New interview with Zack Snyder. He says ‘300’ is “one of the gayest movies ever made.”

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When we showed “300” at the Berlin Film Festival this exact same thing happened. There was immediate discourse around the movie, and everyone booed and walked out. It was our first time showing the movie and we were like, “What the frick.” They were saying it was “a disaster,” “the worst movie ever” and a “fascist” movie. Then we had a press conference where they were asking me all these questions, like, “Are you a fascist filmmaker?”

In Berlin.

In Berlin! Classic. Maybe they’re a little more sensitive. The hallmark question was when one of the guys said, “Are you pro-gay or pro-NRA? Which are you?” And I said, “Look, I’ll be honest: I’m a tiny bit of both.” But obviously I’m pro-gay. I made the gayest movie ever made.

You think “300” is the gayest movie ever made?

“300” is one of the gayest movies ever made. I always go, “Look, there are few movies where people come in straight and come out gay, and ‘300’ is one of them.”

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I’ve interviewed people about getting fired before. I once spoke with Adam Sandler here at TIFF about being fired from “SNL” and Drake opened up to me about being fired from his show “Degrassi.” How do you feel about having the DC superhero universe taken from you when you’d made quite a bit of money for the studio?

The circumstances around it were so particular. It just kind of crawled over me. What was happening with me and my family was so intense.

And to have this be added to it.

It was so loud — that part was so loud — that, in retrospect, asking, “How’s the movie going?” And they go, “Oh, it’s fine! They’re doing some reshoots.” And I go, “Oh, OK. frick it.” So, Debbie went and watched the Joss [Whedon] version of the movie, and to have her come back to me and say, “You can never see that movie,” and to realize then that it was 60 pages of rewrites that they did for it… I’ve never seen the movie, so I don’t know.

You’ve never seen Joss’ version?

I’ve never seen it. There was a point when the movie was released that was a low point for me because the pile-on effect was so insane. Not only did I lose my daughter, but also they’ve released this version of the movie that I had nothing to do with and my name is on a movie that I didn’t make.

Were you like, “What else?!”

“What else!” Literally. But there was this catharsis of, I met with this executive at Warner Bros. who’s long gone since — I won’t say who it was — and he said to me, “You know, Zack, I’ve got to tell you one thing: You were right about everything.” And I was like, “That’s kind of you.” And he goes, “We were fighting you, and in the end you were right.”

What were they fighting you on?

The whole vision for the DC universe and the way I made movies and everything. They did this attempt to control it — and I’m just talking about the regime that was there that’s no longer there. They had this massive IP that’s worth a ton and I can understand wanting to protect it as best they could since all their jobs depended on it working, and they’d put it in the hands of a madman — or so they thought — so the part of them thinking that, and this is going to sound horrible, “This thing that happened to Zack is a window for us to take the movie back now.”

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You said once that the only way you’d do another superhero movie is if you could do an adaptation of Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns.”

The reason why it’s “The Dark Knight Returns,” if anyone would ever let me do it outside of the DC Universe since it’s a novel that just happens to have superheroes in it, is if I could do “Watchmen” and “Dark Knight Returns,” those two books next to each other, to me, represent the complete cycle of the superhero comic book medium. You can do no more than those two books. “Watchmen” came at the beginning of the superhero movie phase, so it would be super fitting to have “The Dark Knight Returns” come now, at what I would say is possibly — I don’t want to call it the twilight, but we’re down the road of the superhero movie genre, and I think audiences would understand the why of it.

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