Screenwriter DON PAYNE talks to Tara DiLullo about the dangers of making Uma Thurman a SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND

We’ve all had bad breakups. You know the ones - where your stuff ends up in bags, ripped to pieces, or burned in the front yard. Loud screaming matches ensue and accusations are hurled back and forth – in short, misery. Well imagine that “fun” with the extra special twist that your evil ex has superpowers, so the game of love is taken to a whole new level!

Welcome to the wicked mind of writer Don Payne, who came up with the idea about what happens when a neurotic superheroine goes mental on her human boyfriend after they break up. His script is now the summer flick, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, directed by legendary comedy director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters).

A writer for The Simpsons for the last six years and the screenwriter of the Fantastic Four sequel, Payne says the idea for My Super Ex-Girlfriend actually came from another script he was developing.

“I started to think through an idea for a spec script that I want to get back to after Fantastic Four 2. It had a strong, female protagonist with this regular male lead. At one point, I thought, ‘What if she was a superhero?’ It wasn’t right for this reality-based world, but I thought it wasn’t a bad idea to have a regular guy in a relationship with a superheroine. There had been I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched and I thought what would be a twist on that? Then I thought, ‘What if you break up with that person and they don’t take it well?’ That was the hook and I dropped everything I was doing and wrote it over the course of a few months and it sold pretty quickly.”

My Super Ex-Girlfriend stars Uma Thurman as G-Girl, who ably saves citizens by day, but can’t get her dating life together at night. As her alter ego Jenny Johnson, she’s a needy mess who latches onto nice guy Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson). Despite being smitten with an unavailable co-worker (Anna Faris), Matt dates Jenny, who falls hard. She even shares her secret life as a superhero with him, but her neurotic ways make him run back to his crush, which then sends Jenny into a spiral of break-up revenge.

While writing the script, Payne says Thurman was always in his head to play Jenny. “There were a few actresses I was toying with in my mind and Uma was always at the top of my list. I was a big fan of hers from Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction.”

Love changes everything

Even though the film has a superhero backdrop, Payne says the story is really about love and relationships in general. “I keep telling people that it’s not a superhero movie, it’s a romantic comedy that happens to have a superhero in it,” he laughs. “I wanted the character to be a generic superhero with iconic powers, like speed and strength and flight. I didn’t want it to be about the uniqueness of her powers, I wanted it to be about her personality and the situation. What I tried to do most of all was keep it reality based. I tried to make all the other elements, situations, the relationships, and the characters as real world as possible with the twist. If you take away the superhero elements, the story would still work and that was my goal.”

Usually superheroes in film are the audience pleasers, but Payne says Jenny’s extreme reactions to Matt make her a far more human character and less heroic on some levels.

“There are lots of different facets to her personalities. She is super-empowered and super-strong in many ways, but she is also super-vulnerable and super-neurotic. She is a woman of extremes. Even though she behaves extremely badly and acts out in ways she shouldn’t, she has a point in some ways. [Matt] isn’t completely honest with her about his feelings. If he had been completely honest at the get-go, she may have gone a bit easier on him.

“Maybe not, she’s very emotional, but I think she is just looking for love,” he laughs. “She is desperate for it and lonely and has her own set of secrets that she’s had to live with throughout her entire life. She can’t be completely open and honest with people and when she does open up to this guy, she is making a leap in the relationship, emotionally and psychologically for her. From her perspective, he throws it back in her face, but from his perspective, he wasn’t asking for this from the beginning. There is a case to be made for her side of the story too, even though she behaves badly. But you still kind of like her, as nutty as she is, you still feel sympathy for her.”

My Super Ex-Girlfriend is Payne’s first film script to be produced and he scored yet another dream collaborator when Ivan Reitman came aboard to direct. Happily, Payne reports that Reitman worked with him closely to retain the spirit and vision of his script. “Ivan was very welcoming and it was a collaboration once he came on board to make the script into something that he was happy with and the studio, producers and I were happy with. I was by his side through the entire process and I commend him for that and I appreciate that. Even when I wasn’t on the set, he would call me and say, ‘I have an idea for something, what do you think?’ I know the process isn’t always like that.”

Fantastic Ex-citement

Along with Thurman and Wilson, British comedian and actor, Eddie Izzard also joins the fun as G-Girl’s nemesis and traditional villain of the piece, Professor Bedlam.

Thrilled with his casting, Payne reveals, “In the original spec, [Bedlam] was just a standard super villain that came in and the comedy came from a regular guy with a regular life suddenly having to deal with this super villain who he has to join up with to take care of his bigger problem. It was a strange, unlikely alliance. But Ivan had the great idea of linking the villain's back-story to the origin story of Uma’s character. Now it has this greater emotional resonance, and grounds the character even though Eddie’s character is a little broader than the rest of the characters in the film. He’s really, really funny and he came up with lines that I said, ‘Great! I’m glad I’m getting credit for that!’”

As with all good superhero movies, the name of the game is ‘franchise potential’, but Payne says he’s not looking for sequels to My Super Ex-Girlfriend. “I really had always envisioned it as a one-shot. It really isn’t a superhero franchise kind of movie. Can you franchise a romantic comedy?” he laughs. “There are different ways you could go, but I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. I would be happy if this does pretty well. I think the trailer is pretty good, but I think the movie is even better.”

This feature originally appeared in Dreamwatch issue 144.