Zack Snyder was interviewed by Letterboxd about his film, Sucker Punch. The 2011 fantasy action movie is about a young woman, Babydoll (EmilyBrowning), who was admitted into a mental institution. She has an outlandish imagination and dreamt of a heist to escape her imprisonment. Along the way, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung) are recruited to help with the plan.

Snyder revealed he wants to release a director’s cut: “I’ve never gotten around to doing the director’s cut. I still plan to at some point.” He continued, “Blondie, and all the people that have been killed, join in and it’s the idea that in a weird way, even though she’s lobotomized, she’s kind of stuck in this infinite loop of euphoric victory. It’s weirdly not optimistic and optimistic at the same time. That’s kind of what the tone was at the end. We tested it and the studio thought it was too weird, so we changed it.”

Sucker Punch was largely criticized for the exploitation of female characters and the review for the film was labeled as “misleading positioned as female empowerment despite clearly having been hatched as fantasy fodder for 13-year-old guys.”

Synder retorted to the criticism, “I feel like the main criticism of the film was that it was too exploitative.” He continued, “People took the movie as if the girls fighting and all that stuff was the movie. I found that slightly disheartening.” Synder ended, “It’s talking directly to them about what they wanna see. They wanna see the girls, they don’t wanna see the girls empowered. They wanna see them in sexy outfits. That was the whole thing to me; I always thought it was interesting when people would review the movie and say it’s exploitative. It’s like an anti-war movie that gets the war too good.”

Sucker Punch is celebrating its 20th anniversary by showing it at New York City’s IFC Center this weekend.