Some insidious strain of cabin fever has infected the cast and crew of Superman Returns. It’s day 81 of a planned 118-day shoot, and they’ve been spending long hours cooped up inside a windowless warehouse on the Fox Studios lot in Sydney, Australia, aboard the Gertrude, a 300-foot, four-story yacht that Lex Luthor has swindled from an aging shipping heiress.

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More precisely, they’re on the Gertrude’s belowdecks library set, which is surrounded by a sea of inky black darkness and suspended by tons of scaffolding. It’s the kind of plush salon where Charles Foster Kane would have enjoyed a highball while crossing the Atlantic. Beams of blond wood arch magnificently across its high ceiling, and the glass-paneled floor invites watery reflections to waltz delicately on the curved wall near the grand piano.

Off to the side, director Bryan Singer, 40, dressed in a torn black T-shirt and sagging jeans that reveal several inches of Calvin Klein underwear, sits Saturday-morning-cartoon-close to a stack of monitors. He is shoveling cheese and crackers into his mouth, trying to maintain his flagging energy.

The work this day has largely been dedicated to capturing that chunk of film crucial to any comic-book adaptation: the sequence where the villain, often in some sort of crowing exposition, begins to reveal his nefarious plans for world domination, which almost always include offing some hero in tights. In Superman Returns, this comes as an exchange between Luthor (Kevin Spacey) and his brassy girlfriend Kitty Kowalski (Parker Posey).

In the scene, which the crew has been shooting at different angles for hours, Kitty brings Lex a martini, which she promptly smashes in the fireplace after he cuts her down with a few deliciously dry insults.

“So now that we are in the middle of nowhere, away from prying eyes, does the oldest criminal in the world think I’m worthy of hearing his plans?” Posey says.

Singer interrupts the scene by speaking into his “god mike,” which, oddly, has a grinning devil’s face drawn on its red foam head in Sharpie pen. “The ‘oldest criminal mind,’ ” he says. “Not the ‘oldest criminal.’ ”

“I’m crashing,” Posey says, breaking character. “I was so ready to do this four hours ago.”

“I’ve worked with actors before,” Posey replies sarcastically. Singer leaves the video village and walks on set. “Go back to your chair,” she says, laughing, attempting to diffuse the mounting tension with a joke.

As Singer huddles with the actors, his hushed voice conceals his words, but his hands act out the instructions, fluttering with staccato flourishes. They run the scene again. And again. So many times that the prop master is worrying that there might not be enough martini glasses to finish what they’ve started.

The scene ends with a sort of historical precis from Luthor: “Romans built the roads. Persians built the ships. Americans built the atom bombs.” He makes an allusion to Prometheus and cryptically promises to bring “fire to the people.” He closes by saying that “the gods are selfish beings who fly around in little red capes and don’t share their power with mankind.”

Now it’s time for Spacey, who won an Oscar working with Singer on 1995’s The Usual Suspects, to become frustrated. Shaved head shimmering with perspiration, he’s clearly reveling in his evil genius speechifying, but he can’t quite find his rhythm with the lines.

“It’s okay,” Singer says reassuringly into the mike. “We’ll get through this.” However, by the time Spacey gets so irritated that he nearly puts a jackboot through the bookcase, even the unflappable director has to wonder if they’re going to survive their time on this ship.

Under the best of circumstances, returning Superman, the most beloved comic-book character of all time, to the silver screen after a 19-year absence would be enough to make any director—even a veteran of the genre like Singer (X-Men and X2)—sweat bullets. Add in a $250 million budget, the fact that the red cape is being worn by an untested actor (newcomer Brandon Routh, with Blue Crush’s Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane), and the franchise’s massive cinematic baggage, and you get an idea of the tremendous weight Singer is carrying on his slight shoulders.

This production, which is using every soundstage on the lot, dwarfs what the director did on the X-Men movies. “Twice the amount of visual effects, five times the amount of sets,” he says, his overactive brain humming almost audibly. Those sets include a vision for Metropolis that isn’t simply Manhattan (scenes in the Christopher Reeve–era movies that had Superman flying over the Statue of Liberty confused Singer when he was young). Guy Hendrix Dyas, Singer’s production designer, studied the 1930s comics, traced over a map of Manhattan, and “started to chop and change it,” he says. The result, created both physically and digitally, is a sprawling art deco city that feels simultaneously dated and futuristic. There is also a mysterious stage, described by Dyas as an “enormous, strange, growing island,” that calls to mind the Fortress of Solitude—except that its crystals are a gray, carbonlike material—and that may give a glimpse into Luthor’s nasty plans for Superman. “I think it’s one of the biggest movies Warner Bros. has ever made,” Singer says. He waits a beat and adds almost apologetically, “I hate saying that.”