James Wan has now successfully brought his vision of Aquaman to life in the upcoming Aquaman film, but it turns out he turned down another DC hero to make it happen.

Wan revealed recently that he also had his chance with the scarlet speedster Flash, which is one of the several projects in development at Warner Bros. As he reveals in a new interview, the discussions for the same started after his work on The Conjuring.

“Having made “The Conjuring,” I was part of the Warner Bros. family, and I knew they were doing their DC thing,” Wan told the New York Times. “I spoke with Kevin Tsujihara [the Warner Bros. chairman and chief executive] at a premiere and I said, “I’m interested in the properties that you have at DC.” A few months later, I was in a general meeting with DC and they floated two properties that didn’t have filmmakers on board: the Flash and Aquaman.”

The Flash would be a tempting deal for any director from quite a few perspectives. The Flash has all the potential to be a splendid film, thanks to the many uses of Speed Force. He is already one of the most popular heroes of DC, without having to climb the hills as someone like Aquaman.

“I felt the Flash had been done before,” Wan said. “It had been on TV twice at that point. The one that had not been done was Aquaman. I realized, wow, his character resides in this crazy, big world, and I could do something very interesting with it. I look up to people like Spielberg, Cameron, Lucas, John Carpenter. I’m a fan of genre filmmaking, naturally. So I thought I could make “Aquaman” a genre film, meaning a horror monster movie. DC basically said, yes, you can make Aquaman versus sea monsters if that’s what you want.”

Now, the director has put his stamp on Aquaman, but creating this wasn’t easy.

“There really aren’t a lot of visual cues from existing films to pull from,” Wan said. “That was exciting for me, because I get to create a new world. In terms of the technicality of it: It was a pain. The actors would be suited up in their costumes, and placed inside these really awkward, uncomfortable rigs. Then visual effects would come in and add the flowing hair, the floating costumes and capes, and then paint in the entire world. A simple scene of two people talking underwater would just take days and days to shoot.”

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