Director Zack Snyder has said he doesn’t understand the online abuse that Amber Heard has faced since her high-profile court battles with ex-husband Johnny Depp.
“I just don’t get it,” Snyder told The Hollywood Reporter. “If other people don’t like her, I don’t know what to say. I would work with her in a second.”
Snyder cast Heard in 2017’s Justice League, which marked her first appearance in the DC Universe.
She reprised the role of Mera in 2018’s Aquaman and will appear once again in this December’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
Snyder, who also directed 2013’s Man of Steel and 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, added that he has no future plans to return to DC.
The one project that could tempt him back, he revealed, would be an adaptation of Frank Miller’s 1986 comic series Dark Knight Returns, but only if it were “a true representation of the graphic novel”.
Jason Momoa (left) and Amber Heard in ‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’— (Warner Bros)
Last month, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom director James Wan spoke out about the false “narrative” surrounding the film’s reshoots.
Responding to reports that the film had undergone extensive reshoots amid a turbulent production process, Wan told Empire magazine: “We probably did seven or eight days [of reshoots], which is nothing for a movie of this size.
“It was just spread out because it’s so hard to get your actors back once you’ve finished the initial shoot.”
Wan also pointed to his previous work on the 2018 horror film The Nun, which involved a substantial amount of re-shot footage being added late in production. “I built an entire franchise from a reshoot,” he said.
“I’m not the kind of person that says, ‘This movie has to turn out exactly how I planned it on day one.’ Your art will never be organic if you’re locked into that mentality.”
The film’s release was delayed as a result of the pandemic as well as an overhaul in leadership at DC Studios. In October 2022, The Suicide Squad director James Gunn and producer Peter Safran were brought on board to oversee a re-launch of the entire DC franchise.
Reports of reshoots and claims of studio interference were, however, played down by Wan.
“I’ve had to learn to be more Zen in dealing with all the noise around me, for sure,” he said. “I’m a pretty private person. I don’t get on social media and have fights, but it’s difficult because this narrative has emerged that is not the reality.
“The noise is fun to write about and it gets clicks, but people don’t know the truth.”
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is released in US cinemas on 22 December and in the UK on 22 December.
