The Suicide Squad director James Gunn has explained the two conditions he needed met to make the movie, after he penned the screenplay.
"When I was finished with it, then they asked me to direct it, and I said I'll do an under two conditions, and they were both conditions they hated," Gunn told IndieWire. "One of which was, it needs to be rated R. The other was which I needed to shoot in Atlanta, Georgia, because my father was dying and he lived in St. Louis, and they wanted to shoot in the UK. I couldn't be that far away from my dad. The UK one was actually the bigger [condition], because it's a lot more expensive to shoot because of all these tax things in the United States. But those were my conditions. But they said yes, and they were fantastic. They just really let me do my thing." Sadly, Gunn's father died a week before filming began.
"Joker came out after we were already well into our thing and well into shooting, and so that was a really good thing to happen for me," Gunn commented. "It took away a little doubt in terms of how well an R-rated movie could perform."
