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The Story Behind the Black-and-White Photo That Linked 'Batman v Superman' and 'Wonder Woman'
DC’s new superhero hit Wonder Woman is an origin story no doubt, but the backstory to Gal Gadot’s Amazonian warrior actually began to unfold more than a year earlier in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. That’s when Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) came across a black-and-white photograph of Diana Prince from “Belgium, November 1918” in Lex Luthor’s conveniently well-organized superhero files that showed her on a battlefield flanked by a squad of four gunslingers.
It was a major revelation at the time, indicating to the Dark Knight that his mysterious new friend ages amazingly well, if at all. But who knew the photo would play such a vital role in Wonder Woman, used as a framing device to set up the entire film when the snap arrives on Diana’s desk in the opening moments?
The folks behind DC Comics clearly did, and according to Wonder Woman star Ewen Bremner, they wasted no time in capturing the moment.
“That was the first thing that we shot, before we’d even shot a scene [for Wonder Woman] we shot that photograph,” Bremner told Yahoo Movies during an interview to promote the Blu-ray and Digital HD release of his other new film this year, T2: Trainspotting. Director Patty Jenkins shot Wonder Woman and her World War I posse — which included Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), Sameer (Saïd Taghmaoui), The Chief (Eugene Brave Rock), and Charlie (Bremner) — when the film started production in November 2015, only four months before BvS dawned in multiplexes.
To be clear, Jenkins did not film the full scene (one of the movie’s best moments, when Diana slices and dices her way across the trenches on the way to saving a Belgian village under siege), just the photo, which would later pose challenges for the cast and crew, according to Bremner.
“It meant that when we eventually got around to shooting the scene that the [photograph] is from, we had to really painstakingly recreate it,” he said. “Because we [took the photo] against a half-built set, in a way sets were still being built at that point. So by the time we came around to filming that scene, probably around five months later, the sets were much more developed. So we had to find a way to recreate the exact same image after half a year had gone by.”
Regardless, mission accomplished.
Wonder Woman is now in theaters. T2: Trainspotting hits Digital HD June 13 and DVD and Blu-ray June 27.
Watch Gal Gadot and Chris Pine talk about what they’d like to see in a Wonder Woman sequel:
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