Written Interview: Greg Berlanti (“Green Lantern”)

Today’s written interview from the most excellent LAT’s movie blog Hero Complex is with screenwriter and TV writer-producer Greg Berlanti whose credits include the TV series “Dawson’s Creek”, “ Everwood,” “Dirty Sexy Money,” “ Eli Stone,” “ Brothers & Sisters,” and the current series “ Brothers & Sisters.” Here in these excerpts Berlanti discusses his involvement in the movie Green Lantern:

GM: How did you come to write the script for “Green Lantern”? It’s very different from the types of projects you’re best known for. Are you secretly a comic-book guy?

GB: I was as a kid. Probably toward junior, senior year of high school, I moved onto different things, but I fell back in love with it. Donald De Line, who’s the lead producer of the film and is an old friend of mine, we were away on a vacation and I mentioned to him my interest in “Green Lantern.” He really championed me and led the way. I used my TV experience to try to develop multiple stories for it. I worked with an artist, and we drew out 20 or 30 images. I went in and pitched Warner Bros. and said, “This is what I think the three movies could be.” In my mind, Green Lantern was always the thing that succeeded the most at mythology. There was this whole space-opera element. There were all these additional characters, the guardians of the universe who the Green Lantern Corps sort of work for. … It seemed to me that this character was an avenue, in a way, of getting to those other stories and characters. As a storyteller, there was a wealth of opportunities. I tried to winnow it down to as cohesive a story as possible and went in and told it to them, and they were incredibly responsive. Greg Silverman, who was my executive on the movie there at the time, sent me off without an outline or anything. He was willing to take a shot on someone who hadn’t done this kind of feature before. I enlisted the help of two of my friends whom I’d worked with a bunch in TV who were also big comic-book fans [Marc Guggenheim and Michael Green] so we could generate the script even faster and use some of our television methodology in terms of generating something they could see the value in.

GM: What facets of the character appeal to you most deeply?

GB: The character itself was “Top Gun” before Maverick. He was a guy who had to learn how to care. He shut down early in his life because of something that happened to him, and suddenly he doesn’t just have to care about himself, he doesn’t just have to care about the planet, he has to care about the entire universe. It was writ so large. The other side of it was that he was always the comic-book version of Luke Skywalker, imagining that you’re picked for this group of heroes that’s there to defend the entire universe. It always had this great kind of wondrous scope to it, and as a kid who ran around in his Superman Underoos, it was a chance to do a superhero movie that went off planet. When you look at all the superhero characters, Hal Jordan is considered sort of Tier 2, but when you talk about which ones have gone off planet and gone beyond our world, he shoots up to №1 for a lot of people and goes to the forefront of everybody’s mind.

GM: What do you think makes Ryan Reynolds right for the role?

GB: Hal’s a little bit of a jerk, but you have to still love him. [Reynolds] can play that, and he can play sweetness. It’s not dissimilar to Josh in “Life as We Know It.” There’s an element about him that guys look at and go, “Oh, I’d hang out with that guy.” That realness is what Ryan has in spades, that charm. You have to believe that here’s a guy who hasn’t succeeded at anything in his life but is still being picked for the most important job in the universe because the universe sees something in him that he doesn’t see in himself. We have to believe that it’s there, but we have to believe that it’s hidden and that it comes out. He has all that. And Hal was funny but offhandedly funny. Ryan has that. It’s blending the right emotional story with the right actor and a director like Martin Campbell. Whether it’s “Casino Royale” or “The Mask of Zorro,” he has an ability to do those larger movies that I think satisfy with action incredibly but also have really resonant characters. I think we’ve got all the right pieces in place.

GM: Have you visited the “Green Lantern” set in Louisiana at all?

GB: I went down there for a couple days. It was very exciting to be there. It’s incredibly large, the size and the scope of it all. But it was really rewarding to see so many things I read in comic books as a kid now reimagined and come to real life. That was very surreal. I could remember the first Green Lantern comic I read, how I was really pulled into the character, and then you see some of those similar images in real life; it’s very surreal. You wonder, “Oh, was that why I was so into that when I was a kid? Did I know that I would be a part in some small way of bringing that story out there? Why is it that it spoke to me then and I maintained an interest in it?”

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