In the weeks following Superman‘s theatrical release, the anti-woke crowd seized on the film for being too political. But if politics are personal, that is James Gunn’s superpower: he imbues his characters—villains, heroes, and everything in between—with a palpable sense of humanity. The second season of Peacemaker, Gunn’s DC Comics spin-off, is no exception. John Cena leads the cast as Christopher Smith, the titular peacemaker who’ll kill anyone who obstructs the path to global harmony. At the end of last season, he began to grapple with the hypocrisy of it all—that his life is at odds with his moral convictions. Gunn, the writer and director, calls the show “a spiritual successor to Super,” the 2010 dark superhero satire in which he directed Rainn Wilson. Earlier this month, the two reunited for a wide-ranging conversation about dance orgies, evil billionaires, MySpace auctions, and how Gunn—co-CEO of DC Studios—shot Superman and Peacemaker simultaneously.
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RAINN WILSON: We’ll jump right in if that’s okay, James.
JAMES GUNN: Good. Yeah.
WILSON: My biggest question was how the hell did HBO okay the frequent use of the word “cunt” and a full-on orgy with dancing dicks in season two of The Peacemaker? Because literally my jaw dropped to the fucking floor.
GUNN: I know. And it’s a sequel to Superman. HBO, they’ve always kind of let us do what we wanted. Remember, HBO has had a lot of nudity in their shows. They’re not unknown to nudity. It is—
WILSON: But not like this. Because it’s not just an orgy—it’s a dance orgy. So there’s a lot of flippity floppity going on.
GUNN: Yeah, there’s some little penises dancing around. Listen, we wanted to make it real. [Laughs] I’m not worried about the use of the C word. The time where that’s been crazy has kind of come and gone as far as I can tell. But the orgy in the first episode, I think we’re just letting people know, “Hey, this is a wild ride that you’re in for the whole season and this is the kind of craziness you’re going to see.” We’re trying to warn people as much as possible when they see the episode that although this is a follow-up to Superman, it is definitely not for children.
WILSON: This is the Last Tango in Paris NC-17 follow-up to—
GUNN: Only more consensual than Last Tango in Paris, as I understand it.
WILSON: That’s true. You can’t even reference that movie anymore, unfortunately.
GUNN: You hear some of these old-school people complaining about the intimacy coordinators. But the intimacy coordinator was my best friend for the days that we were shooting that orgy because it really allowed us to just do whatever we wanted and be really comfortable with it and make sure that everyone was on the same page. I’m very appreciative of all those extras that came in and just went all out. Guy sitting on the counter with his schlong hanging out, eating a sandwich in the middle of an orgy. Those guys are great.
WILSON: You could have asked me. I would’ve been there.
GUNN: You would’ve replaced the guy with the penis dance?
WILSON: That was—
GUNN: We shot that scene and then we shot something from Superman a little bit later, it was in Lex Luthor’s Comms Hub. And I said to my assistant, “That guy looks really familiar to me.” And Michael was like, “Yeah, that’s the penis guy.”
WILSON: Was this all in Atlanta? Maybe it’s just the locations you chose, it had a stunning similarity to the cultural mecca of Shreveport, Louisiana.
GUNN: [Laughs] Yeah, we’re supposed to be in the Pacific Northwest and we shot the first season in Vancouver, but because I was shooting Superman in Atlanta, we shot the second season of Peacemaker in Atlanta so that I could be around. We actually didn’t shoot my episodes until a little bit later so that I would shoot on weekends. We were shooting Superman and Peacemaker at the same time.
WILSON: That’s insane. How the hell do you shoot Superman and Peacemaker at the same time?
GUNN: Well, there’s other directors. Greg Mottola came in and he shot his episodes first. Greg is somebody I really, really trust as a director and he’s the best director we’ve probably ever had for Peacemaker.
WILSON: He’s a great director.
GUNN: And then on weekends, I would shoot things like the interview scene from the first episode. We shot that over the weekend while I was shooting Superman where he interviews with the Justice Gang for the job. I mean, I had no choice. It was a rough couple of years. I wrote, I think, 650-something pages one year, and the next year we shot 650 pages, and then the next year we cut and released 650 pages of material.
WILSON: That’s astonishing. And I just read today in the trades that you’re writing something else?
GUNN: Seconds before I got on the phone with you, I was working on that. I had a meeting about Clayface this morning, which is a movie that James Watkins is directing that I’m really hopeful about. And right before I got on here, I’ve been writing the Superman sequel script.
WILSON: How do you do that and run a studio at the same time? I know you probably get these questions a lot, but as someone who’s known you a long time and known of your great capacity as a writer and director, it’s still pretty staggering that you’re doing as much writing as you’re doing.
GUNN: For me, directing is the heavy lifting. The writing is, I don’t want to say easier, but the writing is really fun. There have been times when I said, “Oh, maybe I should just write all this stuff and not direct it.”
WILSON: Interesting.
GUNN: Directing takes a lot of time away.
WILSON: But then occasionally you have to fit in meetings like, “Hey, what are we going to do with the DC Universe and what are we going to do with our studio and these deals and the new Superman’s anus popcorn AMC tie-in and…”
GUNN: That is absolutely not a thing. Superman’s anus, we’re not going to do that.
WILSON: Sure. I’m just throwing it out there.
GUNN: Listen, in all fairness, Peter Safran takes care of all the hard stuff. He is the guy that takes care of all the business aspects of everything. My job here is truly as a creative force. I write, I direct, and I deal with other writers and directors on their projects and help to usher them along the best I can. My time is limited so I can’t give as much time as I would like to say, James Watkins or Craig Gillespie or Chris Mundy working over on Lanterns. I make a lot of notes on cuts and notes on scripts and then just try to fit together what the overall plan is with all these characters.
WILSON: Earlier you reference Peacemaker season two being kind of a continuation of the Superman film and mythology.
GUNN: It is, yeah.
WILSON: Tell us a little bit about how all of these things are intersecting, and what it’s like being kind of a George R.R. Martin world-builder as you took the reins.
GUNN: I will say that Peacemaker season two really is the Christopher Smith season. It’s about the character of Christopher Smith. It is much more about him than it is about a superhero named Peacemaker. That’s just the costume he sometimes wears. It’s about him discovering this other world, which is sort of Xerox of his world with minor differences. And those minor differences seem to be that everything is better for Peacemaker. And his life over there, his doppelganger of Peacemaker, is everything that he kind of wishes his own life was. That’s the kind of high concept we start with. There’s been a lot of talk about, “Oh, you’re doing the multiverse and that’s already been done.” But it really isn’t the multiverse. It’s more like Philip Roth’s The Counterlife. It’s about one reflection of your world. So the way it relates to Superman is the whole crux of the season. There’s this thing called the QUC—the Quantum Unfolding Chamber—which we saw in season one of Peacemaker and exists in Auggie Smith’s closet, which is a dimensional doorway. We find out it’s a dimensional doorway to 99 other dimensions—and by dimensions, I don’t mean alternate realities. I mean other dimensions, other realities. And that becomes a sort of crisis with Argus, who is in charge of looking over Metahuman affairs, because of what happened in Superman with Lex Luthor’s dimensional pathway tearing up and destroying a quarter of Metropolis. So that’s obviously on their radar. And simultaneously, Rick Flag Sr., his son, played by Joel Kinnaman in Suicide Squad, was murdered by Christopher Smith. So he has these dual drives of wanting revenge and also wanting to keep America safe from what they basically believe Peacemaker is keeping, which is a nuclear weapon in his suburban bedroom.
WILSON: What’s it like being a part of this world-building? I imagine that must’ve been one of the most exciting things.
GUNN: I think it’s the reason I agreed to the job. You talk about George R.R. Martin, and he is really one of the guys who I love and look up to. I’m an enormous fan of his and people say, “Oh, the DCU is doing what MCU is.” But I think it really is a lot more to me what the Game of Thrones world is like or what Star Wars is like, because we’re building a universe and then picking out little pieces of it and telling individual stories from that universe.
WILSON: What differentiates the DC universe from those other universes that you mentioned?
GUNN: There is not a New York City in our DCU. There is not a Los Angeles in our DCU. There is Metropolis, Evergreen, and Coast City. It’s a different map. It’s a world in which some form of superheroes, which we call Metahumans, have existed for at least 300 years and they’ve been a part of our life. But I think that we’re reaching a point in the DCU where there’s three factions. There’s the Metahumans, the governments, and then the corporations. And the corporations are equally important. There’s Luthor Corp, there’s Lord Tech and Stagg Industries and Wayne Enterprises, which are the four big companies that are vying for another type of domination.
WILSON: Yeah.
GUNN: And they aren’t evil corporations, really. They’re just fucking amoral corporations.
WILSON: Wait, you’re saying that Luthor Corp is not an evil corporation?
GUNN: The corporations in themselves aren’t evil. Corporations are amoral. I guess governments are amoral too. But it’s really more dependent on the morality of the figurehead. In this case, Lex Luthor’s a pretty bad guy, although his corporation has done some great things. Luthor has created a battery, which has made the running of the world a much more efficient process. He has cars that run more efficiently, that are better for clean air. He’s done some really great things for the world, which is the reason for his obsession with Superman. He was considered the greatest guy in the world a few years ago, even though there were Metahumans, and then this guy with dimples and a glint in his eye in a silly costume came in and made him feel like shit, so he’s been sort of obsessed with him ever since and has gone evil. I don’t think Lord Tech is the same. It’s run by Maxwell Lord, who we meet in the first episode of Peacemaker. He’s not the greatest guy in the world, but as far as billionaires go, he’s probably more on the right side of things than Lex Luthor.
WILSON: Let’s go back to Peacemaker. One of the things that has been interesting for me as a movie fan is to see the evolution of John Cena as an actor. What’s it been like watching that? I mean, his acting chops are incredibly impressive.
JAMES GUNN: Yes, he’s amazing. There’s a scene in episode six between him and Jen [Holland] that is maybe my favorite couple of minutes of acting of anything I’ve ever put together. For me, that was one of the most stunning things, seeing how much he’s improved as an actor from the first season. I think that for someone who’s trained in a completely different performative art form that isn’t about being vulnerable, it’s sort of miraculous to witness that transformation. And I think that that is true of all of the characters in the show, with the exception of Vigilante, who kind of stays the same. I don’t want to spoil what’s happening, but there’s a scene between him and some people very close to him and they walk out of the room and I’m like, “John, when you walk out, I think you just break down in tears.” John was like, “Okay.” The guy walks out of the room and, all of a sudden, just fucking tears are streaming down John’s face. I was like, “What the fuck is going on?” The transformation in him has been incredible.
WILSON: Even what Jennifer’s character is going through emotionally, you’re seeing other layers. That is a huge swing to take this show that’s kind of lunacy and then say, “Hey, fasten your seat belts because we’re going to really ground it in human reality.”
GUNN: Yeah. There’s a lot of reality in season one but because you have a character that is so full of bluster, it does come off as ridiculous. We have aliens flying around, there are little bugs, so it puts you in a different headspace. At the center of the season, in a lot of ways, is the relationship between Harcourt and Peacemaker, and they’ve both changed as characters. In many ways, Christopher Smith, for the better, is more vulnerable, more caring. In the case of Harcourt, she’s way more fucked. You see what was below the surface of her character in season one. The idea that they would ever be a romantic match in the first season was ridiculous, because she seemed like she kind of had it together and he seemed like a blubbering buffoon. But this season you go, “Oh, wait a second, he’s kind of this considerate, caring person and she’s a fucking nightmare.” So it’s really fun to play with the changes.
WILSON: Absolutely.
GUNN: You see where Peacemaker is a spiritual successor to Super, right?
WILSON: I’m not quite there, but I’m intrigued.
GUNN: First of all, we have a dance sequence at the beginning, so the dance sequence is definitely inspired by the dance sequence—
WILSON: That’s truly one the greatest credit sequences.
GUNN: Peacemaker is about Christopher Smith, a guy who puts on a costume. But it really is about the guy below the costume. His reasons for putting on that costume are various, but they aren’t all good and a lot of them have to do with who his father is. But in the same way in Super, it’s very much a story about Frank D’Arbo and it’s about a guy who puts on a costume. And it also has that sort of tonal mix of the dramatic and the comedic, but it has a grounded, full character at the center of it. It also has a sociopathic sidekick?
WILSON: Maybe several, I’d say.
GUNN: Super obviously cost a fraction of what one episode of Peacemaker costs and it was more rough around the edges. In Super, we jumped from one tone to another in a way that was purposeful and really arty, I guess.
WILSON: You’ve always been very active online. One thing I’m dealing with is really curtailing my screen time because I get those alerts on my iPhone and it makes my eyes bleed. So how are you doing with your relationship to screens and technology as you’re kind of running a studio? Do you only plan time for it when you’re pooping or what?
GUNN: Yeah, it is really all pooping or in between things. I’m not telling anything that people don’t know, but I have somebody who runs my stuff now. I’ll occasionally get on Threads and answer a couple of questions, but that’s it.
WILSON: We kind of came of age at the same time. I think I had a MySpace for a week-and-a-half but we started Twitter and Instagram around the same time.
GUNN: I was pretty extreme on MySpace.
WILSON: Oh, you were?
GUNN: Oh, yeah. I was all in on MySpace.
WILSON: You should buy it. It’s for sale. For $147,000, you can buy it.
GUNN: It would be kind of like buying my childhood lake home.
WILSON: Two more quick questions. Is there anything that scares or intimidates you as a filmmaker? Are there things that you’re working on as a director, things that scare you that you know need to improve on just from a directorial standpoint?
GUNN: Absolutely. I love shooting. I love piecing together the motion and the way action sequences work. That’s the thing I’m comfortable with. I’ve been coming to terms with this lately, but when I first started working with Chris Pratt or when I first started working with John Cena, they both were performers who came in with a bag of tricks. What they were used to doing was juggling so that people would like them. And my job as a director became to cut away the part of them that was performing to be liked and get to what was more, for lack of a better term, real and raw. With Chris, it took one movie, because it was harder in Guardians, but little by little we worked on that and then he was off to the races. With John, he took it on wholeheartedly and maybe on our third or fourth day of shooting, we talked about that. But I need to learn the same thing. I am deathly afraid of not entertaining people, so I tap dance more than I need to, I think. But I’m not responsible for the most ADHD member of the audience being entertained for every second of the film. Some of those instincts of mine are good, but I think I need to slow down a little bit.
WILSON: One last question: is there anything you’re really excited to see? I’m so excited to see Weapons.
GUNN: Yeah, totally excited to see Weapons. And I haven’t seen The Naked Gun yet. Have you seen it?
WILSON: Not yet. That’s a good double feature, by the way.
GUNN: It might just be the same movie twice in a row. It’s one of those movies where so many people that I really like are telling me it’s great, so I am really excited about seeing that.
