The “Magic Mike” director recently told The Daily Beast that he could never direct a superhero movie due to the complete departure from reality, especially when it comes to a lack of adult sexual relationships onscreen. “For me to understand the world and how to write or supervise the writing of the story and the characters — apart from the fact that I can bend time and defy gravity and shoot beams out of my fingers — there’s no fucking,” Soderbergh said. “Nobody’s fucking! Like, I don’t know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing.” Soderbergh added, “The fantasy-spectacle universe, as far as I can tell, typically doesn’t involve a lot of fucking, and also things like — who’s paying these people? Who do they work for? How does this job come to be?”
Now, “The Suicide Squad” director James Gunn called out Soderbergh’s claims, tweeting, “With all due respect, Steven Soderbergh, some people are fucking,” alongside a collage of “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “The Suicide Squad,” and “Peacemaker” sex scenes. Gunn added, “Me & Zack Snyder & Richard Donner & Chloe Zhao & Tim Miller off the top of my head [are the exceptions]. But, to Soderbergh’s credit, sex seems to be nonexistent in many comic book films, so it’s not like his statement is groundless.” To Gunn, showcasing sex “isn’t necessary in any single story,” albeit does add to the world-building. “But to have an entire antiseptic sexless film universe is a denial of who we are as human beings (and how every single one of us got here),” Gunn wrote in a Twitter thread. “The Suicide Squad” was rated R at writer-director Gunn’s urging; in fact, the rating was part of his deal to return to DC. “I said, ‘It’s going to be rated R because it’s like a war film.’ I have a big aversion to war films or gun films where people are getting shot and they’re getting thrown back and it’s [just the] impact, but no real repercussions to the violence,” Gunn said. “I hate that kind of stuff, and I’m like, ‘The only way I can do this and not have it be rated R is if I have them fighting a bunch of robots or something, and I don’t want to make a movie with a bunch of robots, I want to make a war film.’ They were like, ‘Okay, you can write it rated R.’.” Aside from the gory violence, Gunn joked, “We see lots of penises, but not much female nudity, which I think is funny. That’s one of the reason why we got an R rating…They just really let me do my thing.” Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
