I was very much taken by Tim's approach, which was that Kal-El was not told by Jor-El, before he got put in the little spaceship, who he was or where he came from,” Gilroy tells Indiewire. “So poor little Kal-El, when he winds up on earth, he has no freaking idea where he came from. His biggest fear is that he's an alien. Our Superman was in therapy at the beginning of the film. He's in a relationship with Lois Lane and he can't commit. Or he was maybe in couple's therapy. But he can't commit because he doesn't know who he is or what is going on with him. He's hoping that he has some physiological condition that gives him these powers but that he's still human.”

Gilroy states that in his script draft, Clark Kent doesn’t realize he’s an alien until Lex Luthor finds remnants of the spacecraft that took him to Earth.

“It was all about the psychological trauma of it,” added Gilroy. “I loved it.”