Geekscape Interviews: DC Executive Producer Bruce Timm on ‘Justice League: Gods & Monsters’
Last month, Machinima and DC/Warner Bros. unleashed the exclusive web series Justice League: Gods & Monsters Chronicles. Featuring the Justice League like you’ve never seen them before, the web series is tied to the upcoming Justice League: Gods & Monsters, coming to Blu-ray and On Demand on July 28. The three-part season has already been renewed for a second season next summer.
About a month before its online premiere, I sat down with DC head honcho Bruce Timm in New York City and talked with the man responsible for a solid portion of our childhoods on the exclusive series and what superheroes mean to our generation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNP88Go8C9w
The first thing I want to touch on before we talk Gods & Monsters, Machinima touted its unique millennial audience. Machinima captured my demographic, but you found this kind of success really early on with Batman: The Animated Series, Superman, Justice League. We grew up on that. That was calculated, wasn’t it? To get us from the cradle to the grave?
Bruce: I wish I could say I was that smart.
No?
Bruce: It was just lucky that whenever we did those shows, I just wanted to do a version of those characters that would make me happy. That would please my own inner 12-year-old, and just hoping that other people would still find the same thing about the cool that I did.
At the same time, I didn’t want to hold back on the storytelling aspects of it. I didn’t want to make it a show that only kids would enjoy. That it would be adult in a way that would be not overt, but that so if the parents were actually watching the show with her kids, that they can get hooked on it too.
It just turned out to be just a happy accident that all these years later, it kind of grabbed ahold of people’s imaginations, and here we are.
Let’s talk about the new project. It’s very exciting, obviously you’re taking some of the most iconic heroes and putting a new coat of paint on them in terms of depth and character. It’s not that we haven’t seen an evil Superman before, but what do you hope to do different in this new series? For Wonder Woman and Batman and for everybody else? What is really the goal of the series?
Bruce: I don’t want to say that the traditional version of those characters are worn out or tired, because it’s absolutely not true. I’m sure I’m going to be doing other movies and TV shows with the traditional version of this characters at some point as well. There’s tons of mileage in those guys yet, but at the same time there are certain restrictions that each character has built into them. Just as an example, for the most part I’m a traditionalist myself, and I do understand that you don’t want to push Superman too far over the edge and then suddenly he’s not Superman anymore. At the same time, everybody has their own line in the sand.
When we did the first DTV Superman: Doomsday, it was a big part of the original comic that Superman killed Doomsday. They killed each other. Part of that was they beat the crap out of each other. If you’ve ever seen that comic, Superman’s like raw and bloody during it. When we were doing that movie version of it, between the time the comic came out and this time we did the movie, DC official policy was that Superman’s skin does not break. He cannot bleed. I was like, seriously? It’s one of the most famous Superman comics of all time, and we’re going to publicize the crap that we’re doing out of this … Publicize the crap out of the fact that we are doing this animated version of it, and you’re saying he can’t bleed? It’s ridiculous.
It was ridiculous.
Bruce: I literally had to get on the phone with the president of DC Comics and try to talk him out of it, and he’s just like, no. Sorry. You have to find some other way to kill him. The logo of the show is the big, bloody S, and Superman can’t bleed? For instance, things like I used to drive me crazy.
The great thing about this is that since these characters never existed before, even though their names did and parts of their origin stories or parts of their background, I can basically make whatever rules I want about these characters which is great. I get on an e-mail chain with DC Comics now, and the shoe’s on the other foot. They’re doing a spinoff comic book based on these versions of the characters, and they run the ideas pass me. Bruce, do you think this would be okay if Superman did this? I was like, let me think about it.
You are relishing that, aren’t you?
Bruce: I try not to be a dick about it, but at the same time, it is interesting to be the final say of what these characters get to do. To me, it’s just very freeing. Say with Superman, if Lois Lane shows up or Jimmy Olson or Lex Luthor either they react differently with Superman than the traditional Superman, or the characters themselves are completely different. In the Gods & Monsters movie, Lois is in the movie, and she and Superman can’t stand each other.
Wow.
Bruce: Luthor’s in it, and I don’t want to … I can’t talk too much about him, because the take on him that we came up with this pretty interesting and different and unusual. Again, we didn’t want to do just Lex Luthor again, we wanted to come up with and reinvent everybody. Kind of keep the core idea of who that character is, but give him a different back story. Give him a different, basically, an alternate timeline. He made different choices in his life then the real one did.
We’ll get back to characters in a second, but what I’m really intrigued about, actually, is the platform. You’re debuting on Machinima.
Bruce: Right.
I would assume that really frees up a lot of what you can and can’t do versus traditional television.
Bruce: Definitely.
What can we look forward to? How different will this show be from other series that were used to?
Bruce: The biggest difference besides the fact that I don’t have to send him through Broadcast Standards and Practices, so I don’t have to worry about making it appropriate for all ages. Technically, we are going under the assumption that it’s going to be around a PG-13. Between PG-13 and R.
Of course.
Bruce: That’s freeing to a degree in terms of content. Weirdly enough, just from a practical standpoint, the thing that’s most exciting to me is about the idea that each episode is 7 minutes long instead of 22 minutes long, and it’s not like each episode ends with a to be continued. Each episode is going to be a solid contained 7 minutes of story. That’s really interesting. It’s completely new for me, and it’s really exciting because it’s a challenge. I know how to tell a story in 20 minutes. I have to figure out now how to tell a story in 7 minutes, and what does that mean, and how do you do that so it’s not just 7 minutes of fighting? It’s 7 minutes of plot and drama and humor and everything else.
What was the learning curve for that going from years of 22 minutes to now, in these seven or so minutes?
Bruce: We’re still in it. I’m still in that learning curve. We’re figuring it out. I think the first three that we’ve done so far, I think are actually a really good example of the kinds of stuff we’ll be doing, because each of the three shorts is completely different.
One of them is, not a comedy, but it’s a little bit lighter in tone. It’s a little bit more of like an action buddy cop movie. One of them is more of a straightforward horror story, and the third one is kind of more of an epic tragedy. It was really interesting that we can do all the different kinds of diverse kinds of stories the normally do on a regular series, but just in condensed form. Some of the shorts will be a little bit heavier on action, and some of them will be more about mood. Some of them would be more about character, but each one is going to be a satisfying, self contained, 7 minute chunk.
I can assume why you’re going that direction, but can I ask why you’re choosing that direction as opposed to the traditional?
Bruce: That’s what Machinima asked us to do. They said we would like to be the length. We said, okay. We’ll figure out how to do that.
Just targeting those guys who are on the subway?
Bruce: That’s the idea, I guess, is the whole YouTube video idea that it’s not micro-content, but kind of macro-content.
I can’t talk up enough about how much Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League meant to a lot of kids my age. What do you hope fans to take away from these new iterations?
Bruce: Hopefully they’ll be intrigued by these new versions of them, and hopefully even though they can be quote unquote unlikable at times, hopefully they’ll still learn to like and hopefully, maybe never quite admire them, but even that’s a weird thing to me. Like I said, I sometimes think about that. Some of my favorite heroes are dicks. I think James Bond is a dick.
Of course he is.
Bruce: Indiana Jones. He’s a dick, you know, but he’s our dick. He’s our asshole. There’s something about them that still likable, still appealing even though they’re people you probably wouldn’t really want to know in real life.
That’s, again, something I wanted to bring to these characters is that … Batman has traditionally always been kind of a dick.
Haha! Yes!
Bruce: Just to kind of, like I said, play with different flavors of them.
You’ve had a very storied career. Again, I grew up watching your work and the work of DC Animation. Just looking back on your career, does it astound you how much you’ve accomplished and how much you and your teams have accomplished? Does it shock you at all how much influence you have had on generations?
Bruce: It does shock. It’s gratifying, and it’s … Fortunately with the very first show I produced, it was a big, big hit so that helped a lot. Every show since then has had varying degrees of success. It was nice to know even way back even before there really was much internet presence that the show seemed to be popular, and people really loved it and whatever, but it does kind of surprise me now when people your age or whatever come up to me at conventions,”I used to come home from grade school every day and watch Batman: The Animated Series.”
I did.
Bruce: I’m just like, that doesn’t make feel old at all.
I’m sorry!
Bruce: No. It’s all right. It is odd, but it’s good to know, though. It’s cool.
What can you tell me about what was the initial nucleus of the idea of Gods & Monsters? Again, we’ve seen evil Superman, we’ve seen evil Batman before, but what about those two specifically?
Bruce: It was two different things that converged at the same time. It was a couple of years ago when they first brought out The New 52, and people were kind of freaking out that it was going to be like this big reboot, and it turned out to be actually a pretty soft reboot. Most of the stuff was cosmetic changes, costume changes, and what not.
At the same time, it got me thinking, I remember when they brought back Flash and Green Lantern in the late ’50s for their Silver Age incarnations. They basically kept the name and the gimmick, and they threw everything else out. They changed their costume, they changed the way their powers work, they changed the alter egos. That would be really ballsy if they did that with The New 52. I was a little disappointed that the reboot was as salt as it was, but at the same time I understood it from a commercial standpoint.
That got me thinking, if I did that with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, basically all the characters on DC Universe. If I did that radical of a revamp of them as they did with Flash and Green Lantern in the Silver Age, what would that be like? What would that mean? That just kind of got my wheels spinning, and this is where I ended up.
I know you’re not directly involved in any of the movies, like Batman v. Superman, but what do you think about the culture proliferating and becoming so massive. All these movies become events now.
Bruce: It’s weird. It’s weird to me. When I first got here in New York a couple of days ago, I checked into my hotel, and I walkout of the hotel for a cigarette, and right across the street from me is the Regal Theater, and it’s like big letters. Avengers. It’s like, wow. When I was a kid I couldn’t even imagine that I would be seeing an Avengers movie on a big screen. I went and saw at 7:00 AM because I had to. Yes. A freaking Ant-Man movie. They’re making an Ant-Man movie.
Right.
Bruce: I was like, what?
On DC’s side we’re getting Aquaman, we’re getting all the guys.
Bruce: Suicide Squad. I know, it’s crazy. It’s cool. It’s really cool. It’s stuff that I never even dreamed about, because I thought this is never going to happen. Who knows.
There’s one question I really did want to ask you as with the godfathers of DC animation. Whenever there are pictures of civil unrest around the globe, and you see people wearing superhero T-shirts.
Bruce: That’s funny.
What do you think about people gravitating towards these characters in ways that go beyond the comic book page?
Bruce: That’s too deep for me, dude.
Really deep? I’m sorry.
Bruce: It’s okay. It’s just that I’m too shallow.
No problem.
Bruce: That’s an interesting though. I hadn’t noticed that before.
Eric: I guess next time you see an AP photo, just check it out. Going back to Gods & Monsters, what’s the most exciting thing, again, about this project as a whole? You’re targeting the Machinima audience, you’re going with Machinima. You could’ve gone anywhere else, but now you’re here. What gets you amped about the project as a whole?
Bruce: For one thing, even when we were doing Justice League, as much as I love Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, Flash, the Green Lantern, I really like the weirder, more obscure characters. Characters like The Question, Warlord, and wannabes to whoever. To me, that’s the stuff that is like, I just think that stuff is really fun to play around with. Here I get to create a whole new universe that’s full of characters I can mash up and mess around with. It’s the same kind of thing that made Justice League Unlimited fun for me. Having this huge toy box to play in.
It’s like a kid playing with his toys.
Bruce: Totally.
Just about some of those auxiliary characters, you showed us a weird ass Green Lantern that even I’ve never seen before.
Bruce: Right.
Eric: What are those meetings like? Is there a a lot of back-and-forth between?
Bruce: That was just something I just thought of on my own. I just thought of, if we’re going to do Green Lanterns, A, they’re space based. Yes. They’re technically aliens. That guy’s probably actually one of the more normal looking Green Lanterns because he’s at least a biped. We’ve seen a lot of alien Green Lanterns in the comics and stuff anyways, but at the same time, I wanted to make them so alien that they’re a little scary. They’re a little bit unrelatable for human beings. I didn’t want them to just be human beings in a funny suit like Star Trek aliens with bumpy heads and shit. Yes. That’s kind of where we’re going there. What does it mean to be a genuinely alien Green Lantern? Somebody who doesn’t think like a human? Doesn’t think anything at all in earthly terms.
Who were some of your animation idols growing up and influences? You’ve influenced a whole generation. I’m curious about who got you to pick up a pencil.
Bruce: Big ones were probably an awesome Disney animator named Marc Davis who’s one of my all time heroes. Classic Warner Bros. Looney Tunes director, Bob Clampett, was like God to me. Alex Toth who designed all those wonderful Hanna-Barbera superhero cartoons in the ’60s was a huge influence. That’s the big few I can think of.
Any last words you can say about Gods & Monsters?
Bruce: It’s awesome. Watch it.
Justice League: Gods & Monsters comes out July 28th.
