ComingSoon.net/SuperHeroHype had a chance to sit down with him and ask him a couple of questions about his involvement in those plans, and he gave us a quick update on what he’s focusing on at the moment:
“We are working on the treatment for the second film actually, we just started working on that with the same guys who I did the original with (Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim). Those two guys are also writing a script based on a treatment we wrote for ‘The Flash,’ so that’s my involvement with DC right now is the script for ‘The Flash’ and the treatment for ‘GL2.'”
A couple things we were interested in learning more about was the tone of the movies, as well as how they’ll bring the mythology from the comics into the movie universe. Berlanti had some really interesting ideas about Barry Allen’s character, involving his job as a crime scene investigator, which certainly will give the movie a different spin than some may be expecting:
“‘GL’ is always a bit lighter than that on earth but mixed with a twinge of the space opera, which has its own epic qualities to it. ‘Flash’ as we’re getting into it is interesting, too. Though Barry Allen was a little lighter in the comic, I think because of the nature that he was a CSI and moved in this world of crime before this stuff happened. I think it’s tonally somewhere in between ‘GL’ and ‘Dark Knight.’ It’s actually a little bit darker than when we were working on (‘GL’), because you’re dealing with somebody who is already a crimefighter in a world of those kinds of criminals and that kind of murder and homicide. I find you talk a lot about different films when you’re working on a film, and we spend a lot more time talking about ‘Se7en’ or ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ as we construct that part of Barry’s world, then I thought when we got into it. It helps balance a guy in a red suit who runs really fast.”
Being that a lot of Green Lantern’s mythology is going to be introduced in that movie, we were curious which aspects of the “Flash” comics might make it into the first movie, asking in particular about the Rogues’ Gallery and the time travel aspect of the comics:
“A third thing I’d throw at you is alternate dimensions, so it’s true that we want to find the things that make it… With ‘GL,’ we used to say there’s a space opera component and then there’s the down on earth. In ‘The Flash,’ there’s the sci-fi component and there’s the crime component and it’s fitting those two things together, and the sci-fi thing, we obviously want to nail that and honor that and do that in a way that feels visceral and real and cool and probably more in the tone of ‘The Matrix” films or things like that. I always think of ‘The Flash’ stories where he met Jay Garrick and knows there was Earth Prime and things like that. There’s an avenue for these films to broaden the DC Film Universe in that way, so that’s the hope.”
The idea of the movies possibly introducing the other Flash and Green Lantern and thereby making some sort of Earth-2 Justice Society (JSA) possible certainly sounds very cool, although Berlanti remains non-committal about whether he might direct that “Flash” movie, preferring to focus on the script and figuring that important factor once it’s done.
“When we have the script together, I’ll probably sit down with Warner Bros. and want to decide what’s best for that movie. It’s so hard when you’re working on the material, the script too, because if I thought about it just as a director I would freak myself out but when I think about it just as a writer, we try so many different things. It’s like, ‘I don’t even know how we’re going to do that but what if we did this or what if we showed this?’ It’s more freeing and liberating so I haven’t really thought beyond the script right now for it.
Look for the full interview with Greg over on ComingSoon.net sometime in the week before the movie he did direct, Life As We Know It, which opens on October 10.
