As the first female director of a Marvel or DC film, Jenkins has gently reinterpreted the superhero genre, bringing love and compassion to the world of fights and fantasy

At a sunbaked studio lot in LA’s Culver City, a table laden with red and blue cake pops styled with miniature fondant headbands is drawing smiles: superheroes, in small and edible form. They are tiny and temporary (gone in a gulp), which is especially pleasing when you accept them for what they are – homage to something huge and potentially lasting.

The new Wonder Woman movie, with its images of sword-wielding Gal Gadot now all over billboards, buses and social media feeds, is aiming to do for superhero movies what the excellent and feminist Mad Max: Fury Road did for action blockbusters. It’s progressive yet crowdpleasing, faithful to the tenets of the genre yet wise to its own absurdities. In short, it’s a game-raiser for reasons beyond the fact that it is also the first ever Marvel or DC movie to be directed by a woman. She is 45-year-old Patty Jenkins, a soft-hearted hard-ass who has waited nearly 15 years for this moment. Jenkins is also only the second female director to command a budget of more than $100m.

Her last movie, 2003’s Monster, was also her debut. It won Charlize Theron an Oscar for her portrayal of real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos and it won Jenkins the attention of major studios. When she told Warner Brothers that she wanted to make a Wonder Woman movie, it began a very long conversation. The history of the film, in fact, is a saga more complicated and much more boring than any Marvel or DC storyline – and with a bigger cast, too. Jenkins, the umpteenth director attached to the project, was finally hired in April 2015.

“There were so many of those conversations,” she says, “about whether so-and-so would like it.” We’re in an aggressively air-conditioned trailer and Jenkins, highly groomed and hyper-voluble, is in a tight orange dress that matches her nails and toes.

“It’s the trickle-down effect,” she explains. “As long as your main interest is teenage boys, then the No 1 obvious person to write that story is a grown teenage boy and the No 1 person to direct it is a grown teenage boy. Ultimately so many things come down to money, but particularly when it comes to superheroes – people really thought that only men loved action movies and only men would go see a superhero movie. And then the few movies they tried to do with women superheroes didn’t quite work out.”

Remember the misbegotten Catwoman of 2004, or 2005’s less-than-electric Elektra? Neither does anyone else, except perhaps Halle Berry and Jennifer Garner. The Hunger Games franchise and the stardom of Jennifer Lawrence helped shift things, preparing audiences for the not-so-radical idea that a young woman as fantasy-movie protagonist might be a box-office viability, not liability.

“I think the world is also demanding and shouting back that they want more variety,” Jenkins adds. The internet has, of course, amplified those shouts. “People will start making demands online – ‘There better be this and this character’ – and it’s impossible for me to think of anything in those terms, no piece of art comes together that way.” Ultimately, she says: “You just have to retreat to intention.”

Wonder Woman, aka Diana, hails from the island of Themyscira, which in Jenkins’ vision is a paradisiacal gynocracy of gym-buff Amazons galloping around lustily on horses and spinning in slo-mo through the air in elaborate combat. There is a complete absence of men on the island, but no paucity of makeup. Most of the Amazons look like Victoria’s Secret models. (One of them is: Doutzen Kroes has a cameo.) It’s brilliant, in a campy, high-budget Sapphic-fantasy sort of way. Of course, teenage Diana wants to join them in butt-kicking splendour, but she’s about to get schooled. “Fighting does not make you a hero,” intones her regal and battleworn mother, the Amazonian queen.

For Jenkins, this line has a kind of Talmudic weight. “I was like: I MEAN THAT. Becoming a hero is not what you thought because there is no villain, it’s us, and [we have] a collective responsibility to become better people and only that will save the world.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charlize Theron in Monster, 2003. Photograph: Allstar/METRODOME/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

And yet, Diana doesn’t go about brokering a first world war-style armistice by prematurely founding the UN. The genre demands that she fight lots and look cool doing it. Isn’t there a bit of hypocrisy there? “I was very cautious with her attitude,” says Jenkins, “and if you watch closely she never stabs anybody – she’s knocking guns out of hands. Even with our amazing stunt girls I would always want to have a conversation with them and say: ‘It’s never this …’” – Jenkins is on her high-heeled feet, demonstrating an aggressive, macho stance – “ … it’s always …” And she mimes precise and focused self-defence. “It’s cool-looking and everything, but it’s never hateful.”

In one scene, Diana annihilates an enemy sniper, and takes out the better part of an ancient church. After a suitably suspenseful pause, our heroine emerges, straddles the wreckage, and patiently grants the camera some adoring seconds on her immaculate face. Watching this, I was overcome with the perfection of her liquid eyeliner. I tell Jenkins as much and she laughs uproariously. Was it important to her that Diana look gorgeous at all times?

“Absolutely. As I always say, it would be more practical if Batman were built like a very small rock climber, it would be much easier to get into spaces, to do all kinds of things. Well, that’s not your fantasy. Your fantasy is he’s unreasonably big and built. Good. My fantasy is that I could wake up looking amazing, that I could be strong and stop the bully but that everybody would love me too. I think that’s intrinsic to fantasy – fantasy is fantasy.”

Sometimes the internet needs reminding of that. When the trailer aired, Gadot’s armpits became the Twitter freak-out du jour. Wouldn’t shaving be low on her priorities? asked a population seemingly unfamiliar with the concept of “fantasy”.

By contrast, the movie is excellent at ribbing the ridiculousness intrinsic in its premise. When Diana explains, matter-of-factly, that she was fashioned from clay by her mother and brought to life by Zeus, the American pilot Steve Trevor (a blue-eyed and oddly vacant Chris Pine) responds, with nonplussed understatement: “Well … that’s neat.” Later, he takes Diana shopping, keen to get her into something less conspicuous on the streets of first world war London than a miniskirt, bustier and cloak. As he finishes her utilitarian outfit off with glasses to make her “less distracting”, his secretary, played by the always appealing Lucy Davis, skewers him and an entire cinematic trope with the line. “Yeah, really, specs,” she mutters, “and suddenly she’s not the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chris Pine and Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman. Photograph: Clay Enos/AP

Does Jenkins think popular entertainment has a political responsibility? “Absolutely. One of my favourite things about this movie is that being a brave and thoughtful hero is a lesson that is wonderful to hand down. It’s not about fame and luck, it’s hard to do the right thing, and you might be alone in doing it.”

There’s an edge in her voice that makes me think she’s talking about more than just Wonder Woman. Does this relate to her own life and career?

“Absolutely. There are technical reasons [for her long hiatus from film], I had a baby, I had a movie that didn’t go, all those things are true.” What is also true, however, is that “I have passed on a lot of things that would have been extremely lucrative, because they were nothing else. Even if it’s an action movie, even if it’s a thriller, I want to bring something beautiful into the world on some level that I believe in.” That attitude, she says, has made her “unbelievably picky”.

There’s also the industry’s sexism: “It’s played a part – I’m not offered things that are authentic to me very often. I did not necessarily feel that Hollywood was interested in what I wanted to do. They wanted me to do what they wanted to do.”

The principles with which she steered this movie – peace, love, and compassion – don’t necessarily sound like those of Hollywood executives. Nor do they sound like the top priorities of comic-book diehards. “But here’s the beautiful thing that makes me want to cry: they do want that. That’s what’s blowing my mind ... The truth is, humanity craves love and heroes and I am so touched and blown away by the comic-book fans’ support in particular. It’s enough to make you cry when you see the intentions that you had reflected back at you.”

Later, I type “wonder woman + cry” into Twitter’s search bar. I scroll for a very long time without reaching the end, lost in the tweeted tears of strangers – people crying at the trailer, at the thought of the trailer, and swearing to cry with happiness through the entire movie.

Wonder Woman is released on 1 June in the UK and Australia, 2 June in the US.