Rachel Martin

He's dealt with addiction and bad behaviors associated with it, and he's trying to make a big comeback.

And the vehicle for this comeback is a superhero movie.

How did this particular story capture your imagination when you're between acting projects and you get to your computer and you're so excited to have your writing time?

How is it that this particular narrative settled into your consciousness?

I was on a set of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities that was being directed by Guillermo's longtime DP collaborator, Guillermo Navarro, who shot his first four movies and won the Oscar for Pan's Labyrinth.

And he told me...

a story about an actor who had taken him to dinner and shut down much of a restaurant for this dinner so that they could have privacy.

And this struck me as a really interesting metaphor for the peculiarities of the world of

tentpole filmmaking.

And what interests me about that world is that I think it's, in its own way, a microcosm for America.

Oh!

Well, let's go down that road.

I mean, I was just going to ask all kinds of questions about what fame does to people and the immense amount of money that goes into this kind of filmmaking, these tentpole films, these huge, huge franchises.

But I'm going to put a pin in that because I want to understand how you see the big box franchise tentpole movie as a reflection of our country.

Movie sets are little societies.

And big movie sets are not so little societies.

Like any society, you have status, you have pecking orders, you have jealousy, you have gossip, you have politics.

Ego.

You have ego and you have politics writ large that express politics that are national and international just in the very nature of the project.

And the superhero narrative is a distinctively American thing.