James Gunn on the Kind of Funeral He Badly Wants to Avoid for Himself

Rolling Stone has a really sharp and wide-ranging interview with James Gunn up today, and it’s well worth your time if you care about Superman (he’s amused that some of the Zack Snyder loyalists are actively rooting against him) or the future of the DCU. On the latter front, Gunn makes clear that The Batman Part II is still very much happening, Matt Reeves is just “slow … Let him take his time. Let him do what he’s doing. God, people are mean. Let him do his thing, man.”

He also backs Eddie Murphy’s comments about Hollywood’s broken development process, pointing to a major reason the MCU stumbled—and the industry at large is struggling: studios are locking in release dates before they even have finished scripts. “I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies. It’s not because of home screens getting so good. The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay,” he says.

But the real heart of the interview has nothing to do with superheroes, directing, or even his beloved early horror films. It’s about legacy — and for Gunn, that legacy has nothing to do with movies.

I want to be remembered that I was nice to my family, that my family and friends love me, but I don’t believe in any of that shit. First of all, everything’s a sand castle. Somebody wrote me that the other day. “We have these problems, but that doesn’t last. What will be remembered forever is the movies.” I’m like, “No, it won’t. It’s just fucking disintegrating with everything else.” What I really do care [about is] that I’m good to my wife, and I really do care that I’m good to my friends and my brothers and my sister and my mom. I went to the funeral of one friend a few years ago, and he was split up from his wife, but he hadn’t treated her well, hadn’t treated his friends well. He had stood me up three times, supposed to meet me for lunch or something, and didn’t show up. Funerals are always sad, but I think there’s a kind of fulfilling sad where people are crying because they love somebody so much. And then there’s this sort of depressing sad, where it’s like he just disappointed everybody, and it’s really hard for people to say nice things. We loved him, but it was hard, and that really affected me. I’m like, “I don’t want my funeral to be that.” So I guess I really do think about it sometimes, but in terms of that: I want people to cry because I was good to them.

That may not be a reason to rush out and see Superman, but it is, at least for me, a damn good reason to support James Gunn.

Also, unrelated but kind of not: I can’t help wondering if the guy who ghosted him three times is the same guy who once stood up Gunn and his ex-wife Jenna Fischer at a dinner party years ago. (Probably not. If the guy had died, Fischer probably would’ve mentioned it.)

Source: Rolling Stone