Batman Will Be Terrifying In Suicide Squad, Says David Ayer

It's long been known that Ben Affleck's Batman will appear in the upcoming DC Comics Suicide Squad movie, but director David Ayers says we've never seen the Dark Knight quite as dark as this.

The film follows a team of super-villains including the Joker (Jared Leto) and Deadshot (Will Smith), and Ayer told Collider that afforded him the opportunity to show the Dark Knight from the bad guys' perspective. "All the Batman movies have been from Batman's point of view," Ayer said. "He's the good guy. He's the hero of his own movie in all the movies we've seen. If you look at what Bruce Wayne has done in creating the Batman persona, his idea was to terrorize criminals. It's sort of psychological warfare against criminals. This wrath that comes in the night and attacks and pulls criminals from society. For the first time, we're seeing Batman from the point of view of the criminals and he's freaking scary."

Although Batman wasn't originally supposed to appear in Suicide Squad, Ayers said he talked producers into it. "Look, you apply at a job for a DC Comics movie and it's like, 'Come on, let me get the toys, please. Let me get the cool stuff,'" he said. And while he wanted the cameo to be a secret, Ayers said he knew the surprise would be blown when bystanders spotted Affleck on the movie set in Toronto.

"Well, we had to make a choice of do we shoot the movie or don't we shoot the movie?," he said. "Do we tell the story we want to tell and block the streets off so the people of Toronto don't see anything? We just said, 'Okay, you're gonna see what you're gonna see.' But [Batman] has purpose for what he's doing, and you couldn't tell the story of the Suicide Squad [without him].... So many of the characters that are in that squad had some interaction with him in order to get into [prison]."

But if you think you've figured out Batman's role, Ayers said we haven't seen anything yet. "We have had some material exposed by virtue of being out on the streets and working out on the streets, but it's a sliver," he said. "It's a fragment and it's all out of context. For me, it's a lot of fun just to see how people try and assemble these pieces because, in their minds, they're a much larger piece of the film than they're actually saying. But it takes days and days to shoot a scene. So it's how does all this fit together? That's the big surprise."

Suicide Squad hits theaters Aug. 5.