James Mangold Has a Plan for Swamp Thing

There’s no replacing Indiana Jones in any way. But I feel like the character herself—she did feel fresh on the page, and there is a sense of, is there room in the world for someone like this? So I do think there’s room for a slightly clumsier, bruised, limping female action star, maybe, in the future.

It’s more so about his ability to connect and counsel. He’s not as rash to bear arms as Steve Rogers was. Having a super serum makes you impossible to beat, so your answer to everything is to fight it out. Whereas Sam Wilson can actually die pretty easily.

He realized that his ability is not to change the world with force; it’s about giving people the wherewithal and the recognition that they deserve so that they can make a change. I can go around and beat up people all day; it won’t matter. Those people are going to come right back and do the same sh*t.

Basically, the second I heard DC was going through some leadership convulsion and James was taking over, I just saw it as an opportunity to throw my hat down in the most — I mean I just called them and I said, ‘In all the stuff you’re doing, if the idea of me making a gothic horror film, origin story of Swamp Thing fits in, tell me. It’s no different speech than anyone else gets with me; I don’t have any agenda for a universe, I’m not building towards someone joining in some future. Have at it, but I’d just be interested in telling, I’ve always been interested in doing a version of Frankenstein, basically, and, yet, I feel, ‘It’s alive!’ has been done enough, but Swamp Thing always occurred to me as this wonderful version of a Frankenstein story, much in the way one of my favorite pop films of growing up, RoboCop, the original one. This guy who just wakes up and he’s been turned into, he finds he’s become this machine, was also something I was fascinated with with Logan, obviously.

But, to me, the idea of making almost a noir, mystery, horror film about a guy who wakes up and he’s this thing. There’s an amnesiac quality of, ‘How did I get here and who did this to me?’ So I’m envisioning a horror-noir film following a creature that can’t be seen, trying to piece together from fragments of memories, what happened and who did it. And none of this runs counter to the Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson and all the great work that went on...I’m just framing it up in a new movie context, but that’s all they were exploring in these comics and so beautifully.