Man of Steel

Bryan Singer overcame a path paved with kryptonite to bring back Superman

Comments (0) By Scott Foundas Wednesday, Jun 14 2006

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For the director, that meant finding, in Stan Lee’s neofuturistic world of heroic and villainous mutants, the theme that has been central to all of his own films. Whether it’s The Usual Suspects’ criminal mastermind Kyser Soze passing himself off as a helpless cripple, the ex-Nazi Kurt Dussander hiding out in suburbia in the unfairly neglected Stephen King adaptation Apt Pupil or Superman himself stumbling about Metropolis as his mild-mannered alter ego, Singer’s favored characters are all men (and women) of great and sometimes terrible power, forced to live incognito in a society inhospitable to their true identities. “Everyone has sides to them that people see and sides to them that people don’t see,” Singer says. “Sometimes, none is more sinister or powerful than the other, but people are more complicated than what we see. They choose what to reveal of themselves. Like right now I’m on tape, so I’m choosing what to reveal ?of myself.”

Indeed, in conversation, Singer is engaging but guarded, sometimes grimacing slightly as I prepare to ask a new question. You can hardly blame him. Since long before X2 and the much-discussed “coming out” scene that made explicit the idea of mutation as a metaphor for homosexuality, journalists writing about Singer, who is openly gay, have often seemed more interested in their subject’s sexuality than his filmmaking. Specious accusations of sexual misconduct on the Apt Pupil set continue to be dredged up to this day, while in the lead-up to the release of Superman Returns, publications ranging from the celebrity gossip Web site Defamer to the Los Angeles Timeshave questioned whether Singer’s take on Superman will be “too gay,” despite the lack of compelling evidence that it will be gay at all. Finally, during the Superman Returns press junket over the weekend of June 9, Singer responded to the accusations by telling Reuters that Superman “is probably the most heterosexual character in any movie I’ve ever made.” But I wonder if Singer should even have dignified the question with an answer. For it says something dispiriting about our supposedly enlightened, post–Brokeback Mountain age that so much worry should be expended on how a filmmaker’s sexual orientation will affect a cherished pop-culture icon — a discussion it is nigh impossible to imagine arising were the director in question straight.

Look, Superman, I can lift this chair. (Photos by Gregory Bojorquez)

Anything you can lift, I can lift heavier. (Courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

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Back at Orso, Singer has downed a gin and tonic and is starting to loosen up. Of his recurring interest in identity, secret or otherwise, he cites feelings of outsiderdom he suffered during his childhood and adolescence. “I was a tough combination,” he says. “I was a nerd, but also a terrible student. I graduated high school with a cumulative GPA of about 1.9 — my parents wouldn’t be very proud of me telling this to you, but it’s the truth.” He was also the only Jew on an all-Catholic street. “And then my parents got divorced when I was 13, so that was even more different than everyone else on my block. Those Catholic families did not get divorced.”

He wrote stories — often when he should have been doing his schoolwork — and made 8mm movies, including his little-known first foray into the science-fiction/fantasy genre: The Star Trek Murders,made together with a friend, Neil Bornstein, when both were in their early teens. Then, one storied night when he was 16 years old, Singer had his eureka moment, when the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 profiled the life of Steven Spielberg. “Watching that profile, I suddenly saw a Jewish kid from the suburbs who had lived for a short time in New Jersey, who was a nerd and who had a drawer full of 8mm movies. I immediately drew a parallel. I saw the show at a friend’s house, and literally on the walk back from their house to my house — I even know the exact moment of sidewalk on which it took place — I decided: Now I know what I want to do with the rest of my life. And from that moment, it was as though a huge weight had been lifted off me. I was ecstatic.”

According to Singer, he’s rarely been out of preproduction, production or postproduction since. He went to film school, first at the School of Visual Arts in New York and later at the University of Southern California, where he had his cinematic horizons broadened, discovering Hitchcock, Polanski, Kubrick and Lynch, all of whose influences are evident in his own work. And though Singer eventually settled in Los Angeles, as a filmmaker he has time and again turned his attention to ferreting out the aberrations lurking beneath small-town America’s carefully ordered surfaces. “Uncovering suburbia as a suburban is at the core of the things that interest me,” he says, “whether it’s the Westchester mansion with the mutants in it in X-Men or the Kent family living on this farm raising a superhuman being from another planet.”

To the outside observer, Singer is now living a film student’s dream. At 40, he’s at the top of his game, with a large house in the Hollywood Hills and a collection of high-end European sports cars to show for it. But sometimes, the view from on high can feel a bit like looking out from inside a fortress of solitude. “I was at USC, speaking after a screening of a film I made, on the very stage where I used to see dozens and dozens of filmmakers come to be interviewed,” he says. “When the event is over, the most enthusiastic students run up to talk to you. And this night, the first kid up there says, ‘How does it feel to be doing what we all dream of doing?’ He put it right to me, and he was sitting in the very row that I sat in auditing that class for three years. It was a very strange feeling, because even though this has happened to me relatively early in my life, all I see is the process of it, and ?the obstacles.”