When director Zack Snyder was finishing his first film, a “Dawn of the Dead” remake, others in the edit bay inquired: Who was that woman barging in with helpful rejoinders like, “You know what, that sucks. You should change that”?
“That’s my girlfriend,” he’d sheepishly reply.
Snyder married TV commercial producer Deborah Johnson in 2004, the same year “Dead” was released. (Snyder’s commercialmaking home is Believe Media.) The couple has been mixing business with romance ever since, exchanging costume or set design ideas over glasses of wine. Deborah produced each of his movies since “Dead,” including the surprise hit “300,” the new female-focused action fantasy “Sucker Punch” and the next Superman franchise reboot.
The couple can’t imagine not working together. “In Hollywood, there’s a lot of hidden agendas and people are out for themselves. We go to battle with each other,” Deborah Snyder said.
The duo has a lot riding on “Sucker Punch,” Snyder’s first film not derived from outside source material and his most unhinged. It features a mélange of over-the-top movie-geek eye candy: jet packs, dragons, samurai swords, Nazi zombies, plus heroines in pigtails and stiletto heels packing heavy weaponry. The mix-and-match insanity of it all is intentional, Snyder said.
“I want the net result to be like the movie ends and you’re just like ‘What the…'” he said, smiling.
Young Australian actress Emily Browning stars as a girl trying to break herself and others out of an insane asylum while escaping into two levels of fantasy. Snyder’s signature swirling camera movements and stylized, computer-generated sets are paired with a bombastic rock score.
“It’s pretty fearless,” said Oscar Isaac, who plays the villain Blue in a beard and eyeshadow. “In the sense that he is unashamedly putting everything that he thinks is cool, every idea that he’s been wanting to see in a film — he puts it up there and does it very boldly.”
But actors on set know that each decision also goes through Deborah.
“They take risks together. They make really simple decisions together. Every little thing, they’re creating together, whether it be in the same room or not,” said Jena Malone, who plays a character named Rocket. “She approved all the costumes, all the hair and makeup. Everything went through the both of them. So you have the ultimate imagination and the ultimate kind of grounding.”
The Snyders’ Cruel and Unusual Films production company has at least four other projects churning — a constant stream of meetings and logistics updates.
“I’m always sitting there drawing or whatever. I’m always working. Because it’s a family business, it’s all hands on deck all the time,” Zack Snyder says.
The couple treasures whatever escapes they can get. They go for walks with their two Laboradors, spend time with Snyder’s six children, and recently wrapped a year-long renovation of their post-and-beam home in Pasadena. Their three vacations in the past five years were post-wrap trips to beach resorts: Los Cabos, Mexico after “300,” Turks and Caicos after “Watchmen” and Bora Bora after “Sucker Punch.”
They don’t expect another break any time soon. The Superman film, set to star Henry Cavill as the Man of Steel, is in pre-production. The Snyders — working with another husband-and-wife team of Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas – have cast Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Superman’s parents.
Snyder says he wants his Superman to be “immensely physical” and to face “a credible threat” from whatever villain is featured, “because I feel like that’s a thing that I’m not sure I’ve seen for a while in the Superman world.”
His biggest challenge, ironically for a superhero movie, is adjusting his own filmmaking approach to be more down-to-Earth, more realistic.
“I’d say that Superman in some ways is divinely different from the movies that I’ve made in the past,” Snyder said. “Only because it doesn’t exist in a stylized world. It exists in the real world.”
Apple and Google Face UK Investigation Into Mobile Browser Dominance
Apple and Google aren't giving consumers a genuine choice of mobile web browsers, a British watchdog said Friday in a report that recommends they face an investigation under new U.K. digital rules taking effect next year.
The Competition and Markets Authority took aim at Apple, saying the iPhone maker's tactics hold back innovation by stopping rivals from giving users new features like faster webpage loading. Apple does this by restricting progressive web apps, which don't need to be downloaded from an app store and aren't subject to app store commissions, the report said.
"This technology is not able to fully take off on iOS devices," the watchdog said in a provisional report on its investigation into mobile browsers that it opened after an initial study concluded that Apple and Google effectively have a chokehold on "mobile ecosystems."
The CMA's report also found that Apple and Google manipulate the choices given to mobile phone users to make their own browsers "the clearest or easiest option."
And it said that the a revenue-sharing deal between the two U.S. Big Tech companies "significantly reduces their financial incentives" to compete in mobile browsers on Apple's iOS operating system for iPhones.
Both companies said they will "engage constructively" with the CMA.
Apple said it disagreed with the findings and said it was concerned that the recommendations would undermine user privacy and security.
Google said the openness of its Android mobile operating system "has helped to expand choice, reduce prices and democratize access to smartphones and apps" and that it's "committed to open platforms that empower consumers."
It's the latest move by regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to crack down on the... Read More