It’s fair to say that Suicide Squad has been the talk of the town for months, but that conversation took a dark turn earlier this week when early reviews painted David Ayer’s anti-hero flick as a jumbled, largely incoherent mess.
An opportunity squandered for Warner and DC, then, with Ayer’s knee-jerk response at the time revealing he’d rather, “die on my feet than live on my knees.” Now that the dust has somewhat settled, the filmmaker spoke to Collider regarding the editing process behind Suicide Squad, particularly with reports claiming that production was in disarray from day one.
[zerg]First up, Ayer defiantly stood by his cut:
“But this cut of the movie is my cut, there’s no sort of parallel universe version of the movie, the released movie is my cut. And that’s one of the toughest things about writing, shooting, and directing a film, is you end up with these orphans and you [frick]ing love them and you think they’d be amazing scenes and do these amazing things but the film is a dictatorship,” Ayer said, laughing. “[It’s] not a democracy, and just because something’s cool and charismatic doesn’t mean it gets to survive in the final cut. The flow of the movie is the highest master.”
In The Hollywood Reporter’s exposé, the outlet seemingly revealed that Warner Bros. was in possession of an alternate cut for Suicide Squad prior to release – a cut that was allegedly more in line with the film’s trailers than the sombre end product marching into theaters today.
Here, Ayer sets the record straight:
“I think there’s a misunderstanding about filmmaking where you can somehow have this crystal ball and understand exactly how everything is going to work together and assemble together. It’s always a moving target as you try and distill and condense down to the best movie. And this thing was a beast, we had over a million and a half feet of footage, with an ensemble movie, 7 plus major characters that we have to introduce, a very complex story that is not your normal linear story and you’re introducing the audience to a whole new world, plus it just has my sort of sickness as a filmmaker in it, my vibe and attitude. So it just took a lot of work to find the movie, the movie was always there and even in the early cuts we knew we had something, we knew it was going to work, but to get it there…wow.”
Suicide Squad has officially landed in theaters today, August 5. To cram in some last-minute homework, the music video for Skrillex & Rick Ross’ “Purple Lamborghini” – the Joker’s ride of choice, in this case – has emerged online, and you can check it out below.