Patty Jenkins warred with Warner Bros. execs to make ‘Wonder Woman’ happen

Hollywood director Patty Jenkins has revealed how her blockbuster hit film Wonder Woman almost didn’t exit.

The 2017-released flick was praised far and wide after it hit the theatres. However, all the mess that happened behind-the-scenes is something only Jenkins is familiar with.

The filmmaker during her recent appearance on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, revealed all the battles she had to fight with Warner Bros. executives over “mistrust” issues and how she had to go through multiple scripts before she got a green light for her ideas.

She claimed that the execs were more interested in the optics that a woman director was helming a female superhero film than they were in the said director’s actual ideas.

“Everybody in the industry wanted to hire me. But I felt like they wanted to hire me like a beard; they wanted me to walk around on set being a woman director — but it was their story and their vision,” she said.

“There was such mistrust of a different way of doing things and a different point of view,” she continued.

“Even when I first joined ‘Wonder Woman’ it was like, ‘Uhh, yeah, OK, but let’s do it this other way.’ But I was like, ‘Women don’t want to see that. Her being harsh and tough and cutting people’s heads off … I’m a ‘Wonder Woman’ fan, that’s not what we’re looking for.’ Still, I could feel that shaky nervousness [on their part] of my point of view,” she added.

“They were all freaked out by all the female superhero films that had failed, the smaller ones that had failed,” she said adding: “and also Christopher Nolan was making the ‘Dark Knight‘ thing, so I think they were just trying to figure out what they were doing with DC at that time.”

“They came back to me a year later and said, ‘Do you want to do it your way?’ And boom, I just went and made the movie,” she added.