This past March, Disney announced that they were bringing director James Gunn back to direct Guardians of the Galaxy 3, after publicly firing him last year.
Gunn’s firing came after insensitive Tweets surfaced from a decade ago from his Twitter account.
In the fallout of his firing, cast members, friends, family, and a slew of rabid fans took to the internet to call Disney out for the move.
In March, the studio announced that they rehired the director shortly after firing him. The studio chose to keep the news secret for a number of months. (Yea right. Disney does know that nobody belives this.)
The director broke his silence about the entire incident in an interview with Deadline:
That first day… I’m going to say it was the most intense of my entire life. There have been other difficult days in my life, from the time I got sober when I was younger, to the death of friends who committed suicide.
But this was incredibly intense. It happened, and suddenly it seemed like everything was gone. I just knew, in a moment that happened incredibly quickly, I had been fired. It felt as if my career was over.
He learned fast that his career was far from done, when numerous studios approached him about new projects. Warner Bros. hired him to write and direct The Suicide Squad, thier own team-up of misfits:
At the same time, I didn’t know what I believed. The news that I was hired back, it was a big story for a day and then it’s done. When all this happened, it went for days and days and days.
As much as I wasn’t reading the news, I was feeling the shrapnel constantly through all of the texts and calls from my friends and family who were so upset at this or that.
I finally had to be like, “Guys, I can’t focus on all the negative stuff right now, it just hurts me.”
The studios, for the most part, said, “We’d love to have you.” They called within the first two days. But I didn’t believe it.
That’s the thing that I have to be honest about.
On some theoretical level, I was like, “Well, maybe I do have a future.” I’m a fairly logic-oriented person and that helped, but emotionally, there was not a whole lot there to hold onto.
That was good for me, too, because what I needed to do was stop making my career be what makes me worthwhile and start making me just be OK as myself.
That is what I concentrated on. I concentrated on the fun.
Gunn laments on his past comments years ago:
I was writing Suicide Squad and thought of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 as being long gone.
I guess it was a possibility for a while, but the initial conversations with Alan [Horn, Walt Disney Studios president] weren’t, “Let’s figure out if I should come back.” It was, “Let’s talk about this.”
It was like the break-up of my marriage.
I got divorced, and then had those conversations with my ex-wife: “Let’s get along as well as we possibly can and be kind to each other because we’re both a large part of each other’s lives…”
…I don’t blame anyone, and feel and have felt bad for a while about some of the ways I spoke publicly;
some of the jokes I made, some of the targets of my humor, just the unintentional consequences of not being more compassionate in what I’m putting out there.
I know that people have been hurt by things that I’ve said. That’s still my responsibility, that I wasn’t as compassionate as I should be in what I say. I feel bad for that and take full responsibility.
Disney totally had the right to fire me. This wasn’t a free speech issue. I said something they didn’t like and they completely had the right to fire me. There was never any argument of that.
This is only a small bit of the interview, you can shoot over to the original Deadline interview. Gunn learned from the entire experience.
He is a better person from it, rather than still being angry or trying to deflect the blame.
