“I’m a queer icon, who knew?!” Jokes screenwriter Daniel Waters as he discusses the strong queer following for Batman Returns and Heathers. Waters is also known for the 2032-set sci-fi Demolition Man, which predicted a President Schwarzenegger, and the under-appreciated screwball action-comedy Hudson Hawk starring Sandra Bernhard as the villainous Minerva Mayflower opposite Bruce Willis’ title character. The 2001 dark teen comedy Happy Campers saw Waters make his directorial debut, which he followed up with 2007’s Sex and Death 101, reuniting with Heathers star Winona Ryder. He also collaborated with his brother Mark Waters—director of Mean Girls, House of Yes, and Freaky Friday—on the satire #Fashionvictim starring Gina Gershon, and the fantasy romance Vampire Academy based on Richelle Mead’s bestselling YA novel series.
The Queer Review is presenting a special 33rd anniversary screening of the ultimate Christmas movie for misfits, Batman Returns, at New York’s IFC Center on Tuesday, December 23rd at 9:15pm with an in-person introduction by electronic pop musician Bright Light Bright Light (who recorded a gorgeous cover of the theme song from the movie, “Face to Face”, originally by Siouxsie and the Banshees) and host James Kleinmann, plus a recorded introduction by Daniel Waters.
Batman might have his name in the title, but for us it’s all about the queer icon that is Michelle Pfeiffer’s skintight latex-clad antiheroine, Catwoman, purring and whipping her way across Gotham delivering one-liners like, “I am Catwoman, hear me roar!” Waters keeps the snappy, deliciously camp and quotable dialogue coming. While narratively, there’s something about superheroes and villains wrestling with their double identities that those of us who grew up queer, feeling forced to hide our authentic selves, strongly identify with. The heightened tone of this gothic pop-up book of a movie continues to charm three decades on, while production designer Bo Welch’s twisted urban fairytale is a festive feast for the eyes. Look out for a memorable cameo from Paul Reubens as The Penguin’s father and remember kids: “Mistletoe can be deadly if you eat it” but “a kiss can be even deadlier if you mean it.”
Ahead of the screening, Daniel Waters speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about his memories of writing the film, the initial public reaction to it, its legacy as a cult Christmas movie, and his thoughts on Michelle Pfeiffer’s indelible performance as Catwoman.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: What do you make of the way that Batman Returns has been really embraced as a Christmas movie, especially in recent years?
Daniel Waters: “Well, it’s been embraced period. It got very decent reviews when it came out, but the box office kept going down 50% every weekend because we were scaring kids. We were betraying McDonald’s. It was not the summer fun people expected. It’s so weird that it was a summer release because it’s such a winter movie and such a good Christmas movie. Finally, now that there have been 500 Batman movies, people look at Batman Returns and say, ‘At least this was something different.’ We got punished for being something different before, now we get rewarded for being something different.”
How did the Christmas setting come about?
“Christmas was kind of an arbitrary, off-the-cuff decision. Like, ‘Sure, let’s make it Christmas!’ But it’s funny how that’s paid off because it really has become a Christmas movie. It goes back to when I was a child. I always remember being shocked when my parents said, ‘Christmas is a melancholy time.’ I was like, ‘Melancholy time?! It’s Christmas! Who’s going to have a bad time on Christmas?!’ Then as I grew older, I understood what they’d meant. When Tim Burton says, ‘Let’s make a Christmas movie’, you know it’s not going to be The Grinch with everybody holding hands at the end. I knew that we had a chance to make not only a dark fucked up superhero movie, but also a dark fucked up Christmas movie. It was like, as many ways as we can be dark and fucked up, we’ll take them!”
The Christmas setting gives the terror of what’s happening to Gotham a different dimension, doesn’t it? Seeing Christmas trees blowing up and things that are supposed to be sparkly and festive being destroyed.
“I’m sure you’ve seen the clip from an old talk show where the kid is saying that Batman Returns is the most pernicious thing. He goes through bullet points, like, ‘It makes fun of toys!’ ‘It makes fun of Christmas!’ ‘It makes fun of ducks!’ Then I go, ‘Oh, My God, the kid’s right!’ We systematically came to destroy it. It’s hilarious because Christopher Nolan blows up a football stadium and kills 15 or 16 people and, it’s like, ‘Oh, that Chris!’ But in our movie, The Penguin eats a fish and bites a nose and suddenly we’re the dark Christmas movie! And it’s true though, because we go deep into your mind, we get to the really dark recesses. A lot of superhero movies have been darker, more twisted, but this one gets you because we go to the good places and we mess with you. I think it’s fun that we’re the dark one still.”
How aware are you of Batman Returns being a really cherished movie by a lot of queer folks?
“When Alonso Duralde—who is a great queer writer—interviewed me about Heathers, his first question was, ‘How could a heterosexual man have written Heathers and Batman Returns?!’ He’s so disappointed in me because I have such bonafides! Yeah, both Heathers and Batman Returns have a great queer following and I love it. Going beyond the sexuality of it, we’re choosing something different. We’re choosing a different way to go, so that can let everybody in. You don’t look at Catwoman and Batman and think, ‘Oh, well, there’s a healthy boy meets girl relationship.’ It’s something so much more than that.”
I think your work in Batman Returns as well as much of Tim Burton’s work could be described as queer in the original offbeat sense of the word.
“Yeah, with Batman Returns we sent out a secret whistle to a lot of people to signal, ‘Don’t worry, this isn’t your typical movie’ and I think a lot of people respond to that.”
What do you think of your Catwoman in Batman Returns as portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer being referred to as a queer icon?
“I love it! My entrée into the film is Catwoman. As you can tell by my great Batman scenes and my great Penguin scenes! It is Catwoman that I come alive with and it’s how I got the job. Tim Burton had a very sturdy Sam Hamm screenplay with statues and plot points and third act structure—all those good things that you read about in the screenwriting books—and it just wasn’t speaking to him. He just didn’t care. He was like, ‘Okay, if this is what you’re going to do, you guys can do it with somebody else.’ I think Warner Brothers at that time—not afterwards—but at that time, was like, we’ll let Tim do what he wants to do.”
“I knew I was not going to get the job by appealing to Tim’s love of plot and love of a good mystery, but that it was the outsider element that was going to get to him. I had that vision of Catwoman right away. I didn’t care that in the comic book she was a jewel thief who robs banks and who has a henchman. That didn’t interest me. I liked that Batman has a big industrial complex underneath his mansion with a lot of different Batman suits. I love the moment of him going to be Batman and going through all his suits and his technology and then there’s Catwoman in her Volkswagen trying to find her Catwoman outfit underneath a pizza box! That really struck me.”
“I wanted a homemade Catwoman and I started to say that even in my first meeting with Tim and he was drawing her like a maniacal man. I was trying to add more detail and he was like, ‘Shut up!’ I could tell something had been inspired in him and he didn’t need my words anymore. It got a little more dominatrix from there. Catwoman was definitely the appeal for both of us. Her journey especially, that’s what I was interested in. Usually around Christmas, they have a lot of screenings here in Los Angeles and at the end I’m always like, ‘Holy shit, this is the end of the movie?!’ Don’t pretend this is a happy ending. We got away with this. Oh my God, we’re freaks!”
It feels like it’s Catwoman’s movie at the very end having subverted the expected image of Batman looking over Gotham, instead we have Catwoman.
“I kill all my female characters. I killed Winona Ryder’s Veronica in Heathers and I killed Catwoman in Batman Returns, but they always find a way to come back to life because the actresses who play them do such an indelible job of making them worthy. The last CGI shot of her popping up on the screen that you mention was added for $200,000 a week before the movie came out because we couldn’t leave things with just, ‘Oh yeah, she died.'”
What do you make of Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance in the film?
“It’s one of the things I can look back on from my deathbed with most pride, Michelle’s performance in Batman Returns. I actually successfully fought for Annette Bening to play Catwoman and Tim met with her but then of course she was famously impregnated by Warren Beatty so she couldn’t be in the film. So Michelle Pfeiffer was the quote, unquote consolation prize. She was amazing. Michelle was like ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to play Catwoman.’ Then she gets the script and is like, ‘Wait, this isn’t the girl part.’ She was shocked that it was an actual role. There are so many dimensions to begin with and she brings so much more to it. Every time I watch it I learn something different about her performance.”
“I had some trouble with writing the men, with Batman and The Penguin, but not with Catwoman. I knew that we’d got to have a masquerade ball where everyone comes in costume except for Bruce and Selina. I was like, ‘I’m brilliant!’ That scene came effortlessly to me. When I’m doing a good job as a writer and the actors can take it another 50 yards it’s just amazing.”
One sequence that particularly resonates with a lot of queer folks I’ve spoken to is when Selina Kyle returns home after she’s been resurrected by the alleycats, destroys her apartment and makes her Catwoman suit.
“Britney Spears said in an Instagram post, ‘It’s the hottest scene I’ve ever seen in my life.’ When I saw that I was like, ‘Alright, Britney!’ Britney Spears is backing me up.”
Britney’s got good taste in movies. Earlier in the movie, we see Selina come home alone to her apartment before her transformation, so the second time is such a contrast and makes even more of an impact because of the repetition.
“It’s the key to comedy. Easy laughs. You set it up for some payoffs. I love it. When the movie first came out, people were thrown by having those two scenes with Selina Kyle when Batman really hadn’t had a good scene yet. But now that we’ve been so inundated with Batman and other superhero movies we appreciate it more. It’s like, wait a minute, we’re going someplace else here and that’s grand.”
What was that sequence like to write?
“It was one of the most fun sequences to write. It took me a while to get the perfect neon sign though because I knew I had to have a sign that she changes from ‘Hello There’ to ‘Hell Here’. Let me tell you, I was running around my apartment at 2am in my underwear when I worked it out shouting, ‘I did it! The perfect neon sign!'”
“I’m an imperfect feminist, but I’m a mercenary for originality. It’s amazing that if you make a female character, or a non-traditional male character, and give them a sense of humor, some wit, and you give them a little something else that it knocks the entire film off its axis in a way that the audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. Like, ‘Wait a minute. What are we doing here? Why are we spending all this time with the secretary?'”
“I also did that with Heathers. I love to embrace the cliché of what you think you’re going to see. When Christian Slater as JD shows up, it’s like, ‘Oh, here’s the heroic outsider who’s going to save her’, but then he turns out to be even more malevolent. I love it when the audience thinks, ‘Oh, now we get it. Now we know what’s going to happen.’ That’s when you can slap them in the face, in a good way.”
I’ve read queer interpretations of Catwoman destroying her closet in that sequence as a symbolic moment.
“Oh, that’s hilarious. Geez, I’m a queer icon. Who knew?”
Did you get to see Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker?
“I did. I love the spirit of it. I love outsider art. I love anything that takes the man down. I know the director sometimes needed a social media push up from me to say, ‘Please release this movie’ and I’m glad it got released. Anything that expands the Batman universe is fantastic.”
Heathers came out on VHS when I was 12 years old and I watched it three times over that 24 hours that I rented it from the video store for.
“It always makes me feel so old when I hear that. I was the last generation that only watched things once. We watched The Wizard of Oz one time a year. If you had to go to the bathroom, then you missed the flying monkeys for another year! I’m always blown away by that idea of rewinding a movie and watching it again. That’s cheating! But it’s such an honor to hear that. I’ve got the poster for Heathers behind me right now, which I’ve always hated! But if it wasn’t for that cheesy poster that makes it look like a PG-13 John Hughes film, so many kids wouldn’t have been able to rent it from the video store. So I actually think it was a secret weapon that allowed a lot of people to watch the movie.”
I immediately loved the movie. As a queer kid, I was struck by the fact that these antiheroes weren’t homophobic and that they framed the two jocks as being gay lovers precisely because those guys were homophobic. The way that JD and Veronica spoke about being gay somehow reassured me that there was nothing wrong with me. What was your thought process behind putting that in the film?
“If I was doing Heathers now, I’d actually probably have a queer character in it. I didn’t have a queer character, but one of my favorite lines from the movie is, “Football season’s over Veronica. Kurt and Ram had nothing to offer this school but date rapes and AIDS jokes.’ It’s hard to believe, but at the time it was like, ‘Oh wait, the bad guys make AIDS jokes?’ It’s terrible to say, but that was saying something back then. It is dark, bleak satire, but all my gay friends really can appreciate the line, “I love my dead gay son”. The idea that the only way that a gay character could get some respect back then was by being a tragic figure. At least I’m making fun of that. It’s dark, twisted fun, but cathartic laughter is the best laughter.”
At that time, about the only acknowledgment of queerness in high school movies was the f-slur being thrown around or queer-coded characters in John Hughes movies.
“A lot of times, the f-slur from the hero in a teen film was seen as good for a laugh. There are way too many f-slurs in Heathers, but at least it’s all homophobic characters saying it.”
“My Dead Gay Son” is such a great number in the Heathers muscical. Have you seen the current Off-Broadway production?
“Yeah, it’s incredible. As the writer the film, when I watch the film there’s always something going through my head like, ‘I should have done this’, ‘Why didn’t I do that?’ Or, ‘Oh, if only I’d done this.’ Refracted into a musical it is less dark, but my nasty weirdness is like the smoke in the walls. It’s still there. You can’t get rid of it. The songs are great, the songs are happy, but it’s still there. I can enjoy the experience of watching the musical more than the film. It’s like, I can finally go to my own party and I don’t have to worry if I’m running out of ice. I’m no longer hosting the party, I’m enjoying it. The musical is great and the new version is fantastic. I’m scared that they’re replacing Veronica, but I’m sure the new one will be great.”
The vocals are fantastic all-round in this production.
“Yeah, they are. I can see why some people are almost turned off the musical though because it’s so pre-loved in that it seems like everyone in the audience has seen it three times already. The shrieking after every number is almost nauseating, but since it’s mine, I love it!”
I got myself a “how very” hat from the merch stand.
“Oh, me too, I should have worn mine today. I was trying to tell the cashiers at the theatre when I bought the hat, ‘This is me, I wrote that line’, but nobody cared!”
You were saying that you didn’t watch movies over and over again when you were growing up, but when you were working in a video store in the 80s when you were writing Heathers were there any movies that you’d frequently put on in there?
“I say that about The Wizard of Oz and the flying monkeys, but I think I’ve seen Real Genius 633 times because it’s a movie that you can put on in a video store. You can’t go too R-rated and you don’t want something that’s going to nauseate you. There are definitely a lot of movies that I saw over and over that were almost ambient noise in the background.”
“The video store was great because sitting down and writing with the muse beckoning, ‘Write something, write something’ is terrifying. But when I worked in a video store, I could always have Heathers in my head and do this job surrounded by movies, surrounded by people talking about movies, and I could work on these things without working on them. It was like in Karate Kid—wax on, wax off, paint the fence—so that when I actually sat down to write, I was flowing. Give me my video store job back. Give me video stores back!”
By James Kleinmann
The Queer Review presents a special screening of Batman Returns on Tuesday, December 23rd at 9:15pm at New York’s IFC Center with an in-person introduction by electronic pop musician Bright Light Bright Light and host James Kleinmann plus recorded introduction by screenwriter Daniel Waters. Tickets are on sale now at ifccenter.com. For $3 off general admission tickets use promo code: ‘MEOW’.
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