James Wan Talks Aquaman And What We Could Expect

During an interview with IGN, Aquaman director James Wan talked about what we could expect from his standalone film from character’s speaking underwater and compare Aquaman to Wolverine.

It’s encouraging to hear how involved Wan is on the project, even when he was filming and promoting The Conjuring 2 saying “The train on Justice League has kind of set off already! That's basically Zack's vision for that world, but you know, early on, Zack [Snyder] tried to involve me as much as he could and I really appreciated that.”

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The top issue for Wan is how will Aquaman and the rest of Atlantis talk underwater? Well, Wan gave a cool idea to how it might be handled.

“I want to kind of create... I love the idea of underwater speaking but with a real sort of sonic, aquatic quality to it. So there's this sort of aquatic, almost sonar/whale thing. Even though it's in a human language, there’s this slight sort of underlay to it, this ping to it, which I think would be interesting for us to design from a sound design perspective. Yeah, it will be fun. Also, Zack has some ideas that he'll be doing in Justice League.”

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Wan will also be learning from Zack Snyder’s Justice League adding “Listen, I'll be honest, in some ways, JL will be an experiment for me to see what works and what may not work as well. And then kind of go, okay... Here’s the great thing, with all these superhero movies, you watch from one movie to another, and they always sort of slightly change things along the way. You kind of have to do that to make what's best for your film.”

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The 39-year-old also talked about changing the image of the character and how having someone like Jason Momoa as the king of Atlantis and thought it was a brilliant move by Snyder and co to cast him comparing him to another beloved superhero Wolverine.

“Yeah, I actually think it's a brilliant move on Zack and co. to cast someone like Jason. Immediately, the whole joke aspect of Aquaman goes out the window. You have such a muscular, superhero-y character and one that is almost, to me, in some ways... I look at him, he's kind of the Wolverine in some respect. He's the outsider who gets pulled into this world and he kind of doesn't want to belong and he was doing his own thing. And he prided freedom above everything else. That kind of plays nicely into who his character is. He's like a reluctant superhero, right? He's the reluctant king, basically, or would-be king.”

After the interview was doing the rounds on social media, Wan went on Twitter to literate to fans what he meant when comparing the two characters and also semi-confirming the inclusion of Black Manta.

Peeps, I referenced Wolverine for the loner/outsider aspect. That is all. Don't freak out over headlines. Now, as for Black Manta...

— James Wan (@creepypuppet) 11 August 2016

Click here for more on Black Manta being the villain in the Aquaman solo film.