That’s a very vague answer and he was clearly joking around, but it does beg the question: why didn’t he do a song for Suicide Squad? “I think people had expectations that may have been different, but I’m excited for the fans to get to vote”, he said. Yale’s husband, John Ostrander, agrees.
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“I’m glad we didn’t have this pressure on us while still filming. I think it would be interesting to explore other avenues”. It was really close to nailing the same feel as Mad Love, giving that extra “edge” to the story that wasn’t typical in most superhero comic books.
Anyway, the meal must have been good because the Joint Chiefs give Waller the go-ahead to assemble her supervillain “Task Force X”, and soon enough they’re dispatched to repel a supernatural attack on Midway City. Still, he says, they harbored dark potential. “I didn’t mean it to be taken that seriously”, he said. For whatever reason, she chose that she was going to love this guy. “I thought if The Joker was going to have any sort of relationship with somebody, it has to be, one, with somebody who can keep up with him, and two, someone who’s a bit of a kook themselves”. “We tried to give them more depth, more background”. “As with so many franchise pictures, Suicide Squad began as a release date on a calendar and was back-filled from there, written and directed (by David Ayer) much too quickly”.
The way they introduced the main characters was pretty phenomenal, and, in my opinion, one of the best parts of the film.
Because Suicide Squad’s characters were expendable, they could be, and sometimes were, killed off.
But Ostrander credits Yale with safeguarding Suicide Squad’s female characters, even the ones in relatively small roles, like the staff who work at the prison where the supervillains serve their time.
Even if the 11th-hour reshoots and competing edits – one of them by an outfit that cuts trailers, to make the movie better resemble an ad for a movie – hadn’t been reported, a lack of authorial vision would be self-evident. After a C-list career that stretched over a couple decades, Batgirl – real name, Barbara Gordon – ended up getting tortured, shot, paralyzed and possibly raped by the Joker. So she read up on codependence and began to see Harley’s reliance on the Joker nearly as an addiction. Ostrander says Yale built a believable story about female trauma and resilience. “And she wanted us to detail – in every panel, the whole page – the difficulty”.
But Robbie says she can’t fully inhabit a character if she can’t fully empathize with their motivations. She not only unleashed – and became possessed by – a long-dead witch called the Enchantress, she also summoned up the Enchantress’ brother, thus ultimately enabling his current bout of urban non-renewal. I should mention Capt. Flag is in love with an archaeologist possessed by a 6,000-year-old witch. In the months before she died, Yale wrote a column for Comics Buyers Guide, about being a feminist in an industry that did not then care about female readers.
Viola Davis (“The Help”) is tough Amanda Waller, the bureaucrat in charge with secrets of her own, while Joel Kinnaman (“Run All Night”) plays a special ops guy trying to rein in the kooks. But even within the comic world she’s not particularly well known.
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He said: “I think I could just walk away”.
