I believe in Wonder Woman and the true spirit of Wonder Woman, and I wanted to tell that story. I didn't want to make her an alt version of Wonder Woman.
It's so great that women are being allowed to be heroes in big things.
It is so important for girls and boys to have a female, strong superhero to look up to.
I've always said that I felt women are more heroic.
Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.
But there are still only certain film genres where a woman can stand out, be heroic, be the centerpiece.
I truly feel like I'm a living Wonder Woman.
I was always into fantasy characters, stories of magic, but after Red Sonja, I became obsessed with the persona, the image, of the warrior woman - the sword-wielding, defiant, fearless woman.
Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.
I think there need to be more female action heroines out there that are intelligent and not overly masculine and things like that so I'd love to find - and real too. Not necessarily the superhero perfect archetype of what an action hero is represented as a lot of times. I would love to find that kind of action heroine role to play.
Wonder Woman, she's amazing. I love everything that she represents and everything that she stands for. She's all about love and compassion and truth and justice and equality, and she's a whole lot of woman.
I love flawed female characters, duking it out.
Wonder Woman isn't Spider-man or Batman. She doesn't have a town, she has a world. That was more interesting to me than a kind of contained, rote superhero franchise.
We just really wanted Hit-Girl to be a character who, in a sense, simply happens to be an 11-year-old girl, in the same way that Ripley in 'Alien' could have been a guy, but the part happened to be played by Sigourney Weaver.
I wouldn't know how to write a weak female character. I read so much epic fantasy growing up, where you have these sword-wielding, in-your-face warrior maidens.
I think the role of the Bond woman has changed so much over the years that it now doesn't follow a typical archetypical view. Before, it was very much a beautiful woman who didn't contribute much and who usually ended up getting killed or was arm candy for Bond. But now the women in a Bond movie have so much more to offer.
Very rarely am I attracted to characters that are 'woe is me.' I'm not a big fan of women that have to be the victim and need to be saved, at all times. I don't necessarily think that's how it is, in real life, and I don't think that's how it should be in films.
I like female characters that are strong in their own right and not because the author said so.
People sort of accuse Tolkien of not being good with female characters, and I think that Eowyn actually proves that to be wrong to some degree. Eowyn is actually a strong female character, and she's a surprisingly modern character, considering who Tolkien actually was sort of a stuffy English professor in the 1930s and '40s.
It's great to have female characters that have depth that you can explore instead of being the decoration or the girlfriend or the wife.
Jessica Jones isn't dressed in a sexy outfit to turn people on. She's gritty. She's a human being.
Most of the female 'superhero' role models of my childhood came from novels, and they rarely had powers. Take Dorothy, for example, from 'The Wizard of Oz;' or Laura Ingalls and her sisters in the 'Little House on the Prairie' novels.
The only aspect I'd probably change in some of my films is the death of the heroine. I wish I'd kept some of them alive.
I was a fan of the idea of Red Sonja, but the gender politics of the character made her hard to read, for me, at times.
I need a combination of attitude, sensuality, and vulnerability. I need a new kind of heroine. After Bipasha Basu and Sunny Leone, India now needs an even more unique fantasy figure.
