James Gunn, the writer/director of Guardians of the Galaxy, Peacemaker and Superman, had some advice Wednesday for thousands of creators at Adobe’s Max user conference: work with people you know, turn off the inner critic, and figure out what you’re both good at and enjoy doing.
Gunn appeared during the conference’s day 2 keynote, held this year in Los Angeles. He followed YouTube stars Brandon Baum and Mark Rober, who each have more than 20 million subscribers and billions of views of their videos. On the opening day, Adobe unveiled a string of notable AI-related enhancements to its sprawling suite of creative software, whose flagships include Photoshop and Premiere Pro.
Gunn, though, was Wednesday morning’s media star of stars, talking about his lengthy creative journey and process to many of the 10,000 Max attendees, generally creatives themselves attending the conference to learn or improve their skills with the company’s software.
Gunn, in conversation with Adobe’s Jason Levine, said he initially wanted to be a rock musician, leading a band called the Icons from his Manchester hometown outside St. Louis, Mo. To his frustration, his talents didn’t quite match his ambitions.
He floundered in his early 20s, in and out of school and trying to figure out what creative path he might pursue,
“I was always kind of searching for what I was best at,” Gunn said, drawing comic strips for the school paper at Saint Louis University, playing in the band, casting around for direction. Eventually, he went to his father, a lawyer like several others in the Gunn clan, and said he was considering also pursuing the law.
“He said, ‘I’m a lawyer because I love contracts. I love documents. I love the fine print. At the end of the day, you have to do what you love and the rest will follow,’” Gunn recounted. “He was the one who set me on the right path. If I was left to my own devices, I would have acted out of fear. Take the risks. The worst thing that can happen is you’re hurt and disappointed, but you’re always going to feel good about yourself.”
With English degrees from SLU and Columbia University, Gunn eventually turned his creative focus on film, getting his professional start as a screenwriter paid $150 for Tromeo & Juliet. from schlock-horror specialist Troma Pictures.
“What I was really open to was finding out what I was really good at and what I truly enjoyed, and for me that was filmmaking. That’s a phase a lot of people overlook today, learning where you fit in.”
Troma’s ultra-low-budget operation gave Gunn opportunities to “learn every single thing about the film business,” including far-flung but essential skills in marketing, location scouting, casting, and distribution.
Then came his big break, mining a back-bencher franchise in Disney’s vast Marvel universe to build a superhero movie featuring a dyspeptic raccoon, a truly mono-syllabic tree, Zoe Saldana and a then relatively unknown Chris Pratt.
Guardians of the Galaxy proved a massive hit, turning both Pratt and Gunn into hot Hollywood commodities, and spawning two sequels. Combined, the three films have grossed nearly $2.5 billion worldwide, a long way from the $350,000 it took to make Tromeo & Juliet. The films also mined an unlikely trove of 1970s pop hits, reviving interest among younger audiences in songs long socked away in classic-rock playlists.
Though Gunn said he’s not a particular fan of those 1970s songs (he didn’t graduate high school until halfway through the 1980s), “It fit the vibe of the movie. It helps to ground the movie. Instead of using set design from earth, I used music to ground us in emotional reality.”
In similar fashion, when he wrote the streaming hit Peacemaker, with John Cena as a large-fisted lunk trying to be a better superhuman than his racist father, Gunn turned to hair metal, the loud, poppy heavy metal notable mostly for its practioners’ prodigiously teased mounds of locks. But the sounds fit Peacemaker’s world. Season 2 debuted several weeks ago.
In 2022, Gunn and producing partner Peter Safran were named co-heads of Warner Bros. Discovery’s DC Studios, focused on maximizing the opportunities for projects of many kinds based on that other major comic-book universe. More recently, Gunn directed the latest Superman, released in early July.
The film generated $615 million in worldwide box office for Warner Bros., along with an 83% positive Rotten Tomatoes critical score (and 90% from fans). The film adjourned to HBO Max to stream after summer’s end, where the company said it attracted 13 million views in its first 10 days. Those returns were enough to guarantee a near-inevitable sequel, Man of Tomorrow, that Gunn said will go into production next April.
This time around, Gunn said working with David Korenswet’s Superman should be far easier for both.
“I didn’t know how to handle David Korenswet until about halfway through, and then I got it,” Gunn said. “He’s very honest. I don’t have to use kid gloves with him. He doesn’t use them with me, either, though sometimes, I wish he would.”
But Gunn said he “loves” working with actors multiple times, because he’s already figured out how to bring out their best performances.
“Every actor is like Photoshop,” Gunn said. “You have to work with it, but there’s a learning curve. When I first shot with Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana, at the time, Zoe was the bigger actor, so we shot her first. I found out as we went on that Zoe gets better and better with every take, while with Chris there’s flashes of brilliance and then he goes somewhere.”
He quickly added that he’s a close friend of Pratt’s but the key is catching the brilliance early. “I don’t have to learn what works for them,” Gunn said. “I already know.”
These days, Gunn professes to love technology, but have no particular preference for, say, computer-generated visual effects over practical ones. What does make him grind his teeth, however, are those filmmakers who hope to work out thorny production or story issues while in post-production.
“A lot of people in Hollywood don’t plan,” Gunn said. “I think when you have stuff like that, it ends up not being great. You want to know what you’re doing as best you can so you’re using the best tool to create a reaction for an audience.”
One other bit of advice: allow yourself to be bad at something, so you can make it better.
“As we’re writing, we judge what we doing and that is the enemy of creativity,” Gunn said. “Go through the phase of allowing yourself to turn off your self judgment. When we’re actors in our own drama, we’re judging, we’re two people at once and not fully in the moment. That’s the thing that allows us to be creative and come up with new ideas. It’s really about being in the moment always for me.”
At the Max conference, Adobe’s many announcements included an intriguing two-way integration between Alphabet-owned YouTube’s Shorts and its own recently launched Premiere Pro iOS mobile app, part of Adobe’s increasing focus on the creator economy.
Adobe’s Firefly AI app and service also had a prominent place in the announcements, helping generate images, video, sound effects, animations, visual effects and more while also integrating with perhaps 20 specialized large language models from partners such as Alphabet, Luma, and Ray. The company also had a pitch for cost-effectiveness, saying one Firefly subscription gives users access to and choice among all those LLMs that otherwise have their own, proliferating subscription costs.
Regardless of the AI announcements and several analysts rating the company’s target price higher, though, Adobe shares dropped between 5% and 6% Wednesday on concerns about short-term negative impacts from AI-fueled competitors. The Max conference concludes Thursday.