Tied for 3rd most-quoted character in Sucker Punch (2011): in 6 of its 49 quotes
Most scenes with: Zack Snyder (6)
Would you say the film is a critique on sexist geek culture?
It is, absolutely. I find it interesting, in a lot of ways, that this movie – of all the movies I’ve made – has been universally hated by fanboys, which I find really interesting. It’s like a fanboy indictment, in some ways. They can’t have fun with the geek culture sexual hang ups.
I thought it was basically you commenting on those attendants at Comic-Con who shout, “You’re hot!” at beautiful cast members.
Yeah! 100%. They don’t know how to be around it. It’s funny because someone asked me about why I dressed the girls like that and I said, “Do you not get the metaphor there? The girls are in a brothel performing for men in the dark. In the fantasy sequences, the men in the dark are us. The men in the dark are basically me: dorky sci-fi kids.”
Is it wrong to enjoy seeing Babydoll in that school girl outfit, though?
You can say what you want about the movie, but I did not shoot the girls in an exploitative way. They might be dressed sexually, but I didn’t shoot the movie to exploit their sexuality. There’s no close-ups of cleavage, or stuff like that. I really wanted it to be up to the viewer to feel those feelings or not. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it’s like a guilty-pleasure.
100%. As long as you’re self-aware about it, then you’re okay.
Did you think a lot in the writing process, “Would a woman say this?”
You think that, of course you do. It’s hard to write. Know at the beginning of the movie where Sweet Pea is acting tough? That’s tough to write, because I know where she’s going. It’s like when she says “watch yourself!” in the dance hall and they have that whole banter. That’s difficult because it’s on a graphic, in a lot of ways, but you gotta find a way to make it a lot of fun.
Most female action heroines are generally interchangeable with men. Can you talk about the process of finding that specific female voice?
As a man, you can only do what you can do as far as understanding the female psyche. I just tried to write as honestly as I could, so then the female actors would fill in the emotional blanks I left for them. I feel like the girls were really up to that and into that. I thought it was an interesting approach. A good example is when we did the scene where the girls were going to break out and they’re all saying “they’re in!” and they’re crying at the end of the scene. That’s not in the script, and that was just them. If I had written that, I probably would have thought it was cheesy and no one would cry at the end of the sequence.
I’m curious, if you don’t mind talking about it, what was the originally shot and intended ending?
The very first ending I wrote the order was: Babydoll was being lobotomized, she got chained in the basement, Sweet Pea escapes – well, let me back up. There’s a scene you’ll see on the Director’s Cut with Jon Hamm. When Jon Hamm arrives as the High Roller – and we took this scene out because of the MPAA – when that guy punches Babydoll in the face, she wakes up in the High Roller’s suite. He basically makes a deal with her that if she gives herself to him, and willingly and not against her will, then he’ll give her freedom and get [her] out of that place. He’ll make it so that Blue will never touch her and she’ll be free. She’s seduced by that concept, and right when they go to kiss each other, that’s her being lobotomized. When they kiss, it’s her being lobotomized.
The very end of the movie was: you see Sweet Pea steal a dress from a clothesline, then after she’s lobotomized and Blue says, “Do you remember me? Take her downstairs,” and then you see Sweet Pea getting on the bus, then after her getting on the bus, it cuts back to Babydoll in the basement and that whole scene happens of the cops taking him away. When he shines the flashlight on her, she gets up, and the camera dollies in on her and then goes around her head, and you see that she’s on a stage in the theater and she signs “O-o-h Child” at the very end. After that, all the dead girls come out and they sing together, then the curtain closes. That’s the end.
Why was that cut?
We tested it, and people just did not know how to… I don’t know. I thought it was awesome, personally. Maybe there’s a cult version of it that’ll exist that I can put together sometime [Laughs], but for a mass audience, it just played as this super culty, bizarro ending. I love it, personally. I could tell that people just didn’t know how to take it, though.
Was it difficult conducting test-screenings because of how much of a love it or hate it type of film it is?
What I learned on this was that you can’t test a movie like Sucker Punch. It really defies the whole concept of being tested. In a lot of ways, I think the movie would have been a million times better off if we just made the hardest, craziest version of the movie we could and not trying to please every audience. I do think that the movie is crazy, in a great way, but it’s just funny that I think it’s 30% as crazy as it could have been. I think that’s the world it lives in. It lives in a crazy world.
