Zack Snyder has seen Barbie—and he liked it. Maybe this fact isn't super surprising; he's a filmmaker that likes good films. Still, one of the more pointed jokes in Greta Gerwig's mega-blockbuster does feature a Barbie coming out of a bad trance that she describes as feeling like "a dream where I was really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League," so it would be understandable if the director was displeased. If the joke scarred Snyder, he didn't show it to WIRED managing editor Hemal Jhaveri, who went to Snyder's office in Pasadena, California, to ask him about his new Netflix movie Rebel Moon, the bleakness of his style, and the extreme fans who have followed him throughout his career. What Jhaveri found was the opposite of what one might expect. Rather than intense, she found Snyder to be warm and chatty—just a guy who makes cool shit and likes to talk about it. The thing is, Snyder knows about the toxic aspects of the Snyder devoted who mounted massive online campaigns to get Warner Bros. to release his cut of Justice League before the studio finally put it on Max (then HBO Max) in 2021. He also knows that many of those supporters were rallying around him following the death of his daughter, Autumn. "For every toxic fan, there were legitimate and ridiculous and really, incredibly dark attacks on me, my family," he told Jhaveri. "I'm not justifying any bad behavior, but also, I'm in this conversation with this fandom." During his time with WIRED, Snyder spoke about a lot more than devotees and director's cuts. He talked about Ayn Rand (a lot), taxidermy, and his belief that Hollywood is getting too sanitized. Never, though, did the darkness that prevails in his films come through in his persona. As Jhaveri notes, "If there's violence in him, it's artfully buried." —Angela Watercutter | Senior Editor |
