David S. Goyer has been writing movies and TV shows since the early '90s. As a result, he's had to deal with plenty of script notes from executives -- but one from Warner Bros. during his time making Man of Steel takes the cake for most absurd.
While speaking to The Hollywood Reporter for a career-spanning interview, Goyer was asked about the worst script note he ever received -- besides the time he was asked to put less magic in the Doctor Strange film he was writing nearly two decades ago. It turns out, the minds behind Warner Bros. might not be the best equipped to tell DC stories.
"One note I got was on Man of Steel, where the ending involves Superman utilizing the pod that he arrived in as a child in order to bring down General Zod’s ship," Goyer said. "The note we got from the studio said, 'You have to change that.' We asked why. They said, 'Because if Superman uses that pod and it’s destroyed while saving the city, how is he ever going to get back home to Krypton?' There was just this long pause and we said, 'Krypton blew up. You saw 30 minutes of it!'"
Luckily, Goyer has received notes that have been helpful as well. He spoke about how he was encouraged to make his adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation for Apple TV+ even stranger.
"I actually received some pretty good notes from [Apple TV development head] Matt Cherniss — and I’m not just saying that because Foundation is a pending project," Goyer said. "Early on in the process, I used to talk about how time is a character on the show. And we were twisting ourselves around the axle of trying to figure out, how do we deal with these complicated time jumps and slightly left-of-center story structures? And he just said, 'Fuck it, just lean into it.' So we broke with traditional story structures in various ways. The structure changes from episode to episode. Most of the time, studio executives say, 'How do you make it more normal? How do you make it fall in line with what the audience would expect?' He encouraged me to not do that, which was unusual."
Foundation premieres Sept. 24 on Apple TV+.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter