Affleck and Cavill face off in Batman v Superman – ‘This is a hard movie, mechanically’

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BURBANK, California, March 24, (Agencies): The oldest actor ever to don the Dark Knight’s cape and cowl by a good five years, 43-year-old Ben Affleck wasn’t about to get into a competition with his 32-year-old “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” co-star Henry Cavill over who’s the better fighter. Not even a friendly one.

“Henry’s great at it. And I’m just too old for that (expletive),” said Affleck, whose Batman, earthly limitations and all, takes on the Man of Steel in the Zack Snyder film out Friday.

“Ben’s being very generous but it’s not that tricky to do the Superman stuff,” Cavill quickly responded. “What you’re doing is you’re throwing punches and then something super powered takes over. The CGI kicks in.”

“He’s great with heat vision! You should see it,” Affleck said, laughing.

Anyone who knows anything about the world’s most famous superheroes knows that it’s not exactly a fair pairing. After all, no matter how much Batman bulks up or spends on gadgets and armor, he’s still a man. Superman is something else. His actions in 2013’s “Man of Steel” proved it, and also set into motion the events that lead to the showdown in “Batman v Superman.”

Triumph

Superman’s “Man of Steel” triumph came at a cost. The bad guy was defeated, but his actions left a city destroyed, thousands of lives lost, and it made a powerful enemy in the superhero next door — Batman.

Affleck’s Batman is older, wiser, and a little more jaded than we’ve ever seen him before. He’s also suspicious of this all-powerful god-like being and decides that something must be done.

Thankfully, that fundamental day versus night, man versus alien rivalry didn’t carry over when the cameras stopped rolling, although Affleck laughed that he was still getting used to the idea that he’s not the young guy on set anymore.

“This is a hard movie, mechanically. It was disjointed in a lot of ways putting it together,” Affleck said. “It was good that we got along and I had somebody like Henry to help me get through it. If we had hated each other it would have been an agonizing process. It was a long 120 days.”

Plus, Cavill said, consistently trying to one-up someone is exhausting.

Besides, both actors had enough to think about, between making their characters distinctive and also getting into fighting shape. They had an advantage over many of their Hollywood counterparts just by nature of the fact that they’re both north of 6 feet tall, but they still needed to build muscle and quickly lean down before filming started so they wouldn’t have fat faces either, Cavill said.

Affleck said the costumers essentially became his conscience during the process.

“They have to keep coming over and doing measurements over and over again because the suit has to fit just right,” Affleck said. “It gives you good track of your body. You feel like if you’re not getting bigger the costumers will know it and think you must be slacking off.”

Ultimately it was about establishing a believable reality for Batman’s brute power on screen.

“Audiences really want and respect that actors will get themselves physically in the kind of shape that it’s plausible to do this stuff,” Affleck said. “Hugh Jackman’s got to look right. He’s got to look like Wolverine. When you see him, it’s impressive and it makes you believe it.”

Physical presence aside, Cavill and Affleck both relished in the scope and scale of the endeavor — and its ultimate reach. Affleck, in his first outing as the Dark Knight, will continue on in the “Justice League” movies too, the first of which starts shooting this year.

“This has become the widest, broadest genre for communicating and storytelling, particularly internationally. You’re able to use these stories to evoke interesting themes and tell stories that you think might have resonance. There’s something really powerful in that,” Affleck said.

Chris Terrio, who won an Oscar for his “Argo” script, co-wrote “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and certainly made sure to lace it with big ideas that go much deeper than many contemporary comic adaptations.

“When Superman shows up he engenders a lot of fear. He’s so powerful that people feel threatened and so there’s this notion of how we behave when we’re threatened and how it provokes our lesser selves — we have the urge to strike out at someone because they’re powerful,” Affleck said.

Superman, too, looks a little different from the selfless do-gooder who people know and love in this film.

“Superman is an ideal. He’s something to aspire to be,” Cavill said. “We’re going through an evolution of Kal-El becoming the true Superman who we know in the comic books. In this he’s making mistakes and learning from them and having emotional, knee jerk reactions and realizing that those are not the way to deal with things when it comes to being earth’s savior… it’s a difficult line to toe. People care a lot about these characters.”

Jesse Eisenberg didn’t meet Ben Affleck on “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” until they were filming the party scene where Affleck’s Bruce Wayne and Henry Cavill’s Clark Kent interact for the first time — a crucial moment before their superhero alter egos face off.

Even then, he didn’t spend much time with either Affleck or Cavill, who he also barely knew. For one, he was too busy talking to US Senator Debbie Stabenow from Michigan, who makes a cameo in the scene.

“I was so in my own world,” he said.

Also, in portraying the eccentric, megalomaniac Lex Luthor who tears the two superheroes apart, he actually preferred meeting them in the spirit of the characters.

“It is funny working with guys like that. (They’re) so massive and unusually attractive. It felt like I could push them around literally and annoy them and tease them and it would never really get to them. And they’re also playing these powerful superheroes so it gave me more license to bother them,” Eisenberg said.

The character of Lex Luthor is as essential to Superman as the red cape and the Man of Steel’s ultimate earthbound foe has been played by everyone from Gene Hackman to Kevin Spacey. But this iteration neither looks nor sounds like any version of Lex that we’re used to seeing. Instead of bespoke suits and the legendary bald dome, Eisenberg’s Lex sports blazers, t-shirts and a wavy bob haircut (his idea). And while this millennial entrepreneur might be disarmingly intelligent and philosophical, he’s also a spoiled brat at the core.

“He’s like a child who hasn’t yet been told how the world works and has a juvenile sense of propriety. If you take their toy away, the initial reaction is not anger, it’s probably confusion,” Eisenberg said. “He’s a person who is struggling with real existential crises about his abusive childhood about his, let’s say, perverse Freudian associations with Superman and his need for power in an unstable world.”

The character he spends the most time with on screen though is neither Batman nor Superman but Holly Hunter’s fictional US Senator June Finch, who Lex sees as a potential ally.

Hunter described Eisenberg’s Lex as volatile, complicated and emotional, and her character as the one bringing some “sense and sensibility” to the mayhem.

“It was a really fun ride to take with him,” she said.

His spine-chilling facial tics and vocal flourishes can make even the simple offer of a Cherry Jolly Rancher somehow seem menacing, and it only escalates from there, which gave Eisenberg more room to play — especially as he continues to up the stakes.

“This is a character who becomes increasingly Machiavellian and unhinged,” he said. “In this kind of part there was no ceiling. I could be as odd and eccentric and as vengeful as I wanted. I felt there were no limitations.”

People know Hans Zimmer as an Oscar-winning, much-in-demand composer. But there’s another side to the creator of scores for such films as “Interstellar,” “Gladiator” and “The Lion King”: Zimmer is a veritable mentoring machine, with many of his apprentices launching successful solo careers, including John Powell (the “Bourne” films), Harry Gregson-Williams (“The Martian”), Lorne Balfe (“Terminator Genisys”), Steve Jablonsky (the “Transformers” series) and Heitor Pereira (“Minions”).

The latest to be rocket-fueled by their time with Zimmer is Junkie XL, the stage name of Dutch artist Tom Holkenborg. After writing additional music for Zimmer on the “Madagascar” films and “Man of Steel,” Holkenborg was called upon in 2014 to tackle, on his own, “300: Rise of an Empire” and “Divergent.”

Last year he shook off all remaining boosters when he accompanied George Miller’s awards-guzzling “Mad Max: Fury Road” with a hybrid electronic/orchestral score that kept pace with the film’s insanity. (He also scored crime drama “Black Mass.”)

This year he has two of the hottest superhero tickets in town: “Deadpool,” which shattered R-rated film records, and the upcoming “Batman v Superman” — which he co-piloted with Zimmer.

In his former life, Holkenborg was a successful electronic/dance artist and DJ. He first took the stage in the late ’80s as a synth player in a Dutch New Wave act, then produced for metal and industrial bands. He adopted the “Junkie XL” moniker in 1997, when he released the electronica album “Saturday Teenage Kick.”

“It’s a long trajectory from coming here and wanting to (score films) to the point where a studio says, ‘OK, we’re going to give you the responsibility of this $200 million film.’”

That kicked off a decade in the rave and EDM scenes in Europe and the US, and soon he was being asked to contribute music to movies. “I wasn’t really a film composer at that point,” Holkenborg says. “I was just being an artist, providing cool pieces of music that a music editor would put throughout a film.”

But he got hooked, and moved to L.A. in 2002 on a mission to score films. “I pretty soon found out it was going to be a tough road,” he says. “On one hand you want to learn, on the other hand you want to work; you want to do something cool. But it’s a long trajectory from coming here and wanting to (score films) to the point where a studio says, ‘OK, we’re going to give you the responsibility of this $200 million film.’”

He discovered the best way in was by assisting established composers, and found work helping former Zimmer apprentices Gregson-Williams and Klaus Badelt. Through them he met Zimmer, and the two self-admitted geeks clicked immediately.

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