Patty Jenkins breaks down “internal war” at Warner Bros. over Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins details the fight to get the movie made at Warner Bros. “There was an internal war…about what Wonder Woman should be.”

Patty Jenkins will always have a place as the woman who finally showed studio executives that they didn’t have to be afraid to hire a woman to make a female-led superhero blockbuster, as 2017’s Wonder Woman came out to critical praise and box office success. But Jenkins had an uphill battle, as she laid out on a new episode of the WTF With Marc Maron podcast.

It may surprise you to learn that Warner Bros. first approach Patty Jenkins about working on a Wonder Woman movie way back in 2007, not long after she’d won accolades for her directorial debut Monster. “Everybody in the industry wanted to hire me,” Jenkins remembered. “But I felt like they wanted to hire me like a beard; they wanted me to walk around on set being a woman director, but it was their story and their vision.”

Basically, the studio heads were resistant to doing things a different sort of way, and she chafed against it. “Even when I first joined Wonder Woman, it was like, ‘Uhh, yeah, OK, but let’s do it this other way.’ But I was like, ‘Women don’t want to see that. Her being harsh and tough and cutting people’s heads off … I’m a Wonder Woman fan, that’s not what we’re looking for.’ Still, I could feel that shaky nervousness [on their part] of my point of view.”

Incidentally, just the other day, Zack Snyder was on The Nerd Queens podcast and showed off an unused photo of Wonder Woman that was going to be used in his movie Batman v Superman. In this photo, Wonder Woman is pictured participating in the Crimean War, standing with a long blade and no less than three severed heads:

Geez, someone at Warner Bros. really wanted Wonder Woman to lob off heads.

Anyway, Jenkins left the project and Warner Bros. hired Game of Thrones director Michelle MacLaren. But that didn’t work out either and they asked Jenkins back. “They came back to me a year later and said, ‘Do you want to do it your way?’ And boom, I just went and made the movie.”

Although that wasn’t the end of the difficulties. At that point, the movie had gone through something like 30 scripts, and she still had to fight for her vision. “There was an internal war on every level about what Wonder Woman should be,” Jenkins said.

And it didn’t always work out for her. While people enjoyed the movie, a lot criticized the final act, which boiled down to a CGI-heavy punching match between Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and the god of war Ares (David Thewlis), with none of the charm and spirit of the rest of the movie. As it ends up, that was a studio note. “The original end of the first movie was also smaller, but the studio made me change it at the last minute,” Jenkins told IGN. “So that’s always been a little bit of a bummer that that’s the one thing people talk about, because I agreed. And I told the studio we didn’t have time to do it, but it was what it was.”

I’m glad Jenkins broke through, hopefully paving the way for more talented women to direct tentpole movies. She’s already signed on for Wonder Woman 3, although just because she has more power doesn’t mean the movies will automatically be great, with Exhibit A being Wonder Woman 2:

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h/t The A.V. Club