How David Ayer Chose The Characters For Suicide Squad

When you're launching a superhero franchise, especially an ensemble film with a whole team's worth of characters, most of whom are being introduced to a wider audience for the very first time, there's a certain extra bit of pressure. Not only do you have to choose the right actors, first you have to choose the right characters. When sitting down with Comicbook.com and other press at a Suicide Squad set visit, director David Ayer opened up a bit about that process, pulling from classic John Ostrander Suicide Squad comics, newer DC stories like New Suicide Squad, and even pulling in new characters that haven't been traditionally associated with Task Force X.

"You almost have to go back to the beginnings and look at Kane's Batman and look at the origins of Superman, and work your way through the canon and how it's evolved as society has changed," Ayer told the assembled reporters. The director, who was involved in development of the story from the very start. "For me it was going into the original suicide Squad which is very interesting because it's a product of kind of a bi-polar world. These guys were fighting the Russians. It was very 80's, you know, and I'm a child of the 80's. I totally understood where they're coming from. You can really see how, in today's world, where the government sometimes engages in murky activities to solve problems and make us safe. Where you could sort of see something like this happening and how would it happen today?"

From there, for Ayer, "It's like building a family, you just look for who is going to be complementary to each other. This is kind of a new venture and it's a lot of characters to introduce. You're looking for that team and that family with interlocking skills that will complement everybody else's."

Looking at the team individually, Ayer said a couple were easy, like Deadshot, "a core element of that team," and Harley, who he actually thought of ahead of Joker.

"I got attracted to Harley through the New 52 version," Ayer revealed, "then you get absorbed into her stand-alone things, then you get into her origins, and then her relationship with Joker is so defining it seemed like, it's salt and pepper. They go together like knife and fork."

Next up for Ayer was Boomerang, who he describes as "the most villainous of all of these characters." He and actor Jai Courtney have created an "absolutely kinetic out-of-control force of nature" in that character. "He's evil-chaotic."

Ayer had no problem finding plenty of characters to choose from in the annals of Suicide Squad history.

"It's crazy how many characters there are. They keep killing them all!" Ayer said with a laugh. "That's the beauty of this [film] too, is no one is safe. No matter who is in the movie, they're not safe. Anything can happen."

Suicide Squad hits theaters August 5, 2016.