Source – Joss Whedon has stepped up to take over for ‘Justice League’ director Zack Snyder after the filmmaker suffered a terrible tragedy.
Snyder has revealed his 20-year-old daughter, Autumn Snyder, committed suicide in March. The filmmaker had hoped to keep the tragedy private and hoped to keep working through it but he says he now realizes that simply isn’t possible.
“In my mind, I thought it was a cathartic thing to go back to work, to just bury myself and see if that was way through it,” Snyder tells THR.
“The demands of this job are pretty intense. It is all consuming. And in the last two months I’ve come to the realization… I’ve decided to take a step back from the movie to be with my family, be with my kids, who really need me. They are all having a hard time. I’m having a hard time.”
“Here’s the thing, I never planned to make this public,” he explains. “I thought it would just be in the family, a private matter, our private sorrow that we would deal with.”
“When it became obvious that I need to take break, I knew there would be narratives created on the internet. They’ll do what they do. The truth is… I’m past caring about that kind of thing now.”
“I want the movie to be amazing and I’m a fan, but that all pales pretty quickly in comparison,” he says of the events in his life.
“I know the fans are going to be worried about the movie but there are seven other kids that need me. In the end, it’s just a movie. It’s a great movie. But it’s just a movie.”
The film, starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa and Ezra Miller, is currently in post production. It has a release date of November 17, 2017.
Just a terrible story. I loved the Watchmen and met Zach Snyder several times and interviewed him a bunch. He’s always smiling, really easy to talk to, and down to earth. You don’t need to like the person when they go through something tragic like this to feel sorry for them, but when you really like them and they’re as nice as Zach, there’s extra sadness there.
One of my best friends took his life a few years ago. He was a family man with beautiful wife and kids. He’d just retired from the NHL and was looking forward to life away from hockey. He was given the wrong cocktail of meds, experienced a full short circuit, and took his own life out of the blue. I watched his wife basically implode and kids do the same. It took four years for her to pick herself up and dust herself off, get past the pain, and be someone she’s proud of today.
Zach Snyder walking away from Justice League is a good thing. Healing doesn’t have a time frame, but if there’s a time to start, it’s now.
If you or someone you know needs to talk, or you’re having thoughts of suicide, talk to someone. What you leave behind is far more devastating than opening up to someone.
