With less than two weeks to go until the premiere of the highly anticipated film, Warner Bros. has released a new featurette that takes viewers behind the scenes of Birds of Prey. The film is billed as a raucous and violent good time led by a fierce girl gang taking on Gotham, and according to these interviews it sounds like the cast had just as much fun as their onscreen personas.
Once again, Margot Robbie displays an innate understanding of the character of Harley Quinn. You can tell that she cares about the character and the story she is trying tell. In her role as a producer, she has been hands on from the development of the script, to casting, to creating a world for her Harley to inhabit.
And the result appears to be Harley/Margot telling her own story. While she was undoubtedly the best part of the mess that was Suicide Squad, Harley Quinn was treated as an object throughout the film. She didn’t have a character arc, and it never felt like her character was changed in any way.
Robbie says of Harley’s second cinematic outing, “I think we wanted people to get a taste of what life could be like when you see it from Harley’s point of view, and when you watch this film that’s what you’re getting. It’s unpredictable and it’s out of order and it’s messy and it’s funny and it’s dangerous and it’s violent and it’s absurd and it’s heartbreaking and it’s heartwarming, it’s a bit of everything which is kind of like the character.”
Finding authenticity with larger than life comic book characters is always a challenge in these kinds of films. While Marvel has maintained a grounded relatability with its superheroes, DC heroes and villains often inhabit one of two worlds: the arch theatrical cartoon world of the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher Batman films or the gritty grounded realness of something like the Nolan trilogy or Joker.
But there has to be a middle ground: something accessible but still entertaining, fantasy mixed with reality. Director Cathy Yan was clearly aiming for relatable female characters, saying “I think they feel real and raw, and they’re not perfect they, you know, drop f-bombs, they make terrible decisions or bad choices, they are really raw in the movie and that’s what I loved about it and that’s what I really want to make sure came across in the film, that none of these women are perfect, they’re not aspirational in that sense, you know everyone I think has their flaws and that I think is what we all want to see on screens these days.”
Jurnee Smollett-Bell, who plays Black Canary, said of Robbie’s work, “Yeah Harley’s crazy, she’s a psycho, she’s quirky, she’s all these annoying things, but Margot finds a way to ground her in a truth that i think we can relate to.”
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays Huntress, said “She really had her hand in everything on this movie, but at the same time managed to keep such a clear head all the time which I was so impressed by, because you would think with all the different roles she’s playing, and all the different hats she’s wearing, that it would be stressful or that she would be in over her head … and she never was, she was cool as a cucumber.”
There is something delightfully meta about Birds of Prey: a story of a woman assembling her own gang, produced by a woman who assembled her own all-female gang to write, direct, costume, and star in said story. It’s a conceit that seems right up Harley Quinn’s alley.
Are you excited for Birds of Prey? Let us know in the comments!
(via io9, image: Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.)
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