Wonder Woman Director Promises Character-Driven Action

Superhero movies are a lot of fun, but even if you're invested in the characters, it can sometimes seem like their onscreen adventures are more about dealing out blockbuster action than truly telling a meaningful story. According to Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins, however, her film take the genre in a decidedly different direction.

Speaking with DC Entertainment for the interview segment embedded above, Jenkins promised "100 percent character-driven" action in Wonder Woman, reflective of the story's perspective from the Amazonian hero's point of view. Pointing out that the movie's story centers partly on Wonder Woman being drawn into human affairs after she's exposed to the horrors of World War I, Jenkins stressed that her action sequences were colored by the shock the character would feel upon witnessing armed conflict on such a massive scale.

"There was no point in the movie that we ever stepped out and were like, 'Look at this extravaganza!'" said Jenkins. "She witnesses a battle on a beach that rocks her world and changes her understanding of what warfare is. And then she comes to man's world and she sees a war that everyone says is impenetrable and nothing can be done about it, and she says 'What am I going to do about it?'"

Jenkins, who directed Charlize Theron to an Oscar in 2003's Monster and more recently helmed episodes of The Killing and Betrayal, certainly has the background to fill in character-driven moments between set pieces. As she went on to point out, Wonder Woman's story has some fundamental similarities with her previous projects. "It makes it like everything else I've ever done," she continued. "You're just saying, 'Here's my character, here's the journey that they're on, how do I want to experience that and how do you do it?'"

In addition to character-driven action, Jenkins has also promised plenty of humor in Wonder Woman, all of which seems designed to soothe fans' fears about the increasingly dark and chaotic direction of the DCEU. We'll all have a chance to see how well it worked when the movie arrives in theaters on June 2.