Education, Culture, Art, economy

Batman and Superman, both towering over six feet tall with the requisite slicked-back hair, the smug grins, and the real-life muscles of an inflatable superhero costume, are onstage. It’s the first time these two superdudes have stood together shoulder to shoulder for the world to see—kind of a big deal for comic-book nerds. But that’s not why everyone else in the room is screaming like tweens at a Justin Bieber concert. The reason for the thunderous sound of a gajillion DC Comics diehards? The 5'10” brunette in the black dress. Her name is Wonder Woman, er, Gal Gadot, and she was all anyone could talk about at Comic-Con 2014, when Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was announced. (Wonder Woman would make her silver-screen debut in the highly anticipated 2016 blockbuster.)

The actress had served two years in the Israeli Defense Forces and competed for Miss Universe, but Wonder Woman hadn’t even lassoed any bad guys yet.

Nineteen months later, the sun is about to go down over the Royal Army Base an hour outside London, and Gadot has just arrived on the Wonder Woman set from her hair-and-makeup trailer. She looks every bit an Amazon warrior: tall and commanding even in the black puffy coat covering up her metallic red-and-blue costume, long dark-brown locks pinned up and tucked under a blue bandanna.

She smiles wide and strides across the field toward the movie’s director, Patty Jenkins, who has just finished running through moves with the fight choreographer and is waiting for the dark to settle in to shoot. Because the temperature will drop to the low 30s, Jenkins is bundled in a ridiculously huge blue North Face jacket, matching pants, and snow boots.

On this particular February night, Gadot and Jenkins have two scenes on the agenda: The first is a 10-second shot of Wonder Woman charging down a grass strip between two barbed-wire fences; the second is an action-packed sequence in which Wonder Woman takes out three German guards, tosses her lasso, and leaps to the top of a water tower.

The scenes will be part of a high-stakes moment in the film that builds on a variation of Wonder Woman’s origin story—that she was brought up in a land of women before following airplane pilot Steve Trevor to man’s world at the height of World War II. The heart of the story is Wonder Woman’s struggle to keep her faith in mankind at a time when humans are killing each other en masse.

Some very real stakes surround production, too. When Wonder Woman is released this June, it will be the first time that the iconic female superhero will star in her very own movie. It also marks the first time a woman will have directed a big-budget superhero extravaganza. (“It was very important to me that we had a woman director,” says Deborah Snyder, one of Wonder Woman’s producers. “I said, ‘She’s the biggest feminist icon out there. How can we not have a female director?’ It [would have] felt wrong.”) It is also only the second time a woman has directed a movie with a budget of more than $100 million (the first: Kathryn Bigelow’s 2002 submarine thriller K-19: Widowmaker).

And there are other women in positions of power. Tonight, production designer Aline Bonetto, set decorator Anna Lynch-Robinson, and visual-effects producer Amber Kirsch are watching, supervising, anticipating— as Jenkins directs Gadot’s takedown of the unlucky bad guys in uniform. And that’s not to mention the several young female production assistants, Amazon warrior extras being fitted in bronzed leather skirts and tops, the more than a dozen women on the special- and visual-effects teams—the list goes on. It’s worth noting that, according to a study released earlier this year by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, in 2016 just 7 percent of the 250 highest-grossing films were directed by
women. And 35 percent of the year’s films had either no or only one female as either director, writer, or producer.

Of course, the number of women on the film’s IMDb page isn’t simply girl-power optics.

“It’s important a woman is making this movie so we’re not hampered by the fact that it’s about a woman,” says Jenkins, whose debut feature film was the female-driven, Oscar-nominated Monster (2003). “There was a period of time when everyone was so obsessed with making superheroines overly tough like a man, but actually they have to be vulnerable. And it’s important to be superconfident with that. Yeah, Wonder Woman is softer—and she’s more badass for it. Men have to be more cautious about it. Like, Am I being sexist? I’m not even thinking about that. I want it to be universal.”

The thing about superheroes is that they are more than just powerful characters fighting injustice in metallic armor or colorful spandex. Their stories are, at their essence, relatable and aspirational tales about belonging: the nerdy teenager who transforms into a crime-fighting crusader (Spider-Man); mutants who want to live equally among humans (X-Men); an orphaned alien who proves he is the true defender of the American way of life (Superman). This kind of storytelling should be ripe for women, who have long felt like outsiders, striving for a proverbial seat at the table. Yet the few times Hollywood has conjured a female superhero (the antihero Catwoman in 2004, martial-arts warrior Elektra in 2005), we ended up with characters who were so emotionally closed off, so dour, so “independent,” that they were nothing more than unrelatable stereotypes of what strong women are, and not an emotionally honest portrait of what strong women could optimistically aspire to be.

Jenkins spent a lot of time thinking about what strength looks like when it comes from women and how that will translate on-screen.

In scenes that depict Amazon warriors, for example, Jenkins says she sought to cast some of the world’s best female athletes, including an American boxing pro, a track-and-field star, a CrossFit champion, and world-renowned martial artists. “I gained 14 pounds of muscle for the role,” Gadot recalls. “It began with prepping for Batman v Superman. Before shooting began, I trained for six months, six days a week.” (The bright side of so much exercise: “I was actually allowed to eat whatever I wanted, especially in the first five months.”) Gadot’s routine included weight training, horseback-riding lessons, martial arts, sword fighting, and choreography. But strength won’t translate to gratuitous bloodshed (a problem that plagued fellow superhero flicks Man of Steel, Batman v
CLAY ENOS/WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. AND RATPAC-DUNE ENTERTAINMENT LLC. OPPOSITE PAGE: COURTESY OF WARNER BROS.