Filmmaker Zack Snyder recently participated in an interview on Letterboxd about his divisive and ambitious 2011 fantasy action movie “Sucker Punch” at Warner Bros. Pictures.
A critical and commercial bomb, the film scored just 22% on Rotten Tomatoes and grossed just $89 million worldwide.
Emily Browning starred as a young woman committed to a mental institution whose imagination creates a dream heist to let her escape imprisonment.
Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino and Oscar Isaac co-starred. Snyder says he understands the reactions the film scored and how it does have its supporters out there:
“It was a very polarizing film. To be frank, the people I’ve run across who’ve come to me and said ‘Sucker Punch is my favorite movie’ are normally angsty teenage girls. It’s like a Morrissey song or something.
I feel like the main criticism of the film was that it was too exploitative. People took the movie as if the girls fighting and all that stuff was the movie. I found that slightly disheartening.”
He says certain scenes were cut that made it more overt that the film’s tone was a “self-aware, self-reflexive audience observing the movie.” He also revealed he still hopes to release a director’s cut for the movie one day:
“You’ll get to see it at some point, I’m sure. I hope. I’ve never gotten around to doing the director’s cut. I still plan to at some point.
But in the original ending, when Babydoll is in the chair in the basement with Blue — she’s already been lobotomized — when the cop shines the light on her, the set breaks apart, and she stands up, and she sings a song on stage.
She sings, ‘Ooh, Child, things are gonna get easier. Blondie, and all the people that have been killed, join in, and it’s the idea that, in a weird way, even though she’s lobotomized, she’s kind of stuck in this infinite loop of euphoric victory.
It’s weirdly not optimistic and optimistic at the same time. That’s kind of what the tone was at the end. We tested it, and the studio thought it was too weird, so we changed it.”
“Sucker Punch” is set to have a 20th-anniversary screening at New York City’s IFC Center this coming weekend.
