woman

Jenkins, who recalls telling Warner Bros. executives a decade ago that she wanted to make a Wonder Woman film, says the version arriving in theaters next year draws from the 1940s comics written by the superheroine's creator, William Moulton Marston.

"The goal was to tap into what always spoke to me about her — to honor who she was, her legacy, and to make her as universal as she was to all of us little girls who ran around pretending to be Lynda Carter when we were kids," she says. "Wonder Woman is the grand universal female hero who didn’t have to be lesser in any way. She wasn’t less powerful, she wasn’t less of a woman. She’s as beautiful as any woman and as strong as any man. That, to me, is so enduring. There have been so few female characters like that — who weren’t small, niche characters or sidekicks. She’s a full-blown superhero who lives up to all of your dreams in every way.

Jenkins adds that it was important to make Wonder Woman seem “vulnerable, loving, and warm," so that she's multidimensional.

Opening June 2, 2017, "Wonder Woman" stars Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright, Lucy Davis, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Danny Huston, Elena Anaya, Ewen Bremner, Saïd Taghmaoui and David Thewlis.