Director Bryan Singer on how Stauffenberg compares with the superheroes he's dealt with before

Valkyrie is your first film since Superman Returns in 2006. What drew you to this World War II drama coming off a superhero film?
Well, I'd just done three big comic-book films back to back (X:Men, X2, Superman Returns), so I thought I'd do a small character piece with my old friend Chris McQuarrie who I'd made The Usual Suspects with, and that was what the original thought was going to be. With Tom Cruise joining the cast, and the evolution of the movie, it became a much bigger movie. So we always joke about it... I think it was always destined to be a big suspense thriller but at the time I thought, "Oh, I'll do a little movie in between the big ones."

Were you familiar with Stauffenberg's story before you entered this film?
Yes. My mother is an environmental activist, and back in the early eighties, she was doing an investigation of the European environmental situation based in Bonn, and she was hosted by the family of a guy named Helmut van Moltke who was part of the intellectual wing of the conspiracy.
So when my mom returned home, when I was a kid, she told me of this plot to kill Hitler the bomb and the briefcase but that was it. But I was very intrigued as a kid that Germans had tried to kill Hitler. And that memory stayed with me, but that was all I knew of it until now, until getting into this movie.