With James Gunn‘s Superman flying to theaters faster than a speeding bullet, the filmmaker and his cast are starting to peel back the cape on what promises to be a fresh take on familiar characters.

The Guardians of the Galaxy director and now-CEO of DC Studios was on hand at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Tuesday along with his cast, including David Corenswet as the Man of Steel; Rachel Brosnahan as his girlfriend and intrepid reporter, Lois Lane; and Nicholas Hoult as villainous billionaire Lex Luthor.

Together, they introduced a sneak peek at the film. The footage starts similarly to the already-released trailer, showing an injured Superman crash-landing in a frozen tundra and calling Krypto for help. The superdog drags our hero to his Fortress of Solitude, where his robot caretakers get to work healing him with the power of Earth’s yellow sun. From there, we see a montage of Superman saving citizens, battling a kaiju (more on that later), and flying around with Lois. The clip ends with Krypto crying as Superman walks away from him, disappointed in the pup for tearing up his compound (this earned awws from the audience).

Before Gunn and company took the stage at the Colosseum in Caesar’s Palace, they sat down with Entertainment Weekly backstage to share more about this summer’s most highly anticipated film, from the “grounded” relationships that form the story’s backbone to its more fantastical elements like “monster babies” and “giant kaiju.”

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: James, is the central conflict in Superman adapted from one particular comic book, or would you describe it more as an original story inspired by an assemblage of different material?

JAMES GUNN: I would say it’s an original story, but the tone and the look of the film, in many ways, is inspired by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman. But if I wrote my own story, then I could just rip off their look. No, I’m kidding. They’re really great guys, and they’re incredibly talented artists. And I read that comic book, and it really has this feeling of the big, old-school, science-fiction Silver Age comics. We have robots and monster babies and giant kaiju and all of that stuff. But that is also grounded around these incredibly real relationships with a couple that has started dating a few months ago, and now they’re really learning the ins and outs of each other. What’s good about them? What’s not so good about them? And what are their ideals like? We have Lois Lane, who’s a pragmatist, and Superman is an idealist, and how does that work together? My wife and I are like that, actually. 

What would you say is the central conflict of this story? 

GUNN: I think we weave in and out of various conflicts, but the central conflict is between—

NICHOLAS HOULT: It’s a love triangle.

GUNN: Yeah. [Laughs] The central conflict revolves a lot around Lex Luther’s attempts to defeat and destroy Superman. I think Lex Luther thinks of Superman in the way that an artist thinks of A.I. Here’s this guy who’s this [incredible] genius scientist who’s worked his whole life to become one of the richest, most powerful men in the world, and he does it all to be lauded. I mean, he wants to be the greatest, and suddenly this jerk comes in wearing a cape with a lantern jaw and a cocky grin, and he just takes all of the oxygen out of the room, out of the room of Earth, and it creates a burning hatred in the guy.

David, Rachel, and Nick — there have been a lot of incarnations of these characters over the years. How would you describe your approach, and what made it feel unique?

DAVID CORENSWET: I think with characters that have been around for so long, have had so many wonderful iterations on screen and in print, live plays…Wasn’t there a Superman musical? 

RACHEL BROSNAHAN: There was a Superman on the stage! 

GUNN: We watched it!

BROSNAHAN: Yeah! One of my old teachers was in it!

CORENSWET: They are very simple characters in the way that they can exist in the public consciousness. Everybody knows who they are and the basic things about them, but over the decades, so much of these characters have been excavated by different contributors, different writers, different artists, different actors. So to take that on, to have an opportunity to maybe illuminate something new about the character or bring it to a new audience is always a really exciting opportunity. For me, rather than think about anything old or new, I just found that the thing that I was drawn to most with Superman was the tension between his love of humanity and the role that he can play for them and the loneliness that he feels in the fact that he can never quite be one of them. And that plays out in so many different ways, not least of which is his love of being Clark Kent and getting to play as one of them, at least for short periods of time.

BROSNAHAN: We were lucky that James laid such a clear roadmap for us. James has spent more time with these characters than any of us had probably going in. So there’s so much of all of them and all the different lives they have lived through these different iterations on the page. And like theater in a way, it was our job to do our homework and find our own ways into these characters that hopefully you don’t feel the seams of when you see them on screen, but that’s what makes them so uniquely their own.

NICHOLAS HOULT: I think you guys summed it up. What they said!

Similarly, James, as a filmmaker, how did you make these familiar characters your own? 

GUNN: I think I bring questions to the material. It’s the same thing that I asked at the beginning of my journey with Guardians of the Galaxy. I said, “Okay, there’s a talking raccoon. That sounds a little silly, but what if it was real? How would it be real, and what would it be like? And I realized at the beginning, before I ever even took on writing the screenplay for Guardians, that meant that character was the saddest character who’s ever existed in the history of the universe, and the story was the journey of him learning to be connected to the rest of the universe, becoming a part of things as opposed to separate from things.

It’s the same question here. What I tried to bring to it is something beautiful that is about the goodness of human beings, about kindness in people, because that’s what Superman represents to me. He almost represents something old-fashioned, and yet I think that’s exactly what we need right now: kindness, goodness, the innate moral values that we grew up with, that somehow the internet has drowned out and deemed weak. That’s who he is, and that’s what his strength is. So that interested me. 

And then, bringing a complexity to the relationship between Superman and Lois, and also between Lois and Lex. We have a great 10-minute scene of Lois and Clark going over their relationship, the way they look at the world, their ideals, their ethics, and how that makes them who they are.

Nick, can you say anything about what particular business Lex is in and what Luther Corp. is in the film?

HOULT: Tech defense? Defense? Yeah. I can’t say exactly more than that, probably, right?

GUNN: I think Lex has invented one of the best forms of battery in the entire world that almost everything runs on. And we don’t ever talk about this in the movie, but I think that’s where he’s made the majority of his money.

HOULT: You described him in one moment as a sorcerer, the level of science, and I like that in terms of just understanding the level of genius he’s working with and also the science that’s at play in this story and how that evolves and also the recklessness that he plays with. And I think that also plays into the lengths he’s willing to go to and the risks he’s willing to take for his goal. And then ethically, the question that people start to question, I suppose, even though he presents himself with something very different and controls the narrative in that, as well.

James, Superman is the first movie to be released as part of the larger DC Universe you’re establishing. How is this movie setting the tone for what’s to come?

GUNN: I think it’s only setting the tone so far as that this is 100 percent a James Gunn movie, and what I want with the future films is for them to be the same — not James Gunn movies, but when I talked to Craig Gillespie who’s doing Supergirl, I said, “I don’t want all of these movies to be the same.” What I love about DC Comics is that you can read a story like The Dark Knight, which is tonally very different because of its artist and writer than Superman for All Seasons, than All-Star Superman, than [Batman:]The Long Halloween. They’re all these beautiful stories within the same world, but completely different. And that’s what I think is exciting.

I think that I learned from my time at Marvel. When Guardians of the Galaxy came out, people were like, “Well, how is this raccoon going to interact with this God of Thunder who’s been set up in a totally different type of movie? And that was the thing that people liked the most about Infinity Wars. So it’s about really letting the artists create these unique visions that allow us to get to know these characters in different ways.

I look forward to the time when these characters — one of them does show up pretty soon…two of them actually — so anyway, when they get to see them in a totally different light, in a totally different genre and a film that isn’t the big spectacle, action-adventure, maybe something more dramatic, maybe something more comedic, whatever, and see those characters in a slightly different light portrayed by the same actors.

Is it fair to say that this movie is a love story between Superman and Lois?

BROSNAHAN: Sure. I think one of the things that I loved so much about the Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, [Richard] Donner Superman was that it felt like a love story wrapped in a universe that was familiar but not quite our own. And isn’t love at the root of every story, in a way? You have to love so hard to hate something, too. I think it’s interesting to see these two characters exploring their love because she’s somebody, as you said, who leads with her head. He’s somebody who leads with his heart. What does Lex lead with?

HOULT: Honestly, I would think of it as him leading with love for humanity in some ways, but then how he displays it…because, obviously, he’s egotistical and selfish, but in some ways, it would be a humanist element of the character and God and all these things that he perceives himself to be and protecting their faith.

CORENSWET: This conversation made me see an interesting, weird, strange thing, which may not be true, but Lex is sort of a combination of Superman and Lois, where he has all of Lois’ intelligence and foresight and skepticism that allows him to make these incredible advances and control the narrative and the government and all these things that he has control over. But he has Superman’s passion for the world and for being a symbol of something, standing for something, and being a public-facing symbol. And maybe the downfall is that Lex has decided what’s right between those two and which should win out, whereas Superman and Lois are in a constant battle about what is right, so they each get checked by the other. 

BROSNAHAN: But they also bring out each other’s humanity.

CORENSWET: That, as well.

BROSNAHAN: It feels like it really is a story about what makes you human at the end of the day. And things like love and curiosity and goodness and hope and courage are all the things that make us human.

Superman soars into theaters this July 11.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.

With reporting by Lauren Huff.

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