In a year bloated with sleek superhero blockbusters, the cast and crew of profane indie comedy Super displayed heroic dedication.

“We made the movie for a couple million dollars,” Super director James Gunn says in the Wired.com video interview above, shot during last month’s Comic-Con International. “Twenty-four days. Big star cast who all did the movie for free. Or, not for free. They got paid whatever the Screen Actors Guild minimum is, which is, you know, a few bucks a day.”

The result proved polarizing, as Super’s nihilistic amateur superheroes Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page divided critics and comics devotees with extreme prejudice and violence. Appearances from cult stars like Firefly’s Nathan Fillion and Gunn favorite Kevin Bacon rounded out Super’s antiheroic geek cred, placing it alongside other comics-based indie satires like Daniel Clowes’ Art School Confidential and Ghost World.

Super “questions the difference between faith and insanity, between justice and rage,” says Gunn, who dissected the superheroic ethos on a shoestring budget. Let us know in the comments section below if you enjoyed Super’s trip to the dark side, or if you prefer your heroes a bit more shiny.