After months of comments by actors criticizing the on-set behavior of director Joss Whedon, the Justice League helmer has called out the behavior of the cast of the beleaguered superhero movie as well as deflecting many of the accusations made against his working style. In a new interview with NY Magazine (via Twitter user Jumbled Beats), almost five years after the movie arrived in cinemas to a lukewarm response and never-ending fallout, Whedon has spoken out about the allegations made in relation to his “toxic behavior” on the set of the movie, as well as dismissing Gal Gadot’s statement that he threatened to “kill her career” while describing the experience has never having worked with “a ruder group of people.”

In the last week, Ben Affleck has become the latest Justice League star to call out the original 2017 movie as the worst experience he has ever had on set. This has lined up with previous comments by Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher and others who called out Whedon as being bullying and “toxic” to work with. While original Justice League director Zack Snyder had to step away halfway into the project, Warner Bros. decision to bring in Avengers director Whedon turned out to be a terrible decision and saw the end result almost kill off the DCEU thanks to many hostile critic and audience reviews.

Now, Whedon has spoken about the making of the movie for the first time since the numerous accusations were made against him and his working practices, something that became much more far-reaching when cast members of other older Whedon projects such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer corroborated stories about how hard it was working with the director. In the interview, as well as criticizing the cast, Whedon also bemoaned the Zack Snyder fans who, he said, turned the internet against him in order to get the original version of Justice League released.

“I don’t threaten people, who does that?” Whedon said in relation to Gadot’s claims, suggesting it was all a misunderstanding due to a language barrier. “English is not her first language, and I tend to be annoyingly flowery in my speech.” Whedon then said that he had jokingly made a comment to the actress that if she wanted to take a specific scene out of the movie she would have to “tie him to a railway track and do it over his dead body”, which he said was later reported as him saying something about it being her dead body. Gadot was contacted by New York, and in an email disagreed with Whedon’s recollection, stating, “I understood perfectly.”

Joss Whedon Struggled To Take Over From Zack Snyder On Justice League

One of the biggest issues seemed to come from Zack Snyder having allowed the cast a lot of room to ad-lib on the film’s scripted content. Once Whedon took over, he struggled to follow the Man of Steel director due to a stark difference in working style. He expected all dialogue to be written exactly as he had prepared it, which led to some actors allegedly criticizing his writing and Whedon pausing the shoot and, according to a crew member, calling the cast “the rudest group of people” he had worked with.

Whedon was also eager to dismiss the claims by Ray Fisher that he was singled out by Whedon for his color, and that was why the director cut a lot of his scenes. Whedon claimed that when it came to the comments made by the actor, they were not “true or merited discussing” and the only way he could explain the actor’s motives for saying what he did was, “We’re talking about a malevolent force. We’re talking about a bad actor in both senses.”

With numerous cast claims against him, and a letter by his ex-wife detailing what he described in the interview as “bad things I’d done and some untrue things about me,” the internet was a bad place for Whedon to visit as more and more people turned on him. In closing on the subject, Whedon mused on the how the internet had played a big part in his success, but also his downfall. He said, “The beginning of the internet raised me up, and the modern internet pulled me down. The perfect symmetry is not lost on me.” He subsequently added, “Could I have been a better showrunner? Absolutely. Should I have been nicer? [People used] every weaponizable word of the modern era to make it seem like I was an abusive monster. I think I’m one of the nicer showrunners that’s ever been.”