Suicide Squad Press Conference Live

The cast and crew of Suicide Squad came to New York City on Sunday to promote their film ahead of the premiere Monday night. Sitting in a warehouse in front of a group of reporters, their conversation was guided by Tiffany Smith of DC All Access.

Smith started by asking about how to respond to the hype around the movie. "I think Jared should go first since he had the hardest job of the whole movie," Will Smith said.

"It's kinda like giving birth out of your prickhole," Leto joked. "For me it was the role of a lifetime. I had so much fun playing the Joker, I think I could play the Joker a few more times, then retire.

"It was almost more like therapy than character creation," Will said of Ayer's approach to developing their roles. "And then he'd completely betrays us, betray our trust," Joel Kinneman added.

"When you're with your best friend, you share secrets, you talk about your inner life. The fastest way to get them there was to have them beat the hell out of eachother then share their secrets," Ayer said. "That's also how you start cults," Leto said.

"David would train with us, beat us up," Adam Beach said. "There was one time he was sparring with Karen Fukuhara and she got a fist right in the nose." "She had her guard open," Ayer said to laughs.

Were there any mild injuries on the set?

"When you're 47, no injuries are mild," Will said. "I tore my calf a couple weeks in. And what's funny is you do it doing nothing. I threw a punch and took a step back, and my calf popped. The doctor said I was gonna be out six weeks. It was really scary to be in that position, I was like, oh my God, Suicide Squad, this opportunity..." Will "soldiered on" Ayer said, and then the same day Kinneman had almost the exact same injury!

Margot Robbie thought she had broken a rib at one point, but it was just a bad bruise. "The hardest part wasn't the physical side, actually. The emotional stuff was definitely more difficult. Exposing my most vulnerable sides in front of a room full of strangers at that point was incredibly hard. Trying to figure out why Harley was so devoted to Joker, that was hard. The physical stuff was fun."

Bringing humanity and humor into it was important.

"David was really great because from the beginning it was clear he wanted to do something different, something special, and make something we'd all be really proud of," Leto said. "I could tell he was willing to go to all lengths to get that. That was both scary and also exciting. I was surprised by the freedom he gave everybody to go completely fucking crazy. What I thought was genius about David was that he was always looking for the accident, for the mistake, and embracing that. For Margot and I, there was a lot of humor in a really sick and twisted way, but he was amazing at finding that. Thank you, David."

"These are villains with souls, and that's indicative of his vision," said Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. "There's a moment when Croc says, 'I'm beautiful,' to have that kind of crocodilian black man make that statement was amazing."

Will Smith asked Adewale, "did you eat any of your assistants? Because that one guy Michael just kind of disappeared."

Adam Beach said that Jai Courtney was "the guy who really brought the crazy."

"I've done love scenes in quite a few movies," Will Smith said. "But I've never seen a costar naked more than Jai. He had a really hard time keeping his clothes on."

"I remember seeing on the set a photograph of a naked man running after David Ayer, who had a look of abject terror on his face," Leto said. "And he had perfect form, I think that was a naked Jai."

"There's not much more to [that story]," Courtney said. "David would come to our base camp where all the trailers were. One time, I was getting out of the shower, and he came in and said, 'what's up dude?' So I took the opportunity, dropped the towel, and went after him. I never caught him!"

"Can we create a charity drive or something to release this photo?" Leto asked.

Robbie did a lot of research, but to fill in the gaps in the backstory she "watched a couple of TED talks on schizophrenia. That really helped, because the women doing the talks were so intelligent, and Harley needed to be intelligent but also psychotic. I also got recommended to read a play called 'Fool for Love' that really helped me unlock her feelings for the Joker."

Viola Davis got a book from Joel called "Confessions of a Sociopath." "One of the things I found out is that a lot of CEOs of companies are sociopaths. I also had to tap into Viola at 8, I couldn't think as Viola at 51. But Viola at 8 could beat some peoples' ass. I remember telling David that when I sat down with him the first time. I am shy, always apologizing, retreating. But Amanda Waller is unapologetically brutal. I could not retreat with this group."

"Pretty much every day that Viola and I had together on set, David would call on her to stand behind the camera and yell mean things at me," Joel said. "She's stand there going Joel! Flag! You little bitch! You punk-ass bitch!"

"I wanted women to have voices in this movie," Ayer said. "I wanted them to have power, and have voices in this world."

Fukuhara said that growing up in a Japanese-American first generation household, she grew up on Japanese culture. "When I first read the Katana comics, I immediately fell in love, and felt like a part of her lived inside me. When I put on the mask and the costume, that turned me into the character."

Cara Delevigne did a lot of research on addiction. "Never having enough, always needing more of something. I also tried to find the demon inside myself, and try to make that as real as possible. Just trying to make it real. That's what David wanted for this movie."

Beach praised the physicality of both Delevigne and Fukuhara on the set. "I didn't really have to do any fighting until the reshoots," Delevigne said. "But I had a lot of fun learning the martial arts."

Was Ayer thinking about the diverse cast from the beginning?

"For me, I grew up in South LA, I grew up in a diverse neighborhood where I was the only white boy," Ayer said. "It's the world I grew up in, but it's also the world we all live in. For kids, it's important to see faces like theirs on screen. It's also a global business now. It comes naturally to me, and to me, diversity is strength. We really need to work on that on screen and in the world in general."

Producer Richard Suckle said this movie was a "producer's dream" and he "couldn't ask for a better job," eliciting "awwws" from the cast. Producer Chuck Roven agreed, praising Ayer's script and the actors' performances. "It was a producer's dream - except for when it was trying to get them to be serious sometimes," he said to laughs.

"The trick is to never show fear," Ayer said. "They are many, I am one. The other thing is to always have an answer, even if you're just making it up." Will Smith called him out on those sometimes, though.

That's it for the press conference. The movie hits August 5, 2016.