We really chose to focus on establishing Krypton...
...to get a better sense of where they come from...
...what they were faced with as a culture...
...and as a planet on the edge of self-destruction.
I think it was important to us to really get at the heart...
...of who the Kryptonians are.
Krypton, it's a great sci-fi element, but it also serves as the framework...
...so you really understand where Clark came from.
One of the things that we really delve into is the fact that he's an alien.
GOYER: Because we were doing, essentially, a science-fiction movie...
...and we were highlighting Superman's alien nature...
...I wanted to spend a great deal of time on Krypton.
And things like free will don't really exist on Krypton.
John Byrne, when he reinvented Superman, I think in the mid '80s...
...had suggested that Kryptonians weren't born in the womb...
...that they were raised in these matrices.
I'm not sure if he called them genesis chambers or not.
That's something we called them in our film.
We were at least following in his footsteps, his idea...
...that, in a way, Krypton was more like, you know, Brave New World...
...your Alphas and your Betas and your Gammas and things like that.
CROWE: For quite a number of years on Krypton, the way we have Krypton...
...there hasn't been anything such as natural birth.
If you are a couple and you want a child, you apply for a child...
...and you get to choose whether you want that child to be a warrior...
...or some form of doctor, or whatever it happens to be.
Those children have been pre-grown.
Then as the need comes, they are harvested and you receive your child.
So it's that fundamental system that Jor-El rebels against.
I think she is an incredibly brave woman...
...giving birth to a child and then to send her son away...
...without knowing what the outcome would be.
ZACK: The idea of these two people on a dying world...
...having to make this sacrifice where they would say:
"We're never gonna see our child grow up...
...but we've gotta put this message in a bottle because it's the only hope we have."
I was drawn into that world and wanted to make that cool.
[CRYING]
CROWE: You do get to step into this other planet.
You see the structure of that society...
...but more importantly, the geography of the planet...
...the relationship of the planet to its sun...
...the volume of the sun in comparison to the sun that we're used to...
...which I find very interesting in terms of detail.
It had existed as a civilized world for hundreds of thousands of years...
...as opposed to maybe 12,000 on Earth.
And that it was a bigger planet with much denser atmosphere...
...with more gravity than Earth, and a much harsher environment.
We even worked out Kryptonian language, which if you freeze frame various things...
...you can see this Kryptonian script.
I even went so far as to write up sayings...
...which Alex McDowell then translated into Kryptonian.
All that stuff on the columns actually says stuff.
We had this sort of massive problem with Superman...
...which is that he is from a distant planet, but he has a giant S on his chest.
So how do you resolve the fact that this S is Kryptonian?
In a way, the entire idea of the language stemmed from that problem.
And so what we started off with...
...without really the notion of developing a full language...
...was developing a series of glyphs.
So if the S or the hope symbol, the hope glyph...
...is related to the house of El, then what is the glyph for Zod...
...and what is the glyph for Faora, and what are the glyphs for the council?
FRANSON: So we wanted to come up...
...with a core number of those, the glyphs, and have layered meaning behind them...
...so this one symbol could stand for a lot of different things.
And these are sort of the ancient symbols.
But then there became a need to be able to translate things more literally into English.
So then we brought on a linguist...
...and started developing a phonetic version of writing.
From the back-story that I was told, the people are very selfish at this point in time.
And so that was something that I focused on for the language.
Also there's a long history of the objects.
The writing on objects shows that people passed them down...
...through their generations.
There's this recording of events that happened with those objects.
So they're very much into the history of their culture as well.
So it was more about incorporating that old mythology of Krypton...
...some of the sentences are about the gods of Krypton...
...so it was including that into the scenery and the idea...
...that Kryptonians have this long tradition of writing.
And so that should be reflected on the ships, the weapons...
...the chambers of council, all of those different things.
So that was how it first kind of developed.
McDOWELL: There are some basic rules for the way languages develop...
...and one of those is, what is the cultural emphasis...
...and impetus for the language?
So in English, it's about-- It's all about me, right?
So "I want an apple" is the way that the language is structured.
What we said about Krypton was that they are object-oriented.
They have fetish-- They fetishize the object.
So in this case, it's "apple want l." And so you put the object first.
So that sort of set in motion a bunch of rules for the language.
If they wanna write a sentence, for example, like, "The light of Rao warms us"...
...where you see the word "Rae," you can either write it out phonetically...
...or you can utilize the old ancient symbol...
...and they kind of connect together in this very, like, intricate sort of filigree...
...which exists on robots, sets, ships.
JARVIS: These two women, probably within three to four weeks, had it licked.
They just got on it and nothing stopped them. And they came up with...
...an alphabet, a lexicon...
...a long list of words with their appropriate meanings...
...and how the script should be used...
...and all of the ins and outs of how things get tacked together, linked together...
...and it was amazing.