Yes. That’s why it always going to be Zod. It’s a science fiction movie, and we wanted a threat to be of a nature that’s significant enough to be world threatening, but was also a threat not just about space ships. Zod represents a link back to Jor-El. Zod knew Jor-El, was friends with Jor-El.

Obviously most of the audience know that he won’t side with Zod, but in our mind, there was an opportunity that he would. Where he’d say okay, let’s do it. Maybe if Jonathan [Kent] hadn’t been a good or adept father, he would have made a different choice.

Zod’s more morally duplicitous in this, and that’s not an obvious choice. You had Jor-El and Zod side by side here, and you put in enough so that you could always see where Zod was coming from.

To me, that was interesting. I refer to Zod not as a villain, but as antagonist. His goals happen to be conflict with Kal’s. But if you look at it from Zod’s perspective, is he doing anything wrong? Look at what happened with the European settlers in America or Australia. They displaced and ultimately kind of committed genocide on the indigenous populations. And those who were against other human beings.

If we were an alien race, and we went to another planet where the option was our race dies out, or we supplant this indigenous, arguably inferior race, I think we would probably say sorry guys, we’re going to take over.