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Time magazine just wrote that your movie is "an action adventure that's as thrilling for what it means as for what it shows." What does it mean?

Singer: It means that humanity is more complex than people realize. Even for heroes, even as black-and-white as it is to be Superman, as idealistic and noble as that is, there's still depth and complexity to it. When people say they wish they were Superman, they don't really wish they were Superman. They wish they could do the things that Superman can do. But Superman, with that responsibility and that awareness of suffering—he's not able to have the thing he wants most, and that's a semblance of normal life and Lois Lane.

Singer on set with Routh and Kevin Spacey, who plays the villain Lex Luthor

And there's something about legacies. I grew up watching The Courtship of Eddie's Father. My parents divorced when I was about 13, and I lived with my father for a year. I'm still very close with both my parents—they're terrific people—but I got very close to my father. And there's something about Superman's relationship to his father, and the notion of fathers and sons, that resonates very strongly with me in this movie. But it's hard for me to say what it means, you know? It's a movie; it means many things. Superman means many things to many people! But these are the things that resonated with me, that I enjoy.

There are a bunch of X-Men fans, but everybody loves Superman, even if they've never read the comics. If you had screwed up the X-Men movies, certainly some people would be upset. But if you screw up Superman … Well, you must be feeling the weight?

Singer: Yeah, tremendously. And I've dealt with that in two ways. One, I've had experience with some pressure and responsibility and skepticism when I made the first two X-Men films. I live with that, and I learned to balance it, and to not become too traumatically affected by it. For Superman, whenever I would get into a state of panic about the impression the character was going to make—which would be a daily state—I would just fall back on my own fan-ship for the character and say, "Look, I love this character. I love the legacy of this character. I'm just going to fall back on the parts of the character, the design, the picture, the music, and the things I love about Superman."

I'm just going to have to rely upon those things, and hope that I'm in tune with as much of the rest of the world as possible! But you know, you can't please everybody all the time.

Are you signed up for more than one Superman movie?

Singer: No, I do my films one at a time. I don't do multi-picture deals. It's so much of a job; I've been working nonstop for two solid years, so for me, I need to step back from each experience and evaluate it. But I'm interested in a second film, and I'm talking to the studio about it. We'll see.

George Reeves and Christopher Reeve photos from Supermanhomepage.com. Superman Returns photos copyright Warner Bros.

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