ALAN BURNETT:
I've been keeping up with the comics, so I didn't have all that much research to do. There has been a lot written on Green Lantern. I actually think he's very complicated. Hal Jordan has gone through changes in the comic books in the last 35 years or so that are just shocking. But I didn't have to deal with his recent history because I was going back to a story from his beginning. However, I am dealing with Green Lantern characters who didn't exist when I started reading the book, so there was a little bit of research on that. I've written Green Lantern in the comic books on a few occasions, so I had some notion of most of the characters I was dealing with in this film.

QUESTION;
What makes Green Lantern a great super hero?

ALAN BURNETT:
Green Lantern is sort of a unique super hero. When you're writing his powers, they do seem a bit odd -- at times, they're very sci-fi and at other times very magical. It's like that old saying about the technology being so advanced that it looks like magic. He has a ring that allows him to construct anything he can imagine. One of the tricks to writing about those powers is that, when you come up with something he does with the ring, the audience is expecting to be amazed, but also -- and this is odd to say about a comics/science fiction story -- they need it to be in context, and it needs to be believable.

Hal is also a very colorful character and he's in the middle of this big soap opera in space. It's a very involving backdrop that opens the door to telling a million stories with him. He also has one of the great costumes -- that great Silver Age suit from the 1950s. He was one of the few, and maybe he was the first flying character, who didn't have a cape. So he has this sleek outfit and it's very striking.

QUESTION:
What makes Sinestro a great villain?

ALAN BURNETT:
We play Sinestro as sort of the bad half of Hal Jordan. As I was writing them, I figured they were pretty close. They both have distaste for authority. But Sinestro is the dark side of the Green Lanterns -- he wants absolute control, while Hal Jordan is more about serving the people. The other thing about Sinestro is that he doesn't think of himself as a villain. He has a plan which he thinks is going to benefit everyone, but unfortunately what this plan does is give him absolute power. And, of course, absolute power corrupts absolutely -- and you can see that it's corrupting him even as he tries to wield it.


QUESTION:
When did you first fall in love with comic books?

ALAN BURNETT:
I had read comic books like LITTLE LULU when I was young, but when I was nine years old we took a vacation -- and I always saved up comic books for the vacation because it was a long trip from Ohio to Florida. Into my stack that year I got the super hero comics and I particularly remember bringing Batman. Somewhere around Kentucky, I started reading my first super hero comic and it was like I lost my virginity. It was just the most amazing thing. I was suddenly in an adult world that I sort of understood and it was sort of made for me. And I was hooked. I've been hooked ever since.

QUESTION:
As you exited Kentucky during that eye-opening trip, did you ever imagine you'd be writing those comics and cartoons as an adult?

ALAN BURNETT:
When I was a kid reading this stuff, I never thought that I'd be writing it. But you know, it's because I did read this stuff then that I write it now. When I started working at Hanna Barbara in 1981, they were looking for someone to take over the SUPER FRIENDS show and they knew that I was a big comic book fan. Before that, I don't think the story editors or the writers cared about super heroes. So I have two degrees from college, and they don't mean as much to my career as those four or five really intense comic book reading years between the ages of 9 and 14.

QUESTION:
Who are your greatest writing influences?

ALAN BURNETT: