Sucker Punch (2011 film)

Sucker Punch is a 2011 action-fantasy thriller film about the fantasies and escape of the young woman in a mental institution.
 * Directed by Zack Snyder. Written by Zack Snyder and Steve Shibuya.

You will be unprepared. (Taglines)

The Wise Man/The General/The Bus Driver

 * This is your journey, if you succeed, it will set you free.
 * If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.
 * Remember, don't ever write a check with your mouth you can't cash with your ass.
 * For those who fight for it, life has a flavour the sheltered will never know.

Sweet Pea

 * [after Babydoll has danced for the first time] All that gyrating and moaning... a dance should be more about titillation. Mine's personal, it says who I am. What the heck does yours say?
 * Everyone has an Angel. A Guardian who watches over us. We can't know what form they'll take, one day old man, next day little girl, but don't let appearances fool you. They can be as fierce as any dragon. Yet they're not here to fight our battles, but to whisper from our hearts. Reminding that it's us. Its every one of us who holds power over the world we create.
 * We can deny angels exist; convince ourselves they can't be real. But they show up anyway, at strange places and at strange times. They can speak through any character we can imagine. They'll shout through demons if they have to, daring us, challenging us to fight!
 * And finally this question, the mystery of whose story it will be. Of who draws the curtain. Who is it that chooses our steps in the dance? Who drives us mad? Lashes us with whips and crowns us with victory when we survive the impossible? Who is it, that does all of these things?
 * Who honors those we love with the very life we live? Who sends monsters to kill us and at the same time sings that we'll never die? Who teaches us what's real and how to laugh at lies? Who decides why we live and what we'll die to defend? Who chains us and who holds the key to set us free? It's you. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight!
 * This is a joke, right? I get the sexy school girl and nurse thing, but what’s this? A lobotomized vegetable? How about something more commercial?

Dr. Vera Gorski

 * It's like we talked about. You control this world. Let the pain go, let the hurt go, let the guilt go. What you are imagining right now, that world you control. That place can be as real as any pain.
 * If you do not dance you have no purpose. And we don't keep things here that have no purpose. You see, your fight for survival starts right now. You don't want to be judged? You won't be. You don't think you're strong enough? You are. You're afraid. Don't be. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight.

Dialog

 * Sweet Pea: This can't be. We did everything right.
 * Baby Doll: A map, a fire, a knife, a key, one thing more, one thing more. It's me.
 * Sweet Pea: What?
 * Baby Doll: [a breathy 'Oh'] Oh it's me,of course it's me. It's the only way this ever coulda been prevented.
 * Sweet Pea: What do you mean?
 * Baby Doll: I'm saying you go home, go to your family. You tell your mom what Rocket said, make her happy. Go out and live a normal life. Love, be free, you have to live for all of us now.
 * Sweet Pea: Baby, no, you can't...
 * Baby Doll: Yes Sweet Pea, you're the strongest. You're the only one of us who ever had a chance out there. You're going home and leaving, that's how we win. It's okay, it's better this way. Now listen, I'm gonna walk out there and when they come after me, you go, okay?
 * Sweet Pea: There's gotta be another way.
 * Baby Doll: No, this is right. This was never my story, it's yours. Now don't screw it up okay?


 * Rocket: Have you ever wanted to just take something back? You know, something you said, something you did?
 * Baby Doll: All the time.


 * Baby Doll: I'm gonna escape from here.
 * Sweet Pea: There are armed guards everywhere! And if Blue finds out, we're dead!
 * Rocket: We're already dead.

Taglines

 * You will be unprepared.
 * A mind bending vision of reality from the director of Watchmen & 300.

Cast

 * Emily Browning - Babydoll
 * Abbie Cornish - Sweet Pea
 * Jena Malone - Rocket
 * Vanessa Hudgens - Blondie
 * Jamie Chung - Amber
 * Carla Gugino - Madame Vera Gorski / Dr. Vera Gorski
 * Oscar Issac - Blue Jones
 * Jon Hamm - The Doctor / The High Roller
 * Scott Glenn - The Wise Man / The General / The Bus Drive
 * Gerard Plunkett - The Stepfather / Priest
 * Patrick Sabongui - Earl

About Sucker Punch (2011 film)

 * Q: You have to perform this character in several different levels of fantasy and reality on top of all of the physical stuff.  Is it extremely challenging?
 * Browning: I think for me there is no real differentiation in character in all of the fantasies worlds because it is my fantasy.  For the other people, I think maybe there is more a difference with the girls being in the asylum and then in the brothel.  I think it’s more different.  But because it’s from my point of view, I sort of get off a little bit easy there.


 * Q: Each of the characters have a sort of iconography that goes along with them. Did you have any input on that and how do you feel about the schoolgirl aspect that you have going on?
 * Browning: I love it.  I mean, I love that in terms of aesthetics I am the most innocent looking, but Baby is really kind of the…I don’t want to say the toughest because all of the girls are tough in their own way.  But I love the fact that it’s this total flip of what you would normally expect from that really innocent schoolgirl.  She’s totally stoic, tough, and kind of angry.  I just like that kind of juxtaposition.  I think it’s pretty cool.

Q: You wear a lot of different outfits in this film. Can you talk about what you wear and what was your reaction when you realized the revealing or non-revealing nature of your outfits?
 * Browning: Well, when I signed on the film was still R-rated.  There was going to be a scene where I was going to be almost completely nude.  So I was sort of prepared for that from the beginning.  But I think almost all of the costumes are sort of more intimidating to wear than actually being there topless because everything is so like pushed up, sucked in, and it’s kind of this weird crazy version of it.  I felt like a women, which I’ve never felt like before. [laughs] It was this mental thing.  I don’t know, it’s kind of fine I guess because the set is so comfortable and it’s so much just part…it’s not nudity for nudity’s sake.  They work in a brothel and it’s kind of necessary.  I don’t know, it’s ok.  Michael Wilkinson, the costume designer, was so careful to make sure that we felt comfortable and that he wasn’t revealing anything that we didn’t want to reveal.
 * Q: For a lot of movie fans Zack Snyder is the guy who did 300, which is this big testosterone macho dude picture. This is a really woman centric movie with five great lead actresses in it.  Were you surprised that Zack was able to get women the way he did or is that something that you think comes natural to him?
 * Browning: I don’t know.  I mean, I think in terms of the emotional stuff and the female relationships – I think that the girls all definitely had an input into it.  I also don’t think these are regular every day women.  They are kind of just a little different.  Yeah, it is kind of surprising that he understands the way that he does.  But a lot of times he’s also like…in terms of that emotional stuff, he will tell us to do something and he will be like, “Is that okay?”  I think he’s very careful to make sure that we…
 * Q: So he kind of turns to you guys for the input?
 * Browning: I think so.  I mean, I don’t want to say that we are directing it.  But he is definitely really sensitive.  If we feel like something is not right, he is totally sensitive to that.  It’s pretty cool.


 * Q: There are four action set pieces that we have been told about. What have you filmed already and can you talk about it?
 * Browning: The first thing we did was World War 1.  I’m filming my sword piece for that right now.  That’s what I was doing today.  Those guys are all fighting in the trenches and then I go into the bunker to fight the Colonel.  They all get locked out.  So my big fight piece is in the bunker.  That is what I’m doing for this whole week while these guys dance. So there is that and there are these kind of crazy zombie robot Germans, who we fight.  Then, we also filmed the dragon world, where we fight orcs and knights.   We go and slay a dragon at the end.  It’s ridiculous.  It’s like nerd fantasy, which is just awesome for me.  It’s the most exciting thing ever!  Then, the last one is train world, which we don’t really know much about yet, but we are filming in two weeks.  I think it’s not so much martial arts.  It’s mostly swords and guns.  So it will be a little easier to learn.  The first sequence is actually me by myself and it’s the samurai world.


 * Q: What is your connection to the other girls in the film?
 * Browning: Well, I come into the insane asylum.
 * Q: Is it an immediate bonding or something?
 * Browning: No, when I get to the asylum, I don’t really…it’s really just me seeing them and then I guess they then kind of get incorporated into my fantasy.  Rocket and I sort of become really close.  Sweet Pea and I sort of butt heads a little bit because I think she worries that I’m going to lead Rocket astray.  Vanessa, Blondie, is kind of Sweet Pea’s little offside and she doesn’t like me very much.  Amber is really kind of naïve and sweet, and really wants to be my friend.  I sort of take this weird leader position and try to help them escape.
 * Emily Browning, "Emily Browning On Set Interview Sucker Punch", Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, Collider, (March 1, 2011).


 * You could say that Sucker Punch is a nymphet version of The Snake Pit or Shutter Island, or a live-action, green-screened redo of The Powerpuff Girls, or Black Swan (Carla Gugino has the demanding dance master role here) with a higher nightmare quotient, or an $82 million tribute to Jess Franco’s sublimely cheesy women-in-prison movies of the ’70s, or an Americanization of Norifumi Suzuki “pinky violence” melodramas (Girl Boss Guerrilla, Sex and Fury) of the same decade, or, in its backstory about a decent girl deprived of her inheritance and consigned to grow up in a prisonlike environment, a gloss on mid-19th-century classics from Jane Eyre to Little Dorrit. With the action scenes playing like production numbers in some high-concept musical, you’ll be reminded of Julie Taymor’s Beatles fantasia, Across the Universe. The visual palette suggests the creepy pastel paintings of Guy Peellaert (Rock Dreams); the fantasy battles with monsters and samurais echo the muscular landscapes of Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. The movie is like an arrested adolescent’s Google search run amok. The teen boy who would get lost in that cyber wonderland — he’s also Sucker Punch‘s target demographic — is meant to fixate on the five girls who go questing. Known only by their prostitute pseudonyms, they include whey-haired sisters Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and Rocket (Jena Malone), a brunette called Blondie (High School Musical‘s Vanessa Hudgens) and the Asian Amber (Jamie Chung). Snyder doesn’t bother much with differentiating these four, as they may simply be personalities fever-dreamed by Baby Doll. That’s Browning, who with the giant eyes, puffy lips and fake eyelashes could be her own anime doll, the whole package dressed in a Japanese schoolgirl outfit as retailored by Victoria’s Secret.
 * Richard Corliss, “Sucker Punch: Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid“, TIME, (March 25, 2011)
 * Q: While we already sort of know the character you play, could you talk about who you play in the film?
 * Gugino: Yes, so I play Dr. Gorsky and Madame Gorsky, as her alternate personality is. So you know there are sort of dual worlds going on, right?  So in the real world, it’s 1960’s Lennox House psychiatric institute, and I’m a psychiatrist who is very Freudian in her ways.  Not a big fan of the lobotomy.  She’s Polish, so…as I was doing some research into the character, I found out that, in Russia, lobotomies were made illegal in 1950, so I think that, in her perspective, that she’s come over to sort of do the more, kind of progressive therapy with music and regression and dealing with kind of probably for better or worse, Freud, what he kind of discovered in the later years has been updated and she’s not there yet.  And I work with Oscar’s character who is sort of the…what do you consider your incarnation in that world?  Because he’s more than…he’s kind of become something different since you…
 * Oscar Isaac: Yeah, for me, I do see it as…the character I’m playing is Blue Jones, who is an orderly at this asylum.  And I think he’s someone who’s generally been pretty powerless in his life.  And so he uses this position at this kind of unorganized, slightly chaotic old asylum to have a position of power.  And so I think he kind of hordes information and he collects things and he has a slightly OCD thing about him.  And he becomes like the don of the institution to a certain extent, and I think that, we’ve talked about that perhaps even he may have helped Dr. Gorsky get a position there.
 * Gugino: Or some sort of…yeah.
 * Isaac: Maybe like a visa thing or…
 * Gugino: She’s an immigrant.  There are so many levels of this story that we’re discovering, but also that, when audiences see it, I’m sure there will be many different interpretations, but it definitely seems as if there’s been…they’ve worked together for a period of time and there’s some sort of a…you know, they come from very different places, but there’s been some sort of…
 * Isaac: So then in the fantasy world, I know literally, I guess, it’s Baby Doll’s imagination creating this world, but for me, I kind of imagined it as what the orderly imagines or wishes he was, which is this respected charismatic, you know…
 * Gugino: And Madame Gorsky definitely also is, again, it seems as if what is in Baby Doll’s fantasy is a heightened version of what she observes initially.  Interestingly enough, in both worlds I use music, as a psychiatrist and also as a dominatrix/choreographer, slash Madame.  [laughs]  Never thought I’d say that!  That that’s what I’m playing.  In the brothel.  So yeah, I’ve never done anything like this so it’s fascinating.  It’s been really, it’s sort of endlessly…which I know we talked about somewhat with Watchmen as well, but it’s endlessly…you can keep digging deeper and deeper and finding more and more stuff.


 * Q: We were kind of talking about this at lunch today. The design of these characters and your character, the dominatrix kind of thing.  We’ve heard ‘empowerment’ mentioned in terms of these characters, but they look a little more like ideals…
 * Gugino: Male fantasies.
 * Q: Male fantasies. Have you talked about that at all?  Have you thought about that at all?
 * Gugino: I think there’s no doubt that we’re paying homage to all sorts of genres, including the girls looking sweaty in tight outfits.  I think you can’t deny that…and there is a playful nature to that.


 * Q: As actors, I would assume that you have some freedom to sort of explore and dig into your real world characters. But when you cross over into this other world, do you have to be careful to sort of do your preparation through the prism of how Baby Doll would see or imagine you?  Does it force you to understand her character more, as well as your own?
 * Isaac: I didn’t approach it that way.  Because even in a fantasy, it’s very specific.  A lot of the time, when you fantasize someone, that should be a fully formed human being.  So I didn’t kind of limit myself to well, what would Baby Doll see or what did she not see.  You know, I just tried to make it as specific as possible.  Who is this guy?  He’s running a business.  He’s a small business man.  What does he have to do to remain in control with these girls and what tactics can he use?  I just kind of went from that standpoint.
 * Gugino: Yeah, you know, I actually had for myself, initially, a similar question that you’re asking for myself, which is, in which way do I enter into that world? And I also realized for me, it had to be…I have to think of myself as real.  Do you know what I mean?  Because, again, otherwise you’re…but it was, for me…and again, that’s what’s always so cool about working with other actors, is that you, you know, I sort of did end up having her…she really is two different people, really.  Sort of like the flip of a coin.  But we have a lot more in the brothel than we do in the real world in a way.  At least what we’ve been devoting ourselves to of late.  So actually, it’s more interesting that we’ve had more time to explore that world then there has been to explore the other.  Like, we’re about to shoot in the next couple of weeks, a couple of really important scenes in the real world, and it’s going to be interesting to go back to those with the information that we have from the alternate thing.  But I have learned more about her character in doing it anyway, because you end up sort of going, ‘Oh, right, this is why…’  You know, it does end up being insightful into her psyche in a lot of those things.  Even some things that the wise man said, and that we were acting out.  They do start to really tie in.
 * Carla Gugino and Oscar Isaac "On Set Interview Sucker Punch" by Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, (March 1, 2011).


 * Q: Can you talk about your reactions when you first the saw costumes you’d be wearing?
 * Jamie Chung: Blown away. It feels like we’re shooting four different movies.  Each costume theme is so detailed and so contrasting to the other costumes that we were wearing the day before. So it’s insane. Michael Wilkinson is a genius.
 * Vanessa Hudgens: It’s fascinating, the attention to detail that he’s created. Just every single thing is so defined. Everyone’s costumes are so personal.  It’s fascinating and it blew me away.  The first day that we walked in to our hangout lounge area, they had just plastered the walls with photos of art work and we just stood there and stared at it forever.  It was amazing.
 * Q: Do you make your characters in the fantasy world as their own characters or as an extension of what Baby Doll sees? Are they separate or thinking about what she imagines your real world characters are?
 * Hudgens: I feel like in a sense it is Baby Doll’s fantasy world, but I feel like I took the initiative to play on what my character is like in the Salem world. In the brothel world, it is just an extension. It is something more powerful, more confident. I feel like through this whole process is Baby Doll’s fantasy and I feel like as soon as she changes it into the brothel we’re all an extension of her, of what she is, and what she stands for.  I mean, I personally played it though as a real character with each thing. It is a different world but it is the same person.  So it’s just different approaches I feel.
 * Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung, "Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung On Set Interview Sucker Punch", by Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, (March 1, 2011).


 * Q: Could you talk a little bit about your dance scene today, Jena?
 * Jena Malone: The dance today is crazy. Each of us girls, except for Emily – because her dance becomes the tipping off of the fantasy worlds – we each have our own burlesque dance.  It’s our persona coming out.; it’s all of the different icons that we represent.  Mine’s sort of the nurse because the first time that Baby Doll sees me, I’m done up as a nurse.  It’s a crazy-dead-zombie-robot-nurse dance.  It’s going be so crazy; it’s going be awesome.
 * Q: What was your training like for the film?
 * Abbie Cornish: We started off in Los Angeles and spent a month there.  We’d go out to 87-11 and train in the morning, martial arts – warm up, warm down.  Then we’d have a half-hour break, our protein shakes, our amino acids.
 * Malone: And then Logan and Dave would take over, our physical trainers, our weight and strength advisers.
 * Cornish: They’d train us like maniacs for an hour and a half. We’d also do gun work, as well, which was so much fun.  Then when we came to Vancouver, it was pretty much the same schedule, but we were learning more about the moves that we’d use in the film, the choreography for the film.  Everything ramped up.
 * Malone: On top of the marital arts and weapons, we were doing costumes and walking through the sets and meeting with Zack. It was really a full-on rehearsal schedule.  The first three months that the three of us girls were training together – Jaime and Vanessa didn’t come until August – that was the rehearsal. All three of us girls sweating, crying, figuring out what our pain threshold was.  In a weird way, it was like an asylum.  We had to eat at a specific time.  We had to push ourselves to the limits.  We were wearing these sweat uniforms and being instructed.  Everything was a regiment.  It was a far more interesting style of rehearing.  Getting to know the physical body of the character, the character’s pain threshold, and how you can work together as a team. Horrible moments, like when I’m doing my 20th farmer’s carry and I’m frickin’ sobbing and you want to do it for the other girls.  You all become strong together.  I think that any form of round-the-table, reading-the-scenes, we never would have gotten to that point of closeness and how connected we were in those first three months.
 * Cornish: And it was such an unspoken thing.  We did talk about it, but there were so many moments when we were all just going hard and doing this thing.  For me, in particular, during those three months, there was this feeling inside me that was almost zen-like.  It was so peaceful because coming in, and doing martial arts, and working out, and learning how to use a gun.  You have to be so careful with a gun; it’s a deadly weapon.  There was something very focused about that process, very disciplined.  Just to be able to exert that much energy and let it out every single day.  It was really fun.


 * Q: What are your characters’ relationships to Baby Doll?
 * Malone: It’s all through Baby Doll. I understand my character through Baby Doll; I understand the story through Baby Doll. That’s the eyes that we’re watching the film through; that’s where the fantasy is taking place.  That’s the key, that’s the truth . It’s just as simple as the first time Baby Doll saw me, I was in a nurse’s costume.  There’s something that takes care; there’s nurturing there.  That becomes the archetype that I fulfill in her mind.  She creates me in a way.
 * Cornish: We’re playing these characters, yet you’re seeing these characters through all different dimensions. Trying to come to some sort of understanding of how you create the one character regardless of the world, or creating the through-line of one journey.  But it’s also a question of what do you show.  I was struggling with that, but then I felt a great sense of freedom.  When I was in the psych ward, I could simply be Sweet Pea in the psych ward; when I was in the action-world, I could be Sweet Pea in the action world.  I could let myself go in those worlds and trust in the character, and trust in the story. I feel like my character is a cube and each day, I’m turning the cube and looking at a different side.


 * Q: Why are your characters in the asylum?
 * Malone: It’s hinted at in the script, but it’s more vague to allow people to fill in what they want. We got ultimate freedom, but Zack does have the final say.  He’s a collaborator at heart.  That’s what so exciting.  Whatever Abbey brings, or I bring, or the moment brings.  Just being in it and finding things from all the trust that the girls have.  Being together really brings out a whole different level of intimacy instead of just talking about the theory.  It becomes way more human and animalistic, the approach of how to find the connection between the girls.


 * Q: Could you talk about the costumes that you wear in the film?
 * Malone: I thought mine wasn’t revealing enough. All the other girls had their thighs out, their legs out, and I’m covered in fish-nets!  Give me more skin!  It’s the first time in my whole life that I felt covered up in my underwear.  We’re in nothing but various forms of underwear, but it all goes back to trust.  Obviously, the early fittings were intimidating. And that was before we started training.  So let’s just see what my thighs look like in seven months and hope for the best.
 * Cornish: You get kind of used to it. This outfit for me is now like a second skin.  We’ve been wearing that stuff for so long.
 * Malone: And everybody is so respectful, which is important. All the guys are so considerate and gentlemanlike.


 * Q: What are your thoughts on how Zack Synder writes women?
 * Cornish: I think Zack himself is very much in touch with his femininity as much as he is his masculinity. He’s very sensitive and caring.
 * Malone: Also, the script speaks for itself. If I’d read the script and felt that if he didn’t know what he was talking about, I don’t think any of us would be here.  He’s exploring so many different levels of female archetypes and allowing them to break and bend and expose themselves with amazing different forms of strength and insecurity, and allowing these women to really be fully-fleshed characters. I was thinking that they could really be men or women. IN an action movie, we’re so used to seeing these men, but literally we could almost be sexless were it not for the specificity of the world that we’re in.
 * Jena Malone and Abbie Cornish, "Jena Malone and Abbie Cornish On Set Interview SUCKER PUNCH" by Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, Collider, (March 1, 2011)


 * Actually, the whole film is a surgical strike on your visual senses and intellectual faculties. Snyder’s efforts to have you believe this is some kind of empowering, riot-grrls-together redemption story would be more convincing if the cameras didn’t slather quite as droolingly whenever the women, clad in fishnets and schoolgirl outfits, come into view. The men, meanwhile, are a one-dimensional army of lechers, paedophiles, rapists and misogynists. The standard defence for this kind of film is that it’s not meant to be analysed too closely, it’s only entertainment. With Sucker Punch, you could also say that its narrative slackness is down to its themes (mental instability) and to the way that it taps into the dream logic of gamer culture. But even its battle scenes are deadly boring. If I had to choose between this and the most bog-standard computer game, it wouldn’t be any contest at all.
 * Sukhdev Sandhu, "Sucker Punch, review", The Telegraph, (31 Mar 2011).


 * You could go to see “Sucker Punch” this weekend — a lot of people probably will, and a few may even admit as much back at the office on Monday — or you could try to make it yourself, which might be more fun, though not necessarily cheaper. Here’s what you will need: a bunch of video-game platforms; DVDs of “Shutter Island,” “Kill Bill,” “Burlesque” and “Shrek”; some back issues of Maxim; a large bag of crystal meth; and around $100 million. Your imagination will take care of the rest.
 * A. O. Scott, "Well, Here They Are, Wherever This May Be", New York Times, (March 24, 2011).
 * Yes, Snyder’s Sucker Punch heroines, the patients at a mental hospital, are relatively thinly-sketched. Yes, in the fantasy world they enter to battle for their freedom, their outfits are not, shall we say, practical. But at the time Sucker Punch came out, it was the rare movie with a female lead to come out of Warner Brothers, Snyder’s longtime studio. Even rarer, it was an original action movie starring women.
 * Alyssa Rosenberg, "Loved ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’? You should watch this Zack Snyder movie.", The Washington Post, March 21, 2016; as quoted in "With ‘Sucker Punch’ Zack Snyder Began Struggling With Ideas He Couldn’t Quite Control", by Charles Bramesco, Uproxx, (03.28.16).
 * Interviewer: Would you say the film is a critique on sexist geek culture?
 * Zack Snyder: It is, absolutely. I find it interesting, in a lot of ways, that this movie – of all the movies I’ve made – has been universally hated by fanboys, which I find really interesting. It’s like a fanboy indictment, in some ways. They can’t have fun with the geek culture sexual hang ups.


 * Interviewer: I thought it was basically you commenting on those attendants at Comic-Con who shout, “You’re hot!” at beautiful cast members.
 * Zack Snyder: Yeah! 100%. They don’t know how to be around it. It’s funny because someone asked me about why I dressed the girls like that and I said, “Do you not get the metaphor there? The girls are in a brothel performing for men in the dark. In the fantasy sequences, the men in the dark are us. The men in the dark are basically me: dorky sci-fi kids.”


 * Interviewer: Is it wrong to enjoy seeing Babydoll in that school girl outfit, though?
 * Snyder: You can say what you want about the movie, but I did not shoot the girls in an exploitative way. They might be dressed sexually, but I didn’t shoot the movie to exploit their sexuality. There’s no close-ups of cleavage, or stuff like that. I really wanted it to be up to the viewer to feel those feelings or not. Does that make sense?
 * Interviewer: Yeah, it’s like a guilty-pleasure.
 * Zack Snyder: 100%. As long as you’re self-aware about it, then you’re okay.


 * Interviewer: Did you think a lot in the writing process, “Would a woman say this?”
 * Zack Snyder: You think that, of course you do. It’s hard to write. Know at the beginning of the movie where Sweet Pea is acting tough? That’s tough to write, because I know where she’s going. It’s like when she says “watch yourself!” in the dance hall and they have that whole banter. That’s difficult because it’s on a graphic, in a lot of ways, but you gotta find a way to make it a lot of fun.


 * Interviewer: Most female action heroines are generally interchangeable with men. Can you talk about the process of finding that specific female voice?
 * Zack Snyder: As a man, you can only do what you can do as far as understanding the female psyche. I just tried to write as honestly as I could, so then the female actors would fill in the emotional blanks I left for them. I feel like the girls were really up to that and into that. I thought it was an interesting approach. A good example is when we did the scene where the girls were going to break out and they’re all saying “they’re in!” and they’re crying at the end of the scene. That’s not in the script, and that was just them. If I had written that, I probably would have thought it was cheesy and no one would cry at the end of the sequence.


 * Interviewer: I’m curious, if you don’t mind talking about it, what was the originally shot and intended ending?
 * Zack Snyder: The very first ending I wrote the order was: Babydoll was being lobotomized, she got chained in the basement, Sweet Pea escapes – well, let me back up. There’s a scene you’ll see on the Director’s Cut with Jon Hamm. When Jon Hamm arrives as the High Roller – and we took this scene out because of the MPAA – when that guy punches Babydoll in the face, she wakes up in the High Roller’s suite. He basically makes a deal with her that if she gives herself to him, and willingly and not against her will, then he’ll give her freedom and get [her] out of that place. He’ll make it so that Blue will never touch her and she’ll be free. She’s seduced by that concept, and right when they go to kiss each other, that’s her being lobotomized. When they kiss, it’s her being lobotomized.
 * The very end of the movie was: you see Sweet Pea steal a dress from a clothesline, then after she’s lobotomized and Blue says, “Do you remember me? Take her downstairs,” and then you see Sweet Pea getting on the bus, then after her getting on the bus, it cuts back to Babydoll in the basement and that whole scene happens of the cops taking him away. When he shines the flashlight on her, she gets up, and the camera dollies in on her and then goes around her head, and you see that she’s on a stage in the theater and she signs “O-o-h Child” at the very end. After that, all the dead girls come out and they sing together, then the curtain closes. That’s the end.
 * Interviewer: Why was that cut?
 * Zack Snyder: We tested it, and people just did not know how to… I don’t know. I thought it was awesome, personally. Maybe there’s a cult version of it that’ll exist that I can put together sometime [Laughs], but for a mass audience, it just played as this super culty, bizarro ending. I love it, personally. I could tell that people just didn’t know how to take it, though.
 * Interviewer: Was it difficult conducting test-screenings because of how much of a love it or hate it type of film it is?
 * Zack Snyder: What I learned on this was that you can’t test a movie like Sucker Punch. It really defies the whole concept of being tested. In a lot of ways, I think the movie would have been a million times better off if we just made the hardest, craziest version of the movie we could and not trying to please every audience. I do think that the movie is crazy, in a great way, but it’s just funny that I think it’s 30% as crazy as it could have been. I think that’s the world it lives in. It lives in a crazy world.
 * Zack Snyder "Interview With Zack Snyder on Sexualityn and the World of Sucker Punch", Film School Rejects, Jack Girouch, (March 28, 2011).