Warning: SPOILERS for Superman are ahead!
Moviemaking is a collaborative process, and sometimes that means a director and actor might get into a debate about how a certain scene should be shot. That’s just what happened between James Gunn and David Corenswet on the set of Superman, specifically when they were filming the scene where Clark Kent passionately explained to Lex Luthor what makes him “human” after the Nicholas Hoult-portrayed bald baddie called him a “piece of shit alien.” Fortunately, the intense debate ended on a positive note, and fans of the 2025 movie release can be thankful that all this was captured on video.
With Superman now available to purchase on digital media, a segment from the making-of feature “Adventures in Making Superman” has been shared by James Gunn on X and other social media platforms. To summarize, while the cast and crew were shooting this integral moment, Gunn asked Corenswet for a take where he was delivering his dialogue more loudly. The actor wasn’t sure this was the right approach, as he felt that rather than get emotional, Clark would be feeling better about himself after having that conversation with his adoptive father.
Corenswet (who beat out 400+ people for the Superman role) and Gunn went back and forth on this, with the former eventually walking over to the latter to talk with him face to face. Then Gunn said these words that finally made Corenswet understand what the filmmaker was going for:
That’s exactly where the issue is, right? Because what [Jonathan Kent] didn’t tell you was it was wrong to feel that way. There are feelings and there are thoughts. Your feelings about feeling bad are ok. It’s not wrong for you to feel that way. It’s not right or wrong anything. None of it is right or wrong. All of it is being vulnerable and being a human being. And in this moment, for you to talk about how it’s ok to be vulnerable, you have to be vulnerable. Which means showing Lex that your fucking feelings are hurt in the point when you really shouldn’t.
By the time James Gunn was saying that last sentence, David Corenswet was already walking back to set and ready to get into the kind of mindset that the Superman director wanted. Corenswet said in this behind-the-scenes look that Gunn’s last sentence “perfectly clarified what the character was doing in that moment and what I should be doing in that moment.” Corenswet added later:
All the credit goes to James for saying that sentence, and for sticking with me in the conversation long enough to get to that sentence. Because I didn’t make it easy for him.
James Gunn said in his own interview after the fact that the debate he had with David Corenswet by no means came from a negative place, and it actually led to a nice text exchange between the two later that same day:
There’s no anger in any of this at all. There’s no ego. There’s a reason why he’s asking these questions: because it makes it better. David wrote me that night, he texted me, he said, ‘That was my favorite day ever on set with a director.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I think that was my favorite day too.’
It’s a good thing someone was recording this as it was going down. James Gunn even wrote in his X post that he “was freaked out (and so happy) to find out it had been filmed. It makes me more eager to check out the other Superman special features, although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more interested in additional information about the Superman Saga Gunn is planning.
Once again, Superman can now be viewed digitally, though you’re also still welcome to check out the first DCU movie in theaters. The physical media copies arrive on September 23, but it remains to be seen when HBO Max subscription holders will be able to stream it.
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