REAL STEEL

HE MADE THE WORLD BELIEVE A MAN COULD FLY, BUT NEW DOC SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY REVEALS THE HERO BENEATH THE CAPE. TOTAL FILM MEETS THE TEAM IMMORTALISING AN ICON.

- HORDAN FARLEY

Contrary to what you might expect, Super/Man is not a documentary about Superman. Richard Donner’s 1978 classic was an effects marvel, a proof of concept for today’s superhero industrial complex and a launchpad for its statuesque, magnetic leading man Christopher Reeve. The documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story starts not with the soaring highs of that trailblazing blockbuster, which launched its nascent star into the stratosphere, but with the 1995 equestrian accident that shattered Reeve’s first and second vertebrae and left him paralysed from the neck down.

‘You start with somebody who awakes from a coma, and discovers that he can’t even move his little finger. He can’t breathe on his own. There’s no more superpowers,’ says co-director Peter Ettedgui who, alongside co-director Ian Bonhôte, previously helmed the documentaries McQueen (2018) and Rising Phoenix (2020). ‘And then you take him from the point of maximum despair where he’s actually contemplating suicide by having his life support switched off, to a point where he realises that he can harness who he was as Superman to actually do something extraordinary in the world. So it seemed to us like that was an incredibly hopeful story.’

Beloved around the world for his on-screen heroics as the indestructible Kryptonian, it’s the extraordinary real-life heroism of Reeve’s latter days – disability advocacy, activist fundraising for medical research, and finding a reason to live after personal catastrophe – that leave a lasting impression in Super/Man. Reeves spent nine years using a wheelchair following his accident until his death in 2004. It is Ettedgui and Bonhôte’s belief that if you want to know the person beneath the spandex, it’s on full display during this period.