James Gunn sure loves animals. We see this every week on social media as the DC Studios president posts photos of his pets but also in his filmmaking. It was famously the idea of bringing a raccoon to life that gave Gunn the confidence to tackle Guardians of the Galaxy for Marvel. And, with his upcoming film Superman, he found inspiration in a very similar way.

“It was just difficult to figure out where I was going to come from with Superman,” Gunn said speaking to io9 in Los Angeles last week. “And I think that it really started with my dog in a lot of ways. The idea of putting in Krypto, I think, was the fun part for me, because that was something that we hadn’t really seen in a Superman movie.”

Once Gunn had the idea to include the superpowered canine, which has existed in DC Comics for 70 years, everything clicked. “We’re always coming in [to Superman] on the spaceship crash lands, and then we see his whole family, and we’ve seen the beginning a bunch of times,” Gunn said. “But this is not that. We’ve even seen a lot of stories that are after he’s married and what that life is like. But I wanted to see him in a different piece of his life, and I also wanted to bring the joy that I felt reading DC Comics as a kid into the movie, and entering DC Comics and seeing it wasn’t only Superman and his parents and the farm and other people. It was flying dogs and kaiju and robots and monsters and magic and sorcery and all these other things. And I wanted to bring that magical world to movies.”

Which all becomes possible when you realize that Superman, in this universe and film, has a dog. Superman opens in theaters July 11 and we’ll have more soon.

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