re: James Gunn's 'The Suicide Squad' Discussion Thread ' - Spoilers

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they were making it so clear that they weren’t going to do the overcomplicated intros

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Harley Quinn sucks

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It does have the singular honor of being the only lower tier film that cannot put the blame on studio intervention.

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He brings in a duplicate of the Will Smith character, then brings in another duplicate with Peacemaker. Then has the characters riff on the absurdity of it all.

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you didn't smile when that logo came up and Johnny Cash's

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David Ayer dropped an interesting tidbit, which is that Lee Smith has an edited cut of his Suicide Squad. Have you seen the Lee Smith cut? From your experience, how much can a different cut change a movie?

Richard Suckle and I produced Suicide Squad. When the studio was hoping to replace John [Gilroy], the original editor, we suggested Lee. I had worked with Lee on Chris’ movies, The Dark Knight trilogy. He’s one of the truly great editors. He was charged with trying to take a slightly different approach, but not totally change the tone of the movie with his work. Clearly, from what David is saying, that was the version that he liked the best of all the versions. There was a tremendous amount of different feelings between what the studio wanted and what David wanted at that time. It was a negotiation, for sure, of what the ultimate cut was going to be.

The interesting thing was, when we tested the Ayer version — to be honest, I can’t sit here and remember how we got to that edited version, who was editing that edited version — but it wasn’t Lee. It was somebody else that came in. The studio version was also different editors as well. We tested both versions. They tested exactly the same. Because they tested exactly the same, David and the studio and ourselves, meaning Rich and I and the heads of DC at that time — Jon Berg and Geoff Johns — we all sat in a room and tried to come up with what would be the best of both versions. Obviously, the movie made a really nice piece of change. Audiences liked it enough for us to want to do a sequel. But it definitely wasn’t the exact vision of David, and it definitely wasn’t the exact vision of the studio.

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That’s surprising that they tested the same.

That testing process, or what we call bake-off, that is not an unusual process. That happens, more than you might think. But most of the time, there is a clear winner. And usually, everybody agrees, “Well if we are going to do the bake-off, we should really go with the clear winner. Let the audience decide.” In this case, there wasn’t a clear winner. It literally came to the exact same place. They just liked different parts of the movie. Different audiences commented on different parts of the movie they liked better or not. That doesn’t always work to create the best movie, to be honest, it’s an imprecise process. There’s a great line in Twelve Monkeys where somebody says “science is not an exact science.” (Laughs.) Well, making movies is not an exact science either.

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