“It’s like the last week in school, and we gotta tell the kids they’re still working,” Gillespie muses.
Perhaps not to get senior jitters, Alcock even declines to watch a rough cut of sizzle reel dailies prepared for the press. “I don’t wanna watch,” she nervously laughs, acutely aware that she’s in the last stretch of her first film, Hollywood or otherwise, and it’s time to bring the thing home.
Yet for those of us who stayed to see the footage, we got something compelling, haunting, and frankly unlike much of the marketing Supergirl has revealed to the public in the 13 months since our stopover in Leavesden. Scored to a moody, female-fronted cover of Radiohead’s “Creep,” the loneliness and isolation of Kara Zor-El, Last Daughter of Krypton—who unlike her more famous boy scout cousin can remember Krypton—is put in full context.
Some of the same trailer footage you’ve seen of Kara waking from a hangover to don sunglasses is present, but when juxtaposed with shots of her leaning over a shotglass, or looking glassy-eyed while staring down bad men, it takes on a different cadence. Here is a young woman still stalked by the memory of what she left behind when, also in a scene we saw, Superman (David Corenswet) discovers her in a downed crystal spaceship straight out of Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman. She’s alone in the universe except for the puppy in her arms when she finally lands on Earth. All of which evokes a melancholy closer in temperament to King and Evley’s graphic novel.
“I hope what you’ve seen so far, and what you’re going to see, just shows you the breadth of what we’re doing at DC,” executive producer Chantal Nong Vo says near the beginning of our tour. “They’re very different films, obviously, different characters, and very different filmmaking styles.”
On the day, the promise of this approach departing from producer James Gunn’s previous superhero movies—from last year’s Superman to Guardians of the Galaxy, although both are clear influences on Supergirl—was clearly visible. As clear as a little girl standing in the ruins of her home, forced to say goodbye.
