Here is just some extra tidbits about Emily’s latest film, Sucker Punch.

The set for the action-fantasy Sucker Punch sprawls through four Vancouver sound stages that together amount to an onscreen explosion of what’s in writer-director Zack Snyder’s imagination.

The director of Dawn of the Dead, 300 and the Vancouver-filmed Watchmen has returned to the city to film his first original story — after the zombie remake and the two graphic novel adaptations — and a walk through the various sets gives a clue to just how all-encompassing this genre-blending story is.

Sucker Punch is set in the 1960s, when a teenaged girl (Emily Browning) is sent to an asylum by her nasty stepfather.

Once inside, the girl bonds with several other teen patients (Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone and Jamie Chung), and she retreats into a multi-level fantasy world where she and her friends are, by turns, the star attractions in a Moulin Rouge-esque night club brothel, and sexy warriors battling robotic Germans in a stylized version of the First World War. As well, they fight dragons and knights in a medieval world, kick alien butt on a futuristic planet, and battle giant samurai in an ancient temple.

All of which means that at any time, Snyder is telling a couple of hundred artisans, technicians and stunt performers what’s in his head, from intricately carved Japanese swords to rhinestone-studded fishnet stockings, with the cast along for the wild, imaginative ride.

“You’re not just working with a director who found a script that they liked and maybe did a few storyboards a couple of months ago,” says Malone, watching this day as co-star Hudgens does a techno-belly dance musical number in the cavernous night club set.

“You’re literally working out of his imagination — it’s all in his mind, the entire film. It’s so epic in his brain that he’s just our full resource. any question you have, you can go to him.”

Which helps the cast with the film’s extensive green-screen scenes. In the Montreal-filmed 300, Snyder put Gerard Butler and cast in a totally green-screen environment with nearly every background added digitally afterwards.

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