LOS ANGELES—When the Georgia Straight sits down with director Zack Snyder in a Beverly Hills hotel, he’s engrossed in doodling an image of R2D2. He’s partly in his own world. This is fitting, considering he’s talking about his current release, Sucker Punch, a visual extravaganza exploring the complex fantasy world of a girl (Emily Browning) trapped in an insane asylum.

After the likes of Dawn of the Dead, 300, and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, it’s his first film that isn’t an adaptation. (He cowrote it with Steve Shibuya, a long-time friend from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design.) It’s also the second feature film Snyder has shot in Vancouver. (The first was his graphic-novel adaptation, Watchmen.) He says that Vancouver crews are “basically my family” and calls the city his “second home”. He has even acclimatized himself to our Wet Coast weather—he runs with his dog in the rain in Lighthouse Park when he’s here.

The film, however, didn’t take similar advantage of our great outdoors; elaborate sets were built on local soundstages. When asked what inspired Sucker Punch’s setting of the Lennox House for the Mentally Insane in Brattleboro, Vermont, he says he was influenced by both a documentary about lobotomy doctor Walter Freeman and the original Planet of the Apes movie. “There’s that sequence,” he recalls, “where”¦Chuck Heston finds his buddy, and he’s like, ”˜They cut out his braaaain!’ and he gets all crazy ’cause he’s got a scar on his head.”

Throughout Sucker Punch, the threat of lobotomy looms over Babydoll (Browning). “That idea of, like, losing your identity, what makes you you, is worse than being killed, in some weird way,” he says. “That’s where sort of the idea of the mental institution then came from. What world can you put that in, where someone can force you to lose the spark that makes you you. That’s a scary proposition.”

Yet even at her most powerless, Snyder points out that Babydoll retains hope for herself “through a series of events that she set in motion”.

He says the girls’ sexy attire, which he is constantly asked about, is part of her struggle. “The girls are in a brothel performing for men, and when they perform in these action sequences, we, the audience, are the men in that brothel and we are putting them in those costumes and making them go do those kinds of fights. They are our brothel. The movie’s our place to go for that.”

The challenge, he explains, is over who controls those images. “The goal of it is for them to then take ownership of those exact same icons”¦and in those clothes, to sort of understand them and control them, just like the guys in the brothel do. But then”¦those exact things that in a normal movie would be, like, without consequence or just easy to understand, end up being, like, slightly dark and kind of take us to a place we didn’t expect to go to.”

Snyder’s next project continues the theme of power as he tackles an icon of strength. “I’m a dork, and Superman is as fun a project, in some ways, as I could’ve asked to do,” he says, explaining that he wants to make the Man of Steel relevant to a new generation unfamiliar with him, as with one of his own kids. “My kid’s like”¦”˜Well, I love the symbol. I’m into that S. That’s cool.’”