<p> As 300-person groups go, these people were not as cool as, say, the 300 Spartan warriors who took on the entire Persian Army during the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, about whom more in a minute. <br /><br />These were Hobbit-ish hobbyists, fans of science fiction and fantasy and comic books. Collectors, enthusiasts, keepers of obscure flames. Geeks. Even the famous people who made guest appearances that year were pretty geeky.<br /><br />This became an annual event. It was renamed the San Diego Comic-Con a few years later, and then it became San Diego Comic-Con International, although by that time it was also known informally as the Nerd Prom. And for decades, it belonged to geeks alone. And it went on like this until the dawn of the 21st century, when Hollywood showed up and took over.<br /><br />And then there’s Zack Snyder, who is 45, was born in Green Bay, and may be the purest geek-auteur of the geek-film era. Snyder is a native son of the geekverse. He’s a consummate action stylist who fills his frames with beautifully orchestrated mayhem — blood splatter, flying glass and billowing flames. But his clout really stems from his ability to speak geek culture’s language, and his fearlessness about working on that culture’s holiest ground, whether he’s remaking a zombie movie that geeks believe to be George Romero’s finest hour (Dawn of the Dead, 2004) or adapting graphic novels by comicdom’s most esteemed creators (300 in 2006, and Watchmen in 2009.)<br /><br />He is, in short, a guy who blows minds in Hall H for a living. One thing that’s interesting about Zack Snyder is that he doesn’t come across, in person, as particularly geeky. He’s handsome, like the actor Bradley Cooper, and compactly buff. Which is not to say that Snyder isn’t also, for example, the kind of inveterate nerd who would proudly own a life-size replica of Han Solo frozen in a slab of carbonite. He is, and he does. But no matter how hard you look, you won’t find poor frozen Han anywhere in his house in the hills above Pasadena which Snyder shares with four of his six children and his wife, Deborah, a producer on his last four films. Because while Snyder is the kind of guy who owns a thing like that, he’s not the kind of guy who then hangs it over the fireplace.<br />“I like to think I have an evolved aesthetic,” he says. “Except in certain areas of my life.” <br />He means the movies. The latest one, Sucker Punch, is the first film he has made that isn’t based on some pre-existing property with its own geeky cargo-cult. But it’s so steeped in fetishistic geek-culture imagery that it plays as if it’s based on a thousand of them. <br /><br />In a way, Snyder was destined to make movies like this. He was raised Christian Scientist in Greenwich, and attended the religious Daycroft School. But when he was 10, he encountered the illustrated science-fiction/fantasy anthology magazine Heavy Metal, under whose covers men with spears rode prehistoric beasts to adventures involving copious amounts of nudity and gore. Snyder’s life was immediately, and productively, derailed. “My aesthetic got kinda warped,” he says.<br /><br />He later studied painting in England for a year, then filmmaking at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He went on to become a successful director-cameraman whose commercial credits included spots for Budweiser, Nike, Visa, etc. Finally, in 2003, he was hired to direct the remake of Dawn of the Dead. He shot the film in high-contrast candy-box colour and scored it with music by Johnny Cash, the punk poet Jim Carroll and the ironic comedy-lounge singer Richard Cheese. The studio wasn’t upset by this, but it was confused. And geeks loved it. Snyder’s next film had more Heavy Metal in it: 300, based on a Frank Miller graphic novel . The film made $210 million within four months.<br />That success paved the way for Snyder to make another bloody adult comic-book movie in 2008: Watchmen, which was termed “a historic failure of geekism.”<br /><br />Snyder’s follow-up to Watchmen was Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, a PG-rated movie. It wouldn’t have been surprising if he’d followed it with something similarly ungeeky. Instead, it was Sucker Punch, a movie that might be his purest geek fever dream to date. <br /><br />Sucker Punch is Snyder unbound. It’s his beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy. Snyder notes that the Europeans got Sucker Punch immediately. And when he’s questioned about how he expects people to receive Sucker Punch, with its Nazi zombies and lobotomies, his response is: “A lot of movies, you walk out and you’re like, ‘Let’s go get a coffee.’ And when somebody asks you, ‘Did you see that movie?’ you’re like ‘Oh, yeah — I did.’ My hope is that if you’ve seen this movie, you know you saw it.”<br /><br />I suggest to Snyder that by making movies aimed so squarely at the geek universe, he has basically staked his career on pleasing an audience that is notoriously never happy with anything.<br /><br />“That’s OK,” he says softly. “It’s an audience that constantly challenges you.”<br />The real problem is, he just can’t leave the geek canon alone. His next project is yet another movie to which the Hall H crowd will bring deeply held preconceptions: a Superman franchise-reboot produced by Christopher Nolan.<br /><br />The fact that Snyder was offered the gig makes sense, in some ways — Superman is as famous as the flag and as old as the March of Dimes but hasn’t appeared in a watchable movie since the Reagan administration, and suffers from the kind of contemporary-relevance issues that a visceral, visual director could potentially solve. But Snyder is also the guy who made Watchmen. Now he has been hired to rebuild the mythos of the biggest superhero of all time. I pointed out to Snyder that this is pretty weird.<br /><br />Really, he said, after doing Watchmen, the only place to go was Superman. Back to the roots. He was in the middle of working on Superman during my visit. His “Superman” books — the top one had SNYDER written on the cover in gold marker — were on the table. I asked if I could look inside. Snyder reacted as if I asked to peruse his wife’s diary. “Are you crazy? I would get in so much trouble.” After a second, though, he agreed to flip the pages in front of me. (Spoiler alert: The movie will have helicopters and people with heads.)<br /><br />Earlier, when I asked Snyder if he felt constrained on “Watchmen” by the obligation to transfer the book to the screen more or less intact, he said no. “I find it interesting and challenging, to make those things real. Maybe that’s just the dork in me, I don’t know.”<br />You have to listen to that dork voice, I said.<br /><br />“Oh, you do,” Snyder said. “The dork voice doesn’t lie very often.”</p>
<p> As 300-person groups go, these people were not as cool as, say, the 300 Spartan warriors who took on the entire Persian Army during the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, about whom more in a minute. <br /><br />These were Hobbit-ish hobbyists, fans of science fiction and fantasy and comic books. Collectors, enthusiasts, keepers of obscure flames. Geeks. Even the famous people who made guest appearances that year were pretty geeky.<br /><br />This became an annual event. It was renamed the San Diego Comic-Con a few years later, and then it became San Diego Comic-Con International, although by that time it was also known informally as the Nerd Prom. And for decades, it belonged to geeks alone. And it went on like this until the dawn of the 21st century, when Hollywood showed up and took over.<br /><br />And then there’s Zack Snyder, who is 45, was born in Green Bay, and may be the purest geek-auteur of the geek-film era. Snyder is a native son of the geekverse. He’s a consummate action stylist who fills his frames with beautifully orchestrated mayhem — blood splatter, flying glass and billowing flames. But his clout really stems from his ability to speak geek culture’s language, and his fearlessness about working on that culture’s holiest ground, whether he’s remaking a zombie movie that geeks believe to be George Romero’s finest hour (Dawn of the Dead, 2004) or adapting graphic novels by comicdom’s most esteemed creators (300 in 2006, and Watchmen in 2009.)<br /><br />He is, in short, a guy who blows minds in Hall H for a living. One thing that’s interesting about Zack Snyder is that he doesn’t come across, in person, as particularly geeky. He’s handsome, like the actor Bradley Cooper, and compactly buff. Which is not to say that Snyder isn’t also, for example, the kind of inveterate nerd who would proudly own a life-size replica of Han Solo frozen in a slab of carbonite. He is, and he does. But no matter how hard you look, you won’t find poor frozen Han anywhere in his house in the hills above Pasadena which Snyder shares with four of his six children and his wife, Deborah, a producer on his last four films. Because while Snyder is the kind of guy who owns a thing like that, he’s not the kind of guy who then hangs it over the fireplace.<br />“I like to think I have an evolved aesthetic,” he says. “Except in certain areas of my life.” <br />He means the movies. The latest one, Sucker Punch, is the first film he has made that isn’t based on some pre-existing property with its own geeky cargo-cult. But it’s so steeped in fetishistic geek-culture imagery that it plays as if it’s based on a thousand of them. <br /><br />In a way, Snyder was destined to make movies like this. He was raised Christian Scientist in Greenwich, and attended the religious Daycroft School. But when he was 10, he encountered the illustrated science-fiction/fantasy anthology magazine Heavy Metal, under whose covers men with spears rode prehistoric beasts to adventures involving copious amounts of nudity and gore. Snyder’s life was immediately, and productively, derailed. “My aesthetic got kinda warped,” he says.<br /><br />He later studied painting in England for a year, then filmmaking at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He went on to become a successful director-cameraman whose commercial credits included spots for Budweiser, Nike, Visa, etc. Finally, in 2003, he was hired to direct the remake of Dawn of the Dead. He shot the film in high-contrast candy-box colour and scored it with music by Johnny Cash, the punk poet Jim Carroll and the ironic comedy-lounge singer Richard Cheese. The studio wasn’t upset by this, but it was confused. And geeks loved it. Snyder’s next film had more Heavy Metal in it: 300, based on a Frank Miller graphic novel . The film made $210 million within four months.<br />That success paved the way for Snyder to make another bloody adult comic-book movie in 2008: Watchmen, which was termed “a historic failure of geekism.”<br /><br />Snyder’s follow-up to Watchmen was Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, a PG-rated movie. It wouldn’t have been surprising if he’d followed it with something similarly ungeeky. Instead, it was Sucker Punch, a movie that might be his purest geek fever dream to date. <br /><br />Sucker Punch is Snyder unbound. It’s his beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy. Snyder notes that the Europeans got Sucker Punch immediately. And when he’s questioned about how he expects people to receive Sucker Punch, with its Nazi zombies and lobotomies, his response is: “A lot of movies, you walk out and you’re like, ‘Let’s go get a coffee.’ And when somebody asks you, ‘Did you see that movie?’ you’re like ‘Oh, yeah — I did.’ My hope is that if you’ve seen this movie, you know you saw it.”<br /><br />I suggest to Snyder that by making movies aimed so squarely at the geek universe, he has basically staked his career on pleasing an audience that is notoriously never happy with anything.<br /><br />“That’s OK,” he says softly. “It’s an audience that constantly challenges you.”<br />The real problem is, he just can’t leave the geek canon alone. His next project is yet another movie to which the Hall H crowd will bring deeply held preconceptions: a Superman franchise-reboot produced by Christopher Nolan.<br /><br />The fact that Snyder was offered the gig makes sense, in some ways — Superman is as famous as the flag and as old as the March of Dimes but hasn’t appeared in a watchable movie since the Reagan administration, and suffers from the kind of contemporary-relevance issues that a visceral, visual director could potentially solve. But Snyder is also the guy who made Watchmen. Now he has been hired to rebuild the mythos of the biggest superhero of all time. I pointed out to Snyder that this is pretty weird.<br /><br />Really, he said, after doing Watchmen, the only place to go was Superman. Back to the roots. He was in the middle of working on Superman during my visit. His “Superman” books — the top one had SNYDER written on the cover in gold marker — were on the table. I asked if I could look inside. Snyder reacted as if I asked to peruse his wife’s diary. “Are you crazy? I would get in so much trouble.” After a second, though, he agreed to flip the pages in front of me. (Spoiler alert: The movie will have helicopters and people with heads.)<br /><br />Earlier, when I asked Snyder if he felt constrained on “Watchmen” by the obligation to transfer the book to the screen more or less intact, he said no. “I find it interesting and challenging, to make those things real. Maybe that’s just the dork in me, I don’t know.”<br />You have to listen to that dork voice, I said.<br /><br />“Oh, you do,” Snyder said. “The dork voice doesn’t lie very often.”</p>
