Affleck, 43, Cavill, 32, and Snyder, 50, recently answered questions about the high stakes behind one of the year’s most highly anticipated comic-book epics.

There’s been an incredible amount of scrutiny of this film. From the start, fans have been picking apart every nugget of news, every trailer, every rumour. What does it feel like to be on the other side of that? Is it possible to tune it out?

Snyder: The tweets, comments, articles, blogs – it’s insanity. I tune it out to the extent that, when it’s really dumb, then we go, “OK, someone stomp this [rumour] because it’s stupid.” But mostly I just go, “Thank God they’re talking about the movie.” The fact that they care enough to get online and either rage or praise – that’s just cool for the culture, for the fans.

Affleck: Nobody tweeted about Casablanca, and look at how they did. [Laughs] From directing movies myself, at this point I always feel too enmeshed with it, where I get this panicked sense of like, “Is it good? It’s horrible, right? It’s going to bomb.” But I have a little more sense of remove from this. I feel relaxed and I’m proud of the movie and excited for people to see it. It’s a much nicer feeling. I’m so glad I’m not Zack.

How did the idea of putting Batman and Superman together in one film first come up?

Snyder: It was born from a conversation about what to do with Superman [after Man of Steel], what to face Superman off against next. I was also really interested in expanding the comic book universe. I think Chris [Nolan] did an amazing job with those three Batman films, but to me those worlds are very self-contained. If Green Lantern came into the Dark Knight movies, you’d be like, “That’s weird.”

I really wanted the Man of Steel world to be a world where other DC characters could exist. So I was talking to Chris and I said, almost off the cuff, “What if Batman was the bad guy?” And once you say that, you can’t take it back. I mean, who’s a better guy to fight than Batman?

Cavill: What I love about the fact that we’ve introduced these two really important characters as well [Batman and Wonder Woman], with these two fantastic actors playing them, is that we get to finally expand upon this incredibly rich DC universe. I think it would be a waste just to have one hero from this DC universe and focus on him when there’s so much opportunity to tell really good stories using everyone.

The obvious question you face right away is, how do these two battle? Batman has amazing fighting skills and weapons, but Superman is basically indestructible and could just throw him out to Saturn if he wanted to.

Cavill: [Deadpan] I should have thought of that at the time.

Affleck: It’s a credit to what a good guy Superman is. Put it this way: it takes an hour of storytelling to make it plausible. You don’t just ring the bell at the beginning and they go out and start fighting like Alien vs. Predator. [To Cavill]

Snyder: It’s cool to have the set-up where it’s like, “This guy is a man. This guy is a god.” They do fight, and the fight is compelling. That’s the fun – that you have these two titans of that universe, and we got to use that playground to set them at each other. And the mythology is so rich, you can mine it all day and it allows all the subtlety and the nuances and the motivation for the conflict.

Ben, you’ve said you were initially reluctant about playing Batman. You once said starring in Daredevil “inoculated” you from ever playing another superhero.

Affleck: I just thought it wasn’t a good fit. But I went in and met with Zack and saw this kind of visual 360 of posters and drawings and action figures and animatics – and I was totally blown away. All of a sudden I saw something I’d never seen before and hadn’t even imagined.

This genre is the biggest forum for telling stories in the world right now. You get the biggest megaphone. But this movie is using the genre to explore really interesting themes. And just for me personally – you mentioned Daredevil – I thought, “I want to be in one of these movies that works.”

There have been several actors who’ve played Batman over the years. How did you set about making him your own?

Affleck: You’re right, he’s been played by a number of great actors – obviously most recently by Christian [Bale], who’s an amazing actor and was directed by Chris Nolan, who’s a genius. You don’t want to just try to do that because you’re not going to live up to it. So the idea is to do something different but that also exists within the canonical realm of what is still considered Batman.

Henry, this movie also brings some new darker dimensions to Superman, whom we often think of as just the simple embodiment of pure goodness.

Cavill: Right, certainly in some previous live-action adaptations of Superman he’s been – I don’t know if “simplified” is the right word but something around there. But there is a complexity to Superman that is very prevalent in the comic books. It’s just a matter of bringing it out, which is tricky to do.

Snyder: Because we’ve had the experience of the Dark Knight movies, we’re generally open to a complex Batman. But I think – I hope – Man of Steel started the conversation about what a more complicated Superman would be. He loves just as hard and has as much at stake in relationships as anyone, and you don’t know where he’s going to go when you put pressure on him and threaten his loved ones.

Ben, when it was announced you were playing Batman, the internet went nuts – and not in the most favourable way. Were you prepared at all for that reaction?

Affleck: Yeah, I wasn’t totally up to speed with the extent to which the internet can react to this stuff, and Warner was like, “Look, we just want to give you a little heads-up.” And they kind of briefed me on the reactions to some past casting choices: negative reactions to Heath [Ledger] being cast as Joker and other past stuff I wasn’t even aware of. In my experience, the truth is, if your work is good, people are going to like it. If it’s bad, people won’t. The rest of it is just speculation. It’s like when a team drafts a player: fans can speculate, but you’ve got to wait until the season starts to see how they play.

Deadpool recently proved to be a giant hit. What does it say to you about where we are in the evolution of the superhero genre that this R-rated, irreverent comic-book movie resonated so much with audiences?

Snyder: It’s interesting. When I had my initial meeting with Chris Nolan about doing Man of Steel, he said to me, “Watchmen is a movie you made too early.” Because that movie was written deep into comic-book culture, as a way of exploring the why of heroes within pop culture. Deadpool shows that audiences have now gotten to the point where they can understand the satire of the genre. Before that, audiences were like, “I’m not ready for that. I’m not there yet.”

Los Angeles Times