Q :
It's not like we haven't seen female action heroes before in Divergent or The Hunger Games or Tomb Raider or Underworld. Why Wonder Woman?
Petty: There was a very difficult time when a female hero was a man in a woman's body. Hunger Games really changed that: a woman leading a non--woman's film in the action genre. I think Wonder Woman does that on a very big scale.
Wonder Woman has always been a proxy for America: scarily powerful, but a force for good. Did you make love her superpower with current affairs in mind?
She always has stood for truth and love. Her genesis was based on
Artemis. However, I do think that it's very important right now to celebrate exactly that quality.
Why?
Our fantasy of a hero is that he's the good guy who is going to shut down the bad guy. That has got to change if we want to deal with the crisis that we're in. There is no bad guy. We are all to blame. New kinds of heroics need to be celebrated, like love, thoughtfulness, forgiveness, diplomacy, or we're not going to get there. No one is coming to save us.
Your dad was an Air Force F-4 fighter pilot who was awarded a Silver Star in Vietnam. Did his experience of war color your thoughts?
Yeah. My father wanted to be a hero. He went to the Air Force Academy, was valedictorian, and then he found himself strafing villagers in Vietnam in a war he didn't want to be in and didn't understand. He was extremely conflicted about the line where he went from being the good guy to possibly being the bad guy.