Henry Cavill as Superman in Man of Steel

Why did you decide to go with the origin story of Man of Steel?

You know, it wasn’t so much like ‘Oh! Let’s do an origin story’ as it was about ‘Look, we have this guy who’s going to be making a lot of decisions that the audience is not going to understand unless they know the why of it’. Unless they understand what Jonathan (Kent) told him (Clark Kent aka Superman) as a child, unless they understand that he comes from Krypton and the stakes that were levied there to get him to survive. I just felt like that without that information, you know, there was a clear dimension missing from who he was.

Can you talk about the influence of the comic books on the film?

Yeah, you know, even in the most subtle ways, there’s everything, almost every Superman has reference to Grant Morrison and there is a lot of even Frank Miller’s Superman in the film. You know, I’m a huge Frank Miller fan, so I always go there to get my inspiration even if I had to totally change it, I would always like to start there. Frank is always honest with the superheroes. I feel like a lot of times — and I’m guilty of it as much as anybody — we tend to take our superheroes for granted and we apologise for them a little bit too much. I think Frank never does, just says ‘this is how it is, you know, sometimes I f*** up’. I think that, for me, really that’s always most refreshing.

Would you describe Superman as human?

Superman? Our Superman? Yeah, absolutely! He is human. For sure, I think he definitely, he might be born a Krypton but he definitely, as far as he is concerned, is human. You know, the people he loves are human, his mother and father, the mother and father that he knows and loves are human. He might have special powers but as far as he is concerned, who he’ll fight and die for are those people. So, yeah, I think that makes him humanish.

The red iconic undies are out and in comes a sleek new suit. What other changes have been brought to Superman in this new version?

You know, Superman himself. I really tried to make sure that sort of the Kryptonian design sense was consistent through the suit, that you could believe that the suit was of Kryptonian origin. You could totally wear it. Sometimes I wish we had capes, yeah, it would be awesome. So yeah, they wore capes, they wore tight suits with, like, things on their chests, so all that could make sense and I really thought that was very important because you know, the mythology that people have tried to do around the suit has varied.

Would you say that this is a sci-fi movie?

From the beginning, we wanted a very strong sci-fi element. We really did. We were obsessed with making sure that it was like an invasion story, like you know this whole concept that Superman is an alien and no one really talks about it, is kind of weird. If you think about the old version of Superman, this guy is from another planet and we’re just like ‘Aaah’; I guess that’s weird. It is a huge deal and so we really wanted to make sure that it was conscious in everyone’s mind that basically there’s an alien living among us and what are the implications for humanity? In that, he proves that we’re not the only life in the galaxy and that’s a pretty big deal.

Any particular challenge that stood out while filming your fight scenes, especially with all the special effects?

I like action, I’m a bit of an action dork. So when we would design our fight scenes, I really was interested. We had used a lot of stuff in Sucker Punch and so we sort of evolved on that movie and being able to do these digital doubles and stuff like that and all this stitching of live action. So basically crazy stuff that we’re really confident with. So we designed this small little battle between Zod and Superman. Because the problem I’ve felt with Superman is that the days of him being on a wire are kind of over and you can’t really, like, put the car on a hydraulic and have him pretend that it’s heavy. It just looks weird and it’s not really physically how it would be. You know, the physics of it is wrong. So we really wanted to get after that as much as we could.