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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And the sacrifices made along the way, including family and personal relationships — a dilemma Singer shares with his latest cinematic doppelgänger, who yearns most profoundly for those things which his superpowers cannot will into being.

“When you’re a film director, you have a lot of perceived power. As Francis Coppola says, it’s sort of the last vestige of the dictatorship. You can make a lot of things happen and you’re surrounded by a lot of people and you get a lot of attention. But when you go home at the end of the day — if you’re not married and you don’t have a family and film is very much your life, as it is mine — you feel an undeniable sense of loneliness. I had it in Sydney. I had an extraordinary apartment and I used it on a couple of occasions to entertain, but most of the time I would come home from a 16-hour day and be alone, standing on my balcony, looking out over the city.”

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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Singer is on his second gin and tonic, and for the first time all evening, he seems to fully let his guard down, speaking to me less as a potentially unfriendly journalist than as a sympathetic fellow traveler. “Suddenly you wake up one day and you’re 40 years old and you’re like, ‘Whoa! What have I done?’?” he says. “Well, on one side of my life, I’ve done quite a lot. On the other side, I’ve done nothing. On the personal side, I’ve really not evolved at all.

“I bought a house, and it had no furniture in it for four years, until someone finally said, ‘Hey, let me help you find some furniture for your house.’ Because I was happy to live like a college student, like I did in my dorm. It sounds a bit sweet and charming, but it’s actually a product of not acknowledging the passage of time. When you’re a filmmaker, you judge the passage of time in films, not in years — and sometimes films take more than a year. So I don’t realize it, but a good piece of time has passed since film school.”

Singer says his close friendships are what’s most important to him, though he admits to wanting to fall in love, even if “you know you’re going to have to make choices and it’s going to be tough for that person. It’s all that stuff — the negative side of being a workaholic and a celebrity.”

For now, though, the focus is on whipping Superman Returnsinto final, fighting shape.

“It’s going to be odd, I think, when it comes to an end, and it’s going to come to an end soon whether I like it or not.”

He pauses, looks up into the night sky, then adds, “In fact, I’m very much looking forward to a period of vacation.”

Sometimes, even the Man of Steel needs a holiday.