'Aquaman' director James Wan: 'I didn't want to make a traditional superhero movie'
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Just 48 hours ago, James Wan says, he was climbing the steep and winding steps of the Great Wall of China - a relatively relaxing exercise compared with the 14-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week pace he'd been grinding away at for the last three months to cross the finish line with "Aquaman," the sixth film in Warner Bros.' $3.8 billion DC Extended Universe treasure chest.
Today, thankfully, it's teatime at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. That means Wan, 41, can take a moment to marvel over the whirlwind journey that's taken him around the world and back in a matter of days with "Aquaman," which, by a very large measure, marks the biggest undertaking of his career.
"Filmmaking - the actual creative filmmaking - is only 40 or 50 percent of the process of making a movie in Hollywood," says Wan, ordering a pot of Tahitian vanilla, the soft plinking of a harpist rising above the clinking of china. "The other 50-60 percent is navigating the big machinery of making these films."
That journey still has a big hurdle to clear when "Aquaman,"
