PARKER: Hutch Parker, producer.
KINBERG: I'm Simon Kinberg,
I was a producer, too, but writer-director.
PARKER: Heh.
KINBERG: I think this will be the last time
we see this in front of an X-Men movie.
PARKER: Which is sad to say, I think you're right.
KINBERG: That X, traditionally, was done differently when Bryan did it
and we wanted to add a little fire to it
because of, obviously, the Phoenix cosmic flame.
For Hutch and I, this is our what, third, fourth movie together?
We did Days of Future Past, Apocalypse, you were really primarily on Logan.
- So, fourth movie. - PARKER: Yeah.
KINBERG: And then obviously, we worked together
when Hutch was head of the studio
and I was a lowly writer just trying to get a job in Hollywood.
PARKER: Hardly.
JEAN GREY: Who are we?
Are we simply what others want us to be?
Are we destined to a fate beyond our control?
Or can we evolve?
Become... something more?
KINBERG: We went back and forth a lot in that opening narration.
Obviously, traditionally, that's Charles Xavier's narration
but because we wanted this movie to feel different
and be more Jean's story primarily,
that was a late breaking decision that we wrote in post
with our extraordinary editor, Lee Smith.
When you are old enough to drive,
you can listen to whatever music you want.
That a deal?
PARKER: This was a pretty exciting piece to shoot,
made up of a lot of different little pieces.
Obviously, the exterior stuff but then also a really unique rig
that our special-effects head of department designed
to create the sensation of the roll.
KINBERG: And one of the things we wanted to do with the movie,
I mean, generally, presuming you watched the movie before
because this would be a horrible way
to watch it for the first time, listening to us,
is that, the tone is different than the other X-Men movies.
They're little bit more operatic and over the top
and we wanted this to feel as realistic and grounded
and gritty and raw as possible.
And so, as part of that,
we wanted the special-effects to be as in-camera as practical.
When Hutch said special-effects,
I think something that a lot of people don't know
and a fair amount of people do know,
but if you're not intimate with the process of making movies,
people think special-effects means "computer-generated effects"
and they're two completely different categories.
There's the special-effects, which are the practical mechanical effects on set,
and then there's the visual effects, which is what's generated in the computer.
And so, we try to do as much special-effects,
practical and mechanical effects,
rigs, like Hutch was just describing, as possible
so that you would feel the physics of it,
you'd feel the visceral impact of it,
and the actors would be interacting with something real.
As opposed to something in a computer
where they're just having to communicate with a green ball.
PARKER: And there are a lot of visual effects
that augment that sequence and help it.
But Simon's right,
it's grounded in actually doing that, on some level, practically.
♪♪
KINBERG: This is a scene that we had...
Our line producer, Todd Hallowell,
and our Executive Producer and AD, Josh McLaglen,
they're off camera.
They were the other doctors in the scene but their performances were just so good
that we thought their voices would be powerful enough
we wouldn't have to see their faces.
I'm joking. They'll be upset by that.
This is an example, to me,
that first shot of one of the ways that Lee Smith, our editor,
who was really... I would say,
Hutch was my primary creative partner in making this movie,
and I would say the second partner was really Lee Smith
and he just did a lot of things that were unexpected
as somebody who won an Oscar for Dunkirk.
He works with... on all of Chris Nolan's movies.
He works with Peter Weir a lot. He's worked with Sam Mendes.
Really, the most extraordinary directors alive.
And he just makes surprising decisions and choices.
And the beginning of this scene,
as opposed to going right into the coverage of close-ups of their faces
as you're looking at now,
he started this scene in that high wide shot from the corner
looking down on them at these two small, sort of isolated from one another, figures
and I think another editor would've very quickly used it as the master shot,
the establishing shot and moved into the coverage.
And instead, he held on that for the first two or three lines of dialogue
and showed you how far away they are,
made you feel like there was a sort of loneliness and emptiness to the scene.
And he just is someone who edits with a very artistic, soulful approach.
PARKER: He sure does.
Amazing, or...
Or just... just really cool.
And a unique location,
this is actually in Montreal, in an abandoned hospital
that we were able to use for a variety of things.
But incredibly well designed for, obviously, this particular scene,
but came in handy for a bunch of other stuff, too,
because it was very near where we were shooting at the studio, etc.
KINBERG: And this is our third X-Men movie in a row shooting in Montreal.
We shot Days of Future Past, Apocalypse and this film in Montreal,
which has been a great home for us.
They have a really great studio there, Mel's studio that we basically take over
and so we've got lots and lots of space to build things.
And then the occasional like this, as Hutch was saying,
the occasional location off the stage,
whether it's an abandoned building or it's the exterior of somewhere or this,
which is in the countryside outside of, just outside of Montreal.
PARKER: Great crews there, too.
We really, we had quite a family over the three movies
and they are fairly long shoots, so you're there for a while.
Amazing city, but just a crew that we fell in love with.
I can help.
You're not like the other doctors.
(chuckles)
No.
And you're not like the other patients.
♪♪
KINBERG: This is an interesting shot,
because I feel like it's one of those visual effects shots
that are sort of invisible in the movie.
I think the presumption is that that is actually a location,
a mansion or house.
That is a completely computer-generated house.
We've done that in in the last few of the X-Men movies.
And if you actually watch X-Men 1, 2, 3,
First Class, onward,
I think it's a different mansion in all, but X2 and 3.
So, X1 was in Toronto. X2 and 3 was in Vancouver.
First Class was in London.
And then we went to, in Days of Future Past,
doing a visual effect amalgam of the different mansions
and this is yet a different version of an Xavier mansion.
Right there, we built that doorway,
but everything around the doorway, all the stonework and all of that is,
is computer-generated.
PARKER: It's actually in an abandoned golf course out in the suburbs of Montreal
and became home to us for any of those entrance shots at the mansion
and any of the exterior mansion materials all shot there.
KINBERG: And this is another thing
that we wanted to differentiate from previous X-Men movies
that have these incredibly elaborate,
very visual effects CG-heavy title sequences.
I just wanted the title sequence to feel like you were in more of a drama
than you were in a science fiction, mega-tentpole.
Just keep it grounded, keep it feeling real,
push you forward in the story and not get bogged down
in, you know, a three-minute sort of razzle-dazzle sequence.
(beeping, ringing)
PARKER: This was a lot of fun. We actually have members of the crew,
including one of our assistant directors...
- KINBERG: Right there. - In the shot.
- Right there. - In this scene.
KINBERG: Special talent.
Another AD right there, the blonde guy who was just adjusting his headpiece.
There's also really good local talent
in terms of acting in Canada, in general, and Montreal.
The woman who plays the flight director at NASA was a Canadian actress
and there's a few other great Canadian actors.
PARKER: Yet another mansion set.
Every movie we've ever made has had the interior mansion set.
When we actually, on the last one, Apocalypse,
held the set, or key elements of it that we could reuse later,
just knowing we'd probably come back.
...are irregular,
- likely from the constant engine burn. - (phone ringing)
Oxygen generation is down...
Yes? Yes, this is he.
- Charles? - Mr. President.
KINBERG: You know, one of the things we did,
going just from a narrative perspective, obviously,
going back to Days of Future Past, is we reset the timeline.
And so, even though it's 1992 when this movie takes place,
you don't need Bill Clinton to be the president.
It's a different reality than the one we all know from history.
♪♪
MYSTIQUE: It's a simple extraction.
We go into space,
we get the astronauts, we bring them home.
- Any questions? - Yeah, like a thousand.
We don't have time for a thousand.
So we're going to space?
Yes, Kurt, we are...
KINBERG: And one of the things that was exciting to all of us
going into making this movie, is that in the beginning of the film,
for the first time in any of the X-Men movies,
they are known public superheroes.
And so, they resemble more
the superheroes we know of other comic book adaptations.
And a lot of what we've seen from the comics.
They're not a hidden group anymore.
They are an accepted and embraced part of society when this movie starts.
And I wanted to also use, a lot of different influences,
but obviously, if you know the comics, the Grant Morrison run,
the classic yellow and blue/purple suits
we'd never really done in the movies before.
And just thought this was an opportunity.
And this was a nod to X1,
which is something I thought Bryan Singer did incredibly well.
And the idea of the basketball court that opens up for the jet.
PARKER: Another thing that's been fun on these
is each film has had its own version of the X-jet.
Simon did a pretty incredible job, I thought,
with our production designer,
kind of evolving that into something that felt a little bit more
like it had been in the field, in use,
but still capable of some of the galactic stuff
that we would experience going up into space.
KINBERG: Yeah, I mean, traditionally, in the comic obviously,
it's based on the Blackbird, a real fighter jet.
And we explored that a little bit in First Class.
And so, I wanted us to create something that was part Blackbird, part X-Jet
and something also we haven't seen in the films before.
And so, Claude Paré, our production designer,
had a lot of fun working on that with us.
PARKER: Another design element obviously we feature every time
is both Cerebro and Charles' chair,
which is always the subject of a lot of thoughtful design work
and Simon, again, I think found a really nice balance
that pays tribute to what's come before
but also allowed us to go a little bit further,
both in Cerebro and in the design of the chair.
...shorted out their electricity.
KINBERG: And even the helmet.
I mean, one of the things that we looked at was period aesthetic
and if you actually look at the helmet and a little bit at the chair,
there's a sort of Apple computer look to it.
The lighting and some of the plastic translucency to it.
♪♪
I think this is not as much fun as I thought it would be.
KINBERG: This is, obviously, all visual effects.
PARKER: And this was a sequence that Simon had pre-vis'd in prep
and it pretty much is, I mean, other than being a little bit shorter,
it pretty much is exactly what we planned.
It evolved a little bit in terms of some of the visual effects design
but it's a sequence that was the first one that he took from the page
and put into a visual language, and then in shooting it,
it really did stay true to the original design.
KINBERG: Well, it's two things really that I wanted to accomplish here.
One is, as a fan of the X-Men comics
and obviously as someone who's worked on a lot of the X-Men movies
I felt as though we haven't had a lot of the X-Men working together as a team.
And there's a few places, opportunities we have that in this movie
even if they're fighting against one another,
they're still set into two teams.
In this case, they're one.
And I just love the idea of seeing them,
what fans have always, I think, enjoyed the most in the comic,
other than the nuanced character work, is the teamwork.
And so, this is them really working as a well-oiled machine
and as a team that's obviously, done a lot of these missions before.
And I guess the other part of it is, in the X-Men comic
and specifically the Dark Phoenix saga,
it was really important to me to be as loyal as possible
to the essence of the Dark Phoenix saga because, as many know,
the Dark Phoenix story was a subplot or a B-plot of X-Men: The Last Stand.
I wanted this to really be the primary driver and plot of the film.
And in the Dark Phoenix story,
it's not something that just magically happens to her on Earth.
She gets zapped in space by a Cosmic Force
and this is where that happens.
And so, from the very beginning of working on this script
and conceiving the movie, I knew... if I knew anything,
I knew that some of it was going to take place in space
because there'd be this cosmic intergalactic element,
and an alien element to it as well.
So, this sequence sort of built from the combination of wanting her,
Jean, to get transformed by the cosmic flare into the Phoenix Force
and also wanting to situate it into something real and relevant to 1992.
And obviously, back then, we were still sending space shuttles into space,
which we don't do anymore.
He's not here.
He was in the airlock working on the thruster.
The heat signature's rising fast.
I can't hold it any longer.
We gotta get out of here.
I said strap in!
No, Raven. No.
We're not leaving anyone behind.
I am not putting this team in more danger.
And what about their team? Jean...
PARKER: The other thing that's notable about this
is, it's a triumph of visual effects to me,
that the craft reflected and all this detail,
the, you know, the shuttle itself,
even the frost on the windows there
is an incredibly demanding sequence.
The bamfing which is something they've really worked hard to evolve
and give it a deeper texture and a richness.
But then it's married with really intense performance moments,
particularly from Sophie and Tye, but from everybody.
So, a sequence that I'm incredibly proud of,
and Phil Brennan and Kurt Williams,
who were our champions of all things visual effects,
did an amazing job with their team.
KINBERG: Yeah, I think one of the things that was so great
about this team we put together,
which was some people that had worked on X-Men movies in the past,
some people who were new to the X-Men universe,
some people who had only done re-shoots of X-Men movies.
I mean, it is an extraordinary team and as such talks about it,
it's like Oscar winners, Oscar nominees.
Like I said, Lee Smith won an Oscar for Dunkirk.
Our DP, Mauro Fiore won an Oscar for Avatar.
Phil Brennan had been nominated for Snow White and the Huntsman.
There's just a lot of really, really talented people
that contributed to all of these kinds of sequences
where you have hundreds, if not thousands of people, that are building this.
It's not just us and a green screen.
Obviously, that wouldn't be a whole lot of fun to watch.
But performance wise, the other thing that we had in this movie,
and it was a luxury that I wish we had had in all the films,
was we had a lot more rehearsal time than we'd ever had with the actors.
And I think that's something that was important to me,
in terms of focusing on it being a more character driven movie
than some of the ones had been recently.
And giving some of these young actors,
especially Sophie, the time to really hone all the nuances of the character.
♪♪
(screaming)
PARKER: By the way, these sequences are pretty tedious to shoot,
because none of this stuff actually exists while you're shooting it.
Making the effort by the actors, I think, particularly good.
Another little factoid, I mean, this Phoenix effect look, feel,
was something that really did evolve over the course of the whole film
and into post and modulated and shifted
according to, you know, the way the story was working.
And I think it ended up in a really great place,
something I'm really pleased with.
KINBERG: Yeah, I think when it started,
it was probably more like the Phoenix effect
that we see at the very end of Apocalypse
when Jean sort of goes Phoenix-y, and that was a more fiery look,
but it didn't really have any of the cosmic elements
that are obviously a big part of the Phoenix Saga in the comics.
And so, as we evolved and progressed in post-production with Phil and Kurt,
the visual effects team that Hutch was talking about,
we really brought in different colors
that would denote a cosmic or otherworldly, not just fiery, element.
PARKER: Another pretty critical choice, I think, in all this,
was something that Simon... I mean, we talked about a lot,
but obviously he was really the chief architect of this,
which was keeping the Phoenix effect,
as it manifests itself on Jean, to be pretty subtle,
you know, to live a little bit in the eyes,
a little bit in the cracks...
but not take away from the emotional grounding, the performance,
the psychology that really does sit at the heart of the story.
And in light of what you can do and what is often done,
in terms of blowing ideas out,
I thought that was a really smart and important decision.
KINBERG: Well, I feel like what's happened a lot in movies
when you're talking about supernatural or science fiction movies,
there's a tendency to fall in love
with the prosthetics and the visual effects.
And a lot of the times they get in the way of the humanity
and the performance of the actors.
And this movie is so intensively a, to me,
like I say, a character-based and a performance-based movie,
that if you covered Jean in too much prosthetic
and visual effect and glow and all of that,
you'd really be hiding her performance
and you wouldn't give Sophie a chance to really emote
in the way that she needed to for the audience to relate to her.
And that's the other part of it is, like, I think
the more of that you put on a character,
it's more and more layers between that character in the audience.
It's harder for the audience to relate to what the character is going through.
And this is a movie so much about her inner struggle,
I wanted her to be able to play it
rather than us to have to layer... lather it on.
...felt gratitude. And as for myself, I've... never been prouder.
Enjoy yourselves.
You certainly deserve it.
In fact, you all do.
No more class, the end of the day.
(cheering)
Jean?
You gave us quite a scare up there. How are you feeling?
Actually, I... I feel fine.
- Hank? - Yeah?
Would you take a look at Jean?
Standard medical for anyone injured in the field.
Thank you.
You know, the President was almost sending his condolences.
PARKER: This is one of the moments I like most in the film
because it's an idea that Simon wrote into the script
where you're starting to see some cracks in the family
and in the belief,
you know, the unwavering belief in Charles and his vision.
I mean, Jen's great in this scene, as is James,
but it's really the content of the scene that I think is so powerful.
And it sets a really interesting dynamic for the rest of the film,
where we start to explore and look at,
"What is Charles' responsibility? Has he lost his way?"
You know, one of the metaphors we talked a lot about
was that of parenting where you do your best, but sometimes,
you're not necessarily doing what's right for your child
even though you intend to.
And that's a theme that, I think, resonates powerfully throughout the piece.
KINBERG: Well, and I think part of what has been so enduring
and the reason why the Dark Phoenix Saga is the most beloved of the X-Men stories
is because it's a story that is about,
no pure good guys and pure bad guys.
There's no pure good and no pure evil.
Someone as benevolent as Charles can also have a darker side to him,
can be flawed, can be human like the rest of us.
And so, my intention going into the writing of the script
and then the directing of the performance of the actors
is that everybody had, a spectrum of dark and light to them.
And so, someone like Jean, obviously,
is struggling the most and the most dramatically with that spectrum.
It's funny.
I can't actually remember the last time you were the one risking something.
And by the way,
the women are always saving the men around here.
You might wanna think about changing the name to X-Women.
KINBERG: Someone even like Charles,
who traditionally, in almost all these movies
has been this sort of benevolent, paternal figure,
we sort of explore the space
between being paternal and being patriarchal.
The idea that he's sitting down there in his home,
while young people are risking their lives all over the world,
as a team named after him.
And that there's something problematic about that
and especially the world in which we live right now
where, you know, we're looking more and more at the accountability of people
who are doing things for their own ego or for their own benefit.
This just felt like an opportunity to explore that
in a way that these movies never have before.
And that the comics sometimes do, by the way.
So, it's like, as much as I like to take credit
for a lot of the things that feel unique to this movie
as opposed to other X-Men movies
they are unique versus other X-Men movies
but they're not necessarily unique versus the comics.
A lot of the stuff, as someone that's read these comics
since I was very young,
were just things I felt as though we hadn't explored
even though we're however many movies into this franchise as we are.
You're good to go.
- You can head upstairs. - All right.
Thanks, Hank.
SCOTT: Hank said that?
- "Off the charts?" - He did.
PARKER: Well, we were just in Hank's lab.
You know, one of the things that was really fun on the film
and this is kind of an interesting way to watch the movie,
because you're prompted to think about what took place,
we had an amazing group of sets
that we built for the filming of the movie.
And that lab is one of them that I remember, you know,
you walking in and being particularly taken by the look and the design of it
and how well Claude had done with that.
But then, you know, Fifth Avenue to the mansion,
the X-jet stuff, you know,
amazing to be able to build those sets in such close proximity
and have them all be so different and unique.
KINBERG: Yeah.
I thought I lost you today.
I know.
KINBERG: And this is, to me, I mean,
the trickiest balance of this movie
for me, tonally, as a writer and as a director
was balancing a movie that, you know,
as we talk about the character aspects of the movie
and Jean that is both intimate and personal and emotional and human
with what very quickly here is introduced
and you just saw in that shot of things coming out of the sky,
is intergalactic, is cosmic, is very otherworldly,
is actually the opposite of human.
And balancing those two things,
so that it never tips in either direction,
I think if the movie tipped too much
in the direction of the intergalactic or the cosmic,
you would lose the emotionality of it,
and if it becomes too entirely just an emotional drama,
this stuff would poke out of the film
and there wouldn't be a feeling of an organic coherent whole.
I'm just gonna check on her. I'll be right back.
Just stay.
- Tell her to shut up. - Luna!
(barking)
(barking continues)
Luna!
KINBERG: This particular shot,
this moment of her finding... discovering these aliens in the woods
was something that we really played a lot with.
The original shot was a shot where you fully see the aliens.
They crack her neck.
You watch the transformation,
and it just all felt like, suddenly, in a movie
that was a more naturalistic, realistic film,
you were jumping the shark into something
that was this sci-fi film from, you know, the 70s.
And so, you know, we went with something much more subtle here
and then the transformation is here,
starting really in shadows, and you seeing it, you know,
clearly that she's transforming from another kind of being into a human.
But we're relying much more on performance and on shadow and detail
than we are on this, sort of, big shots.
And really, we're relying here on,
because she has the same color hair and the same clothes and all that,
we're relying on Jessica entering into the sort of Uncanny Valley performance
and Jessica is extraordinarily good at that.
And the look of this character
is something that Jess and I worked on together.
She really wanted it to look unlike anything
she had ever done in a movie before
and Tilda Swinton and other things were influences.
♪♪
♪ Put your hands on me ♪
KINBERG; This is worth mentioning, because she's only in the movie for a flash,
but hard-core fans, and I'm assuming those are the people
that are going to be listening to us right now,
would recognize Halston Sage's character as Dazzler,
who is a big character in the comic and a beloved character in the comic
and also a character who's a critical part
of one of the plot points in the original Dark Phoenix Saga.
So, I wanted to include her in the movie.
♪ Put your hands on me ♪
PARKER: This was also at that golf course location and as I recall,
night shoots are not my favorite but as I recall, it was really cold.
KINBERG: It was freezing cold,
and actually, going back to the Dazzler thing,
she's wearing the least clothes of anybody and she's up there dancing around.
- PARKER: She was such a trooper. - KINBERG: She really was.
And I think we shot her last, so it was like four or five in the morning,
cold as possible, you could be. And she was, she stuck with it.
- Hey. - Rocks.
KINBERG: But this, I like the idea of, you know,
it's a very normal, boarding school kind of scene, right,
which is like the principal of the school is gone,
because Charles is gone, and the kids are throwing a party.
And it's not much more complicated than that,
other than the fact that these particular kids happen to have supernatural powers
and so, when the party gets a little out of control,
you know, trees get blasted off the ground.
You know, it wasn't so long ago we were throwing parties like this.
KINBERG: One of my favorite relationships in the First Class,
I guess, onward cycle of these X-Men movies
is just the Beast-Hank, Mystique-Raven relationship
is really rich and sort of unspoken, but emotional.
And, you know, the two of them have really grown up.
I remember when we first cast them in First Class
and they were both in they're late teens.
Jennifer had only been in Winter's Bone.
Nick had not been in a big movie since About a Boy.
Jennifer's obviously grown into being
one of the, if not the biggest movie star in the world.
And Nick has grown into being an extraordinary actor.
And so, I just was excited to write scenes for them to play.
...we should go do.
This is our life. This is what we wanted.
Not like this.
- Raven... - It's not our life, Hank.
It's his.
What do you think the "X" in X-Men stands for?
Charles and his X-Men are...
KINBERG: And this is once again, really showing you that the X-Men are not,
you know, underground, ostracized characters anymore
but they're embraced by larger society
until larger society's prejudices start to emerge again.
PARKER: It's a scene that, at different times, was in the movie,
out of the movie, in the movie, out of the movie,
because on one level, we grapple with... we'd kind of already established that
and wanted to get on with the story.
On the other hand, you know, we came to realize,
you sort of needed to drive that point home
just a little bit more that yes, in fact,
he is all too happy to accept awards from the President
and bask in the glory as part of setting up for his fall, so to speak.
- You wanna dance? - Come on, Scott.
Did... did you hear what the kids are calling you?
- Do I wanna know? - Yeah!
Phoenix.
It's cool, right? You know, a bird that rises from the dead.
KINBERG: And this is a scene that we really experimented with.
Like, what is it she's seeing?
What is the impact on her face?
What's the trigger for her
starting to lose control of this Cosmic Force inside of her?
It's basically, like, the first bad trip she takes,
based on this thing inside of her.
It's that moment of what's meant to be
the point of view of that Cosmic Force inside of her
as if she's having this sort of residual memory of the Cosmic Force,
all of it just feeling...
The word I used a lot when we were creating all of this sequence
was hallucinatory.
So, it would feel almost like a bad...
I've never done it, but like a bad LSD or, hallucinatory trip.
And that, I think, the visual effects guys did a really nice job with.
- Thank you. - Thank you, Charles.
KINBERG: By the way, that person that Charles is shaking hands with right there
that we're just passing is Chris Claremont,
who is the creator of the Dark Phoenix Saga. Right there.
You see him in the background? Just out of focus.
Probably worth rewinding to see. He's got a little goatee there.
And Chris was the writer of the Dark Phoenix Saga.
He was also the person who essentially created Wolverine.
He is, I would say,
just short of as important to the X-Men as Stan Lee was.
♪♪
Once again, fake everything.
Fake house, fake car.
Fake, I think we had the road, that was about it.
And this actually for me was a...
you know, having worked in a lot of these movies,
I'm very aware of all the different scenes we've had in each of them.
And this was a direct sort of call and response from Apocalypse
when he goes into her room and she's having a nightmare
and that time he could read her mind and this time he can't.
...penetrate her mind.
KINBERG: And this we talked a lot about,
what do we do with Cerebro to make it different
than the 75 other times you've seen it in the movies?
And I guess hallucinatory is another way to describe it.
Again, I really wanted this to feel
like you were inside the mind of someone who's losing her mind.
And so, we did an immense amount of experimentation
with the look of this, how it would-
not right here, but once he goes in through Jean's eye into her mind,
how would we- we would create something
that would have a unique look to it.
And in an environment that's, you know,
our version of the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon
or any of the most sort of iconic environments of these kinds of franchises.
And so, starting right here, we just went to something wildly different.
PARKER: I really love this because it is hard to reinvent,
or re-imagine some of these components
and the idea of going into her memories and seeing these glimpses
and all the, you know, what almost feels like the tissue of the brain...
...tip it in the wrong direction.
PARKER: ...married with that smoky, milky component,
all stuff that came from the combined creative team
but I just love the way it turned out.
Hard to do stuff that's that arresting
and not have it take away from the dramatics of the scene.
I think it's something that was done really well in this,
because obviously, it's really important what they're talking about
and what they're sorting through.
...did something to her.
KINBERG: And that was a sequence we also did a lot of story boarding
and pre-vising of, so that we knew what they'd be looking at
and we just really kept refining what the look of this would be.
So, like Hutch said, it's surreal without being distracting.
PARKER: And hundreds of iterations.
- KINBERG: Yeah. - PARKER: Of all these things.
It's almost done in layers.
KINBERG: Yeah, and if you watch over and over again, which you don't have to do
but you're clearly watching more than once,
you see faces in there, you see memories in there.
There's little things.
Todd Hallowell who's, like I said, one of our producers,
is also someone that has experience as a second unit director
and insert unit director.
And he would go off and direct like, you know,
a little girl riding a tricycle or Big Wheel, rather.
That's in there somewhere if you take a look at it.
There's a birthday cake. There's a dog barking.
There's all kinds of childhood memories that are buried inside those soupy images.
Get out of my head.
Just stay calm, Jean.
She's fighting me. I need you to turn it up.
(groans)
I heard my father.
He's alive.
You're just hearing things. Jean, your mind, it needs rest.
KINBERG: And this was something I like...
I like in movies when, and not to say this is always the intention,
sometimes we have shots that are a little out of focus and buzzy,
but I like it when the camera goes a little bit in and out of focus.
And in general, I know this isn't a Criterion Collection kind of movie,
but in talking about the cinematography, like,
in previous X-Men movies,
they're all done on very static types of cameras.
They tend to be on dollies, on cranes.
Everything is very smooth.
If you look at even like the way the camera's moving right now,
the way it was just moving over Scott's shoulder,
almost everything in this movie is either handheld or a steady cam,
which is a slightly steadier version of a handheld camera.
Did I... Did I do... do that?
It's fine.
KINBERG: There's a sort of docu-realism that a handheld camera gives you.
And it also gives you a feeling of humanity
because there's just a little bit of like,
"That's a handheld camera right there, that's a handheld camera right there."
I mean, I, almost every shot,
you feel a little bit the breath of the camera person,
who's holding the camera because it's not perfect. It's not static.
It has a little bit of movement to it and the same way that in life,
when you're looking at something, your head is never fully static.
Your eyes are never fully looking in one place.
And so, I just wanted to create that feel of it being organic,
it feeling a little bit more handmade than these movies have felt
and that the genre has felt in the past.
PARKER: You also talked a lot going in about wanting it to feel more intimate.
Part of the movement was to make it feel a little unsteady
and a little, you know, unsafe at times,
which was a really interesting set of ideas
to bring to the photography of the film.
KINBERG: This is a crane shot,
and it's one of the only crane shots in the movie, actually.
There's not a lot of them.
That's handheld.
You see like just the little drift it gives you?
If you watch the movie...
like the way its drifting just a little bit around Charles right now
because he's not moving.
Pain.
KINBERG: It's like Hutch said, there's a sort of base level,
unconscious level of instability.
And that becomes more and more unstable over the span of the movie
and that's echoed in the cinematography.
I don't know.
KINBERG: And it's something that's not necessarily...
I mean, certainly conscious for us as the filmmakers,
it's not conscious necessarily for an audience
but it is something that I think cumulatively,
you start to feel in your experience of the film.
That doesn't make any sense, right?
Prepare the jet.
We're going to bring her home.
"We?" Charles, you're in no condition...
KINBERG: And there's a lot more close-ups.
I mean, you know, even this push-in on Charles, as an example,
traditionally, would be more of a crane move
where it would be a smooth, kind of Steven Spielberg-y,
Bryan Singer used to do this a lot,
smooth push in on the characters.
I wanted those push-ins
to feel a little bit more like somebody was walking toward them.
Again, just the back of your brain notices that.
(VUK speaking alien language) So this is all that's left of the D'Bari Empire.
KINBERG: This was a scene that we went back and forth on quite a bit,
how much information we need.
You know, one of the things I really wanted
was for Jessica's character to be a more mysterious character in this movie.
She's an amalgam of, you know, even though we name her,
and she's of D'Bari descent,
she's an amalgam of a few of the different alien characters
that have been in different iterations of the Dark Phoenix Saga.
Lelandra is a character, obviously, that a lot of people thought that she was.
Her hair color would indicate that she's not Lelandra.
And for me, the Lelandra story was so complex, that if we were going to do it,
we would almost require an extra 45 minutes
or extra movie to do properly
because the love story with Charles is integral
and it's just a different kind of film
and I wanted to really focus on this character right here,
on Jean and on her struggle and the drama of what she's going through.
And I felt as though the more subplots we had,
whether it was a Lelandra subplot with the Shi'ar
or it was a Hellfire subplot,
it was going to take away from this central, really intimate story
of a young person losing control.
And the people that love them the most, like Hutch was alluding to,
the family around them, cracking up with her.
Anything that was outside that circle started to feel
like it was potentially detracting from the core emotional experience of the film.
Can I help you?
PARKER: This is another really unique location and set
in that it's actually on the back lot of the studio that we were shooting at.
And Claude and his team built this neighborhood with incredible detail,
individuating each house.
You know, they're all just basically façades
but dressed the front yards with gardens,
with children's toys, all those things,
to help make it feel as real and grounded as possible.
And it was a really efficient, really effective way
to give us something that I think, you know,
was pretty iconic as a window into her past
and her father, her estranged father.
But also, was an unusual setting for an X-Men fight.
KINBERG: Right, which is like as grounded as it can possibly be.
- PARKER: Yeah. - KINBERG: For a lot of these movies,
and when I say a lot of these movies, I mean not just comic book movies,
but science fiction movies.
It's like the more exotic the location, the better.
And to me, in this movie, in many ways, it was like the more mundane,
the more realistic, the more relatable the environment, the better.
Because these things that they're doing,
whether it's optic beams coming out of their eyes or telekinesis
or, I mean, there's so many different things that are supernatural,
I think it's more interesting
to see something supernatural in a natural environment
because when you see something supernatural
in a supernatural environment, it almost feels redundant.
It almost feels like well, "What's the big deal about optic beams
coming out of somebody's eyes in an alien planet?"
But in a neighborhood that looks like the neighborhood
that you, me, any of us could live in, and it's your next-door neighbor,
suddenly it becomes, for me, a little bit more intense, threatening,
and like, I keep using the word "relatable."
I'll get you some water, okay?
PARKER: This was a scene that Sophie prepared for,
you know, just so rigorously and with such dedication.
I think she knew it was such a turning point moment for the character
and Simon had rehearsed it with her extensively.
But it's a critically important scene for her
both as an actress and in this role,
because of what it reveals and what it surfaces about her character
and it's really when she comes to understand,
you know, kind of the broader narrative for her character,
Jean Grey in the midst of this larger, larger story.
Jean?
All these photos, none of me.
You never looked for me.
- Jean? - Why didn't you look for me?
Maybe we should sit down.
No, I don't want...
KINBERG: And you know, I was talking about partners
like Hutch and Lee and Mauro, the DP,
but I will say, probably, and I say this with love to you, Hutch,
my real partner on this movie was Sophie.
You know, Sophie's performance is everything in this movie.
If Sophie was not as dedicated and committed
and prepared for this performance,
the whole movie would fall apart.
No matter how good the cinematography was,
no matter how good the editing was,
no matter how good the production design was,
it really would not have mattered.
And I came to Sophie,
I had a lunch with Sophie about a year or so before we started shooting.
I think I was still in the middle of writing
at least the second draft of the script, if that,
and I said to her "Look, we're going to do the Dark Phoenix story.
You're obviously playing Jean, Dark Phoenix.
You will be the center of the movie.
You're going to have to play, as this scene indicates and many others,
as you know, you're going to have to play
every sort of color of the spectrum emotionally.
You're going to have to play rage.
You're going to have to play pain, you're going to have to play sorrow.
You're going to have to play violence, defense,
I mean all, everything you could imagine
and not only that, you're going to be carrying
a very, large-scale big movie.
The pressure of that is a lot for somebody
who's in her late teens, early 20s.
And you're going to be playing scenes with,"
I mean, this actor right here, Scott Sheppard,
is like an incredible stage actor
whose won all kinds of awards on stage.
And then in addition to him,
Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain,
I mean, the best actors of their generation
who are all 10 to 15... well, I guess Jennifer's not,
but, you know, significantly older and more experienced than Sophie is.
And she was just game for it.
And I started sending her, from that first lunch, articles,
books, YouTube videos of people that have schizophrenia,
Dissociative Identity Disorder,
and she would read them, watch them, send me things back.
And we just really built the character together
and I'm just really proud of her
because it's not an easy thing to do for a young actor.
You shouldn't have come here.
Why is that? We've only come to bring you home, Jean.
I don't have a home. You made sure of that.
Look, your father couldn't handle you, and we took you in.
You told me my father was dead,
and you used me for my powers.
No, that's not true. That's just not what happened.
KINBERG: That shot of Jennifer is not my favorite shot in the entire movie,
but the reality of sometimes shooting with these kinds of ensembles
is that you don't get all the actors in the same place at the same time
and so you got to shoot what's called block shooting.
If you've seen Harry Potter you know what that looks like.
And you just grab Jennifer Lawrence
when you got Jennifer Lawrence for that day in the environment
and that's why you see Jen
separated from the rest of the group in that one shot.
Not a lot of that in that movie, luckily. In this movie, luckily,
we did get the actors committed to all being there.
But every now and then, you couldn't... you couldn't control it.
(sirens wailing)
Stay away from me.
Stay away from me!
KINBERG: That third car that flips over is a computer-generated car
and the first two are real.
That is, of course, not real.
Jean, please!
KINBERG: And that is real. I mean, enhanced, obviously,
the smoke and all that but, you know, we blew up that side of the house.
And as Hutch was talking about, this whole neighborhood,
this whole street is built houses which seems crazy,
but in order to create the kind of destruction
and the kind of control we needed, we needed to build it.
♪♪
(Quicksilver screaming)
Jean, stop!
- I've got the shot. I'm taking... - No, you're not.
I'm sorry, Hank. I want Raven to have a chance.
I told you to stay away.
KINBERG: This was a scene that I would say we...
we really dialed in over and over again.
We reshot as well.
I mean, all of these movies have inevitable re-shoots.
We've done that in every one of these X-Men movies.
I think pretty much every large-scale movie these days has that
because if you have the luxury of doing it, why not?
And we really dialed this... tried to dial this in,
so we would feel the inner struggle that Jean was going through
and we would create as much intimacy as possible from Jennifer,
so that this moment that's coming up,
you would really feel the tragedy of.
When it comes...
people get hurt.
And we did a lot of stuff, like even in post
of warping the imagery around Jen,
so that you would feel the point of view of Jean,
of Sophie's character, warping out her sound.
This is another place that Lee Smith, our editor, was really helpful.
And subtle. But the, you know, even Jean's hair moving that way
was a visual effect just to suggest that instability,
even as you're really meant to be focusing on the emotion on her face.
(gasping)
KINBERG: And this, Jennifer told me, is the first time she has died in a movie.
One of the things I will say about this scene
that I think is the most in awe of,
I would say proud of but I just kind of stayed out of his way,
was Nick's performance.
I mean, Nick in general I feel has been the sort of,
the unsung hero of this franchise
for the last however many movies he's been in them
because he's just such a great actor.
And he's not showy in terms of his performance
and the part doesn't have the same kind of,
you know, big flowery monologues that some of the other actors have.
But this moment of him having to act and emote through,
you know, pounds of blue makeup and contact lenses... pretty extraordinary.
I mean, even if it was just Nick, it's still an extraordinary performance.
But all of this, he really was very, very focused and in the zone that day
and I just kind of stayed out of his way,
and didn't try to do too many takes
because he was really giving a lot in each one of these takes.
And it was really hot out there and he has that big suit on,
but having to literally cry through all of that itself is...
PARKER: Yeah, it was a real achievement.
- KINBERG: Yeah. - PARKER: And a hard scene to shoot.
- KINBERG: Yes. - PARKER: In both, it's, you know,
intensely emotional scene and those are always hard days.
But, you know, there was no escaping the fact
that we were killing off a character that we really love
and both that what that meant in terms of wrapping Jen from the franchise,
or what it meant for the change of stakes in the movie.
KINBERG: Mm.
The word you used, stakes, is an interesting one,
because I think that we all talked about this
and it's really important to me, from the beginning,
because it's true in the Dark Phoenix Saga
that the stakes are more really life-and-death
than has been in these movies in the past for the heroes.
I mean, obviously, villains come and go and die,
but heroes dying is something that people are not used to,
it just tells you that everybody's at risk.
And again, just adds a sort of level of instability or tension
to the rest of the movie that I think is really valuable.
And differentiates it from other X-Men movies
where people fall off of buildings.
If there's any X-Men related movie
that is the most inspiring to me going into this film,
it was Logan.
And again, Hutch was really the producer with Jim Mangold of Logan,
and what you guys created was something so real and so grounded.
You know, this movie is not as grounded as that.
You couldn't have an X-Jet and aliens and cosmic forces in Logan.
But, the seriousness of purpose, the emotionality of that film,
I tried to bring into this movie,
all of these scenes, the performances, you know,
I talked to each of the actors I would say to Jen,
you know, "Play this like, you know, a David O'Russell movie."
For Michael Fassbender it was like, you know,
"As if you're in a Steve McQueen, the director, Steve McQueen movie.
Don't treat this like you're in a cartoon.
Treat this like you're in a serious, humanistic drama."
And I think that that was something
that you guys did so extraordinarily well in Logan,
and I tried to bring to this as well,
even though the circumstances of this are more unrealistic.
PARKER: I learned a lot from Jim in that regard
in the conviction he had to depict the violence,
but have consequences.
And it's part of... in our conversations on this one,
you know, the rationale behind killing off a main character like Raven.
Without that, you don't really have the threat of consequence that you need
to earn the emotional triumph at the end.
To me, her death really does underpin the ending of the movie.
- KINBERG: Right. - PARKER: And earn the choice by Jean.
And then, by the time you realize who they are...
it's too late.
(thundering)
♪♪
Do you know, this is where I first met Raven.
(chuckles)
She was just this little girl, and...
she'd broken in...
KINBERG: This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
Because it's not a scene that you would expect
in a summer tentpole superhero film.
It's just a drama dialogue scene between two really great actors.
It's emotional. It's complicated. It's messy.
And they're both just... they're just great actors
and I just got to step back and watch them act.
And again, I think this is one of those places
where Nick traditionally, in this movie, Hank, traditionally in the comics,
and in this franchise of movies has been this sort of lapdog,
for lack of a less punny metaphor,
has been a lapdog of Charles
and for him to actually go after Charles and ultimately turn on Charles
felt really fresh and different and like an opportunity for Nick
as he's growing up to be a man...
to break from the father.
And I thought that was something that, you know, would feel
and certainly is just empirically different
than what we've done in the past.
PARKER: One of the things I like best about what Simon did in the script
was try to give everybody new dimension and new moments,
so we see a different thoughtfulness from Raven
in the way she's critiquing Charles.
We see Hank finally rises up and challenges Charles,
even breaks with him to align, obviously, with Magneto.
We see a whole different dimension from Magneto.
And it's true of everybody from Scott to Storm,
obviously, for Jean.
But that was exciting from a storytelling perspective
to get to see these actors sink their teeth into some new juicy material.
And in that scene, I think Nick did a fantastic job
and it's the kind of thing we had never given him a chance to do.
And really gratifying to see
how richly talented they all are when given the chance.
Why did I do that?
(sobbing)
- PARKER: That's our neighborhood. - KINBERG: Yeah.
One of those days where it was raining when we didn't want it to rain
and not raining when we wanted it to rain.
So, just...
- PARKER: Kind of roll with it. - KINBERG: Yeah.
Turned on some towers and kept it raining.
I like using the backs of people's heads in movies.
I think it's more dramatic sometimes,
and obviously Jessica had this incredible mane of white hair
so there's a few shots.
That was a minor one because it wasn't in close-up
though we did shoot a close-up we didn't use.
Where we're really focusing on the back of her head.
This performance from Jess, we really talked a lot about
and the metaphor we came up with
was this notion of like this sort of the veterinarian
who's telling you that your animal is sick and needs to be put down.
There's like a sort of eerie kindness to her
that's lethal, ultimately,
but isn't coming in as aggressive.
It's coming in quiet, kind.
And Jess really inhabited that.
PARKER: She's such an amazing actress.
- KINBERG: Yeah, she is. - PARKER: Just remarkable.
Maybe...
KINBERG: What's fun about Jess is that she can be so serious,
and so focused and precise
and you see how precise that little purse of her lips is.
But she's also just a really fun person.
So, you know, the second the camera cuts
when you're in between shots or in between set ups,
she's goofing off and practical joking and she's just a very different person.
She's very in control of her instrument as an actress.
And so, she can turn it on and off.
She doesn't have to stay in the entire time.
(screaming)
KINBERG: This was something cool that I've been wanting to do an X-Men movie
going all the way back to X-Men: The Last Stand which is create Genosha,
the mutant homeland that Magneto creates in the comic,
almost like the mutant Israel. I say that as a Jew.
And I've always wanted to do it
and had an opportunity to do it in this movie.
And instead of making it look like the way it looks in the comics,
which is this sort of bright and shiny, silvery Neverland
I wanted it to feel like Genosha sort of 1.0.
So, the idea was that Magneto has lifted anything
that's metal on the base of the ocean and picked it up
and used it to create these domiciles, these structures for people to live in.
And we're seeing the very beginning of Genosha.
Who are you?
What are you doing here?
Answer the question.
KINBERG: Andrew here, by the way, the guy with the dreadlocks,
was a stuntman who was just so good at doing the stunt rehearsals
and had such a great voice and face
that we ended up casting him as the character.
Leave her.
Why are you here?
KINBERG: Michael really liked this idea,
he loved the idea of using Genosha for the first time in the movie
because he's someone really, really steeped in the comics.
But he liked this idea of like almost Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now,
this like, you know, like it was a commune
and he was a cult leader, so to speak. He wanted to be dressed in big, I think,
I can't remember if it was white or black robes.
I feel like that was maybe a little too much
but he is in pretty monochromatic outfits
and he is in this peaceful place in his life before she shows up.
And he's just one of these actors where, like, you just turned the camera on
and he does so little and yet expresses so much.
I don't know if there's another actor like him
that can do as much with just his eyes. Really expressive eyes.
Look...
PARKER: Yeah, and he's so calm in his performance.
This was a pretty great scene.
I remember shooting this and being blown away by pretty much everything,
by the look of the set, by the way in which Sophie came into it
and rose to the challenge of a scene with Michael.
And I remember Michael commenting to both of us
how impressed he was with Sophie
and how extraordinary she was as an actress in this scene.
Credit to you, too, by the way.
KINBERG: Yeah, I appreciate that. But I mean what's been...
what was lovely was that each of the actors...
Sophie naturally was probably a little intimidated by Michael.
James, Jessica, Jennifer,
all of them, when they first were acting across from her,
would come up to me after the first take or two,
and say, "My God, she's incredible,"
because she really wasn't given an opportunity in Apocalypse to do much
because obviously, there were so many different characters in that movie
and they were doing... each had a little tiny piece of the pie.
And she had a very small piece of the pie in that film.
So, them seeing her as really the leading, obviously,
the leading actor in this film and again,
all of the different emotional colors she had to play,
each of these actors who are so experienced and so extraordinary,
they were impressed.
I would tell her and it would give her even more confidence.
...lose control...
things happen, bad things...
to people I love.
Whose blood is that?
Isn't that why you came here?
- What do you think I can do for you? - I don't know!
Yes, you do. Whose blood is that?
- I don't wanna talk about it. - Did you hurt...
KINBERG: So funny. There was that moment where he puts the cup down
and he kind of misses with the cup and then puts it...
there's just little things in movies
when you like make a movie that you notice.
Some of them you love as mistakes
and some of them kind of annoy you a little bit.
That one annoys me a little bit because I feel like there was...
I always was looking for a cleaner version of him
putting the cup down but there - and there were cleaner versions
but his performance wasn't quite as aggressive and strong.
And so, I just left with the miss of the cup
which feels like the real world.
(chopper whirring)
KINBERG: Now, this sequence is one of my favorites in the movie
partly because it's all real.
I mean, not all but it's... the vast majority of it is real.
These are, obviously, those are real choppers that are flying in
but our special-effects again, practical effects, Cam,
who was the head of special-effects for us,
he created rigs where he could take the bucks of these choppers...
so everything except for the propellers... and remote control them.
So, the first one that's about to go spinning on the ground
is in fact spinning on the ground, and he had explosives in the ground
that would be like the propeller ripping open the ground.
And the second one, which we'll get to pretty shortly,
he brought in two big crane arms and built a crane wire
that was going between the two crane arms
that was capable of holding I think up to 4000 pounds.
And he had the chopper on that wire remote-controlled,
so it could go in and out, closer, further away from Sophie and Michael
with everything but the propeller because obviously,
were not going to put them close to a moving propeller
but we had massive rotor fans
that were mimicking what it would be like for the propeller to be that close.
But literally, they were interacting with a real helicopter.
Then step aside.
We have the same rights as you and your family.
And like I said, we're not here for...
KINBERG: The soldiers you're shortly going to see
running and jumping onto that chopper
are running and jumping onto a chopper
that is in fact there, 10-15 feet off the ground and it's just again,
there's some part of the audience's brain that recognizes real physics,
and so sees a sequence like this and recognizes that it is real in a way
that it wouldn't be in almost any other movie.
And for the actors... so, right here, that's a real chopper.
I said stop that right now!
KINBERG: The propeller is obviously fake because that would be dangerous.
But as this happens, you will see, that chopper does rise a little bit
and then twists real...
and this is all the chopper on a rig spinning around
and explosives going off in all the places.
That's obviously fake because we would not risk Michael Fassbender's life.
But this now is that chopper that's on the wire
and it is everything but the propeller is real.
And it's, you know, 3000, 4000-pound metal object
that's going closer to them, that's going further away from them...
with massive fans blowing on them to simulate the wind.
That's a camera inside the real buck of the chopper that's filming them.
(yelling)
PARKER: It's also hugely helpful to the visual effects guys
to have real elements in the frame to build off of.
It's what allows you to help make this feel photo real...
and as Simon said, give you the feeling, you know, unconsciously
that this is conforming to real physics.
It just makes, it makes all the difference.
KINBERG: That's the first shot that's a visual effects shot of a chopper
because obviously, that we couldn't control.
MAGNETO: Go!
- Leave this place! - I need your help!
I thought you protected mutants here.
I am protecting them... from you.
You need to leave.
Go!
♪♪
REPORTER: Word coming late tonight that Congress is considering
temporary mutant internment facilities for those...
PARKER: Just fun to watch Michael.
KINBERG: No, I know, I think we were both sitting here mesmerized,
awe/crushing out on Michael Fassbender.
...attacking police and military personnel...
That news conference there was something we went back and forth
on just how severe we wanted the human reaction to be.
Initially, the reaction was more severe than that but felt like,
we didn't want it to feel as though all of a sudden
they were going from embracing the X-Men to interning the X-Men.
So, there was, there was a sort of middle ground that I found
and we reshot the anchorman.
...everything that we've accomplished. You have to give us a chance.
(line busy tone)
PARKER: And if you notice, Charles's wardrobe starts to kind of deconstruct
as we get later in the movie,
sort of mirroring his somewhat unraveling,
but having to look at himself anew
and basically take responsibility for what he's done,
but also start to be more honest with himself, I think.
...citizens to keep their distance.
Any sighting should be reported to the police immediately.
Government officials have...
KINBERG: This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
It's a scene I wrote pretty early on that I rewrote a few times
of the first interaction between Jean and Jessica's character.
And this notion that Jean is controlling everybody's mind
but Jessica's mind can't be controlled is, I guess, pretty subtle
because some people don't catch it or don't fully understand it.
But I just thought was a cool way
to reveal you're sort of watching the scene,
wondering why you're watching an older gentleman
drinking before this transformation.
PARKER: Wasn't this our first day with Jessica? Or maybe the second half?
Didn't we do something the first half and then moved to this...?
KINBERG: Yeah, it may be.
PARKER: This location.
It's a small bar in Montréal but had this great look and feel.
KINBERG: Yeah.
Let's just say I have friends in high places.
Who are you?
The better question is...
who are you?
KINBERG: And I'm a big believer in that even though Jessica and I are friends
and we were friends from having made The Martian together,
I think this monologue in here is why she decided to do the movie.
Because I think there's... there's a thematic
and even political element to this that was compelling to her.
And is compelling to me as well.
I mean a movie that is a female protagonist movie,
I wanted it to be more than just a female protagonist movie.
I wanted it to actually explore, like I was saying earlier,
this sort of patriarchal side of Charles.
I also want to explore the empowerment of a female character
in a male dominated, not just world, but candidly, genre.
And so, this notion of antiquated words
created by men a long time ago with very little minds,
something that I thought Jess would dig. And she did.
They can't begin to comprehend what you are.
Even your X-men.
KINBERG: And we had a slightly longer version of this scene
that didn't do much else other than do a little bit more convincing
and then we cut it, or Lee cut it because going out on a smile,
that sort of eerie smile was a stronger way to go out than another line.
- What? - Hank's not in class.
Did you check his quarters?
Yeah, he's not there either.
KINBERG: And then this is where I think, to me, as we were conceiving the movie
and thinking about how do you break a family up,
it's not just about breaking a family up,
but it's about switching allegiances and creating new families,
and this notion that Hank becomes part of Magneto's family
is something that wouldn't have been fathomable
a movie or four movies ago
especially, as they were enemies for Mystique's affection.
- She's gone. - No, I know that.
Then why are you here, Hank?
You have eyes and ears around the world
to help you find mutants for this place.
KINBERG: This was an interesting day on set because we had scouted a location
for this interaction to take place that was...
- PARKER: That's right. - KINBERG: ...like kind of a forest
but when we got there, it wasn't really a forest,
it was like a tree and some grass,
and it felt like it was going to be kind of anticlimactic
to have this face-to-face between these actors who have been enemies
and this moment for Magneto learning this thing about the woman he loves.
And then we were just walking around
and saw all the wreckage that was still there from having shot there
and it felt like this was the right place to stage it.
And Michael, because he's so extraordinary at using everything that he's given,
was his decision to make this move toward the skids of the chopper.
Weirdly, this became a really interesting environment for these two guys,
because it's a world of destruction
at a time when the family's being destroyed.
I need you to help me find Jean.
If I find her, I'll kill her.
I know.
(honking)
KINBERG: This is a little bit of a build
and a lot of visual effect in the background to make it look like New York.
PARKER: Yeah, that's actually on a big sound stage in Montréal.
KINBERG: And this is a set.
Everything that takes place in here from this point forward
and there's a lot that takes place in here,
is a beautiful set that Claude Pare art designed, production designed,
and initially we had thought of it as the French Consulate
and then as you see on the ground, that rug would indicate French Consulate
and then we kind of didn't really explore that much more deeply than that.
But I think Claude Pare... emphasis on Claude and Pare,
liked the idea of representing the French in this movie.
(in alien language) If she can't control it, then we will destroy it.
♪♪
KINBERG: And this is a scene that we reshot.
Initially, this scene didn't really give information
about what it is that happened to Jean in space.
It didn't really give information about the cosmic force that was inside Jean.
And felt like as much as I wanted the character of Jessica to be mysterious,
there's a certain point at which mystery becomes enigma.
And you're just sort of detached.
And so, this became an opportunity for Jessica to explain
what she was doing down here, why she was drawn here
and most importantly, what was happening to Jean.
And this became this big visual effects sequence.
And I will say, with the most profound respect to Phil and Kurt,
our visual effects supervisor and producer,
they created this entire sequence pretty late in the process
so they didn't have a whole lot of time to do it
and it still looks really amazing.
VUK: ...that force.
JEAN: Why?
Because it's the spark that gave life to the universe...
and the flame that consumed my world.
What remains of my people...
KINBERG: And it's true to the characters of the D'Bari obviously,
well, not obviously, I say that to hard-core fans of the comic.
Their planet was destroyed by the Phoenix force.
Why me?
Because you're stronger than you know.
Because you're special, Jean.
With my help...
KINBERG: And I wanted this in some ways to echo
the appeal that Charles makes to young Jean at the beginning of the movie.
Even using the word special was intentional.
At the beginning, Charles was sort of appealing to her
for what he believes to be good,
and now Jessica's appealing to her for what she believes to be good.
But for both of them, there's an element of it
that's empowering them and their agenda. And by the end of this movie,
Jean chooses her own agenda to save the people that she loves.
And that's the arc of the movie for me, is that she's child to neither
and becomes the grown up that's making her own decisions.
But here, she's sort of in the seduction process
of being turned toward Jessica's side. And Jessica's very compelling at that.
...they fear.
And what they fear...
They seek to destroy.
MAGNETO: Did Raven suffer?
Not for long.
KINBERG: And again, if you look at this, it's very dirty
in a way that X-Men movies haven't been dirty before.
The cameras bouncing around a little bit. It's handheld.
It's just longer lens, it's not static and smooth.
The world itself is kind of falling apart
and so I want the camera work to feel also as if it's not quite as smooth.
New York.
We'll have eyes on the ground when we get there.
♪♪
KINBERG: Right there, if you look at all the movement around Michael, it's subtle,
but if you look at it you see the camera's not just set on him.
And this is a steadicam as opposed to it being a crane
which it normally would be in a shot like that.
So, it's got a little bit more life and human movement to it
and even like human footsteps to the way the camera was moving just now.
Anytime we can reveal the Magneto helmet
we basically have in all of these movies.
I honestly think we have in every single one of the movies since First Class.
Big reveal in Days of Future Past. Reveal in Apocalypse. Big reveal here.
PARKER: Also, a great score moment.
Hans Zimmer did an amazing job throughout.
Because he also had to attend
to so many different tonalities, emotional and psychological
and as the movie is starting to take a turn there,
you can feel the score get more muscular,
in the way that it's promising conflict with Magneto and the X-Men.
KINBERG: Yeah, and Hans is... sorry, going back to the people
who are Oscar nominated-winning, incredible teammates...
I've been writing my scripts to Hans Zimmer scores
since I was in film school. He's a hero of mine.
And an incredible inspiration.
And, after the last superhero movie he had worked on before this one,
he said he wasn't going to do
any more superhero movies or comic book adaptations.
And we basically... I wrote emails. I called, I begged.
Finally got a meeting with him
because he was doing a concert in Montréal
while we were in prep on this film
and convinced him to at least continue the conversation.
It was another couple conversations on the phone
until finally he committed to doing the film.
And I think the reason he committed to doing the film was that he recognized
that this was going to be a different kind of superhero film.
It wasn't going to be maybe as bombastic or as broad and operatic
as the films he'd worked on in the past.
It was going to have a more grounded, gritty feeling to it.
And so, he saw it as an opportunity to do something different.
And the thing about Hans is, and this is true for I guess any great artist,
and Hans is certainly a great artist,
is he just wants to be challenged to do something different each time.
And so, this felt like an opportunity to do something different.
And this is a very heavily scored movie.
It's not wall to wall score music,
but I would say we have more music in this film
than we've had in any of the other X-Men movies.
And it's giving us emotion.
It's reinforcing tension and momentum, transitions.
There's a lot of work the score is doing in this movie
and I just love the score so much that we used it.
Hans, over the span of however many months and years we were working on the movie,
I think it was like 11 or 12 hours' worth of music
that he created for this movie.
And he creates these long suites, and then once those suites are created,
the sound editors and Lee and Hans's team,
they start to edit those suites down to picture
and into individual themes for the characters.
And so, this was a real process of finding, creating,
conforming the music to the picture.
Which I've never done before as a producer on a movie.
Usually, composers will write to picture
and Hans actually didn't want to see the picture,
he wanted to start writing the suites first, based just on conversations,
even before reading the script.
PARKER: Incredibly collaborative. I mean, a remarkable process for me,
having worked on a ton of movies as an executive
and then again as a producer.
I'd never had an experience quite like what we had with Hans.
Both creatively and in terms of that process.
KINBERG: Yeah.
(honking)
(indistinct screaming)
♪♪
KINBERG: And this is, as Hutch was alluding to earlier,
we built pretty much the majority of this Fifth Avenue street
on a sound stage in Montréal.
It's our biggest stage. It was our biggest build.
And when you're looking in that direction, for the most part,
that was actually a park in Montréal.
But then once the action starts, all this jumps off,
everything looking toward the buildings,
looking down the street, that's all a build.
And past a certain point in the street then it's a visual effect.
It's what's called a set extension.
But we built blocks of this Fifth Avenue sequence.
And the reason to build as opposed to being on location is one,
obviously, this looks like Fifth Avenue. We weren't going to go to New York
and shut down Fifth Avenue for a couple nights.
But, two, also, all of this destruction you couldn't do on a real street
in a way that would give us the kind of sort of visceral action
and destruction that this sequence required,
especially once Magneto pulls a subway car out of the ground
and hurls it through a wall.
PARKER: Which is an idea that Simon had I feel like almost before,
before we got into the script. It was something he had in his head
as being this, actually, this whole sequence,
the whole fight in New York at different times,
you know, had more scale and even more impact to it.
But the notion being that it was an idea of seeing the X-Men fighting the X-Men
that was critically important to him and he thought was a breakthrough idea
and that the climbing moment of that, climaxing moment of that
would actually be Magneto pulling the subway car up through the street.
I was actually never all that sure about it,
but I do love the way it turned out.
KINBERG: Yeah, honestly, for me, it was going back to that idea
of trying to have the action take place in real spaces.
Everybody knows what a city street looks like.
A lot of people know what even Fifth Avenue looks like,
because they've seen New York in television shows and movies.
So one of the things I love about, as an example, James Cameron movies
is he stages... Avatar notwithstanding...
he stages these incredible action sequences
in really relatable everyday locations, factories, streets.
It just all feels very real
even if the action that's happening is completely surreal.
And should go back to... speaking of real, Cam, our special effects supervisor,
created a rig where that subway train, which was an actual train,
was on a hydraulic that went flying through a breakaway wall.
So, that train that comes crashing through the wall behind Michael Fassbender
is a real train that is crashing through the wall behind Michael Fassbender
and actually was meant to stop
about five or six feet shorter than it actually stopped
and got closer to Michael than it was meant to
and crashed down some of the ceiling above him,
again, closer than it should have.
And only Michael Fassbender possibly in the entire world
would not only stand in place, but barely blink,
despite the fact that there was however many thousands of pounds train
crashing way too close to him.
(metal creaking)
PARKER: And that's one of those conversations you have about,
should we be doing this practically
or should we be doing this as a visual effect?
Because practically, there are obviously risks.
Generally speaking, you know, those things don't go necessarily as planned.
And the time it takes to reset, to do it a second time is exorbitant.
And Cam was 100% confident that it worked. He tested it.
He was like, "No, I really -" so, we all were like "Okay."
And a little skeptically but it came off beautifully.
KINBERG: I don't think we had a reset on that.
Like, I think the reset was like a day later.
PARKER: It was, it was a lot.
KINBERG: Because he'd have to... right after... that was...
PARKER: They'd have to take out that whole chunk of wall, back up the thing
and get everything out of there.
KINBERG: Yeah. But we did get lucky.
We had a lot of cameras, obviously, shooting it but we had one take with it.
Come here! Get me in that house now!
Have you come to kill me, too?
KINBERG: And that's it, still sitting in there.
I failed you. I know that, but...
KINBERG: This was an idea actually that...
one of the things for me that I love about writing and I love about producing
and I love about directing, and all of them are pretty fluid
in terms of how I would define them in my experience is collaborating,
collaborating with someone like Hutch, collaborating with the actors.
And there's a lot of stuff in this movie,
there are great ideas that came from Hutch.
There's a lot of great ideas that came from the actors
and the idea that Jean lifts Charles out of his chair
and walks him up the stairs toward her was James McAvoy's idea.
James read the script, and in the script, she had...
was sort of torturing him while he was in his chair
and James thought the idea of her actually lifting him out of the chair
was even more torturous and disturbing. And it's certainly both of those things.
And so, that's how this evolved into this moment.
Which is a, you know, painful one to watch.
♪♪
Please, Jean.
Please.
KINBERG: And James is on wires here,
but a lot of that is just his physical performance.
He's just got the ability to...
like a lot of these actors, he's got a lot of control over his body
and so he can do a lot of really sort of intricate nuanced little moves
that make you believe that what's happening is real.
...see in mine.
So look.
Jean, look.
And what you choose to do with your gift,
well, that's entirely up to you.
(Charles groans)
PARKER: A lot of work for the visual effects team
with all of that in close, hair movement, the cracks on her face,
the demolecularization of the wall behind.
KINBERG: You did a really good job of saying demolecularization, Hutch.
PARKER: Well, I've had practice.
KINBERG: Yeah, that was a real...
I would say that actual saying the word demolecularization
was harder for a lot of our partners on this movie
than actually manifesting it visually in the film.
You're saying a lot because like you say, it was hard to do.
I can help her in ways that you can't.
She can't be helped.
She's a lost cause.
PARKER: Some of these are fairly stylized shots obviously,
and it's another way that Simon and Mauro were really breaking into a new aesthetic
than we'd seen before in any of the X-Men movies.
...there's still hope.
KINBERG: Yeah, one of the things I said to Mauro
when we first started talking about the movie
and him doing the movie is, as much as obviously, I admire Avatar
and it's an extraordinary achievement visually,
this movie I wanted to be as real as possible.
And so, for me, I was hiring the Mauro who shot Training Day.
I wasn't hiring the Mauro who shot Avatar.
Even though his fluency with visual effects was really useful for this movie,
I wanted him to be able to feel like he could experiment.
I wanted it to feel again like gritty and real and handheld
and down and dirty. And so he got excited about that.
The stylization you were just talking about
is just that's less gritty and real,
but it is certainly an opportunity to like do something
that isn't traditionally done in these films
and create a new film grammar.
I think we all felt like there was a film grammar
that Bryan Singer created in X-Men 1 that was almost 20 years old,
and that had been not that radically changed in all of those 20 years
despite having other directors, Brett Ratner, Matthew Vaughn.
Bryan, having done a lot of the movies.
And that I was really inspired again, I mean, by a lot of movies.
But at least in this universe,
I was really inspired by what Mangold did with Logan
and creating a completely different film grammar
from what he even did with The Wolverine movie.
And I just felt like we had a chance here,
because of the subject matter, not because of just arbitrarily
wanting it to be gritty and real and intimate,
but because the subject matter itself required that kind of aesthetic,
we could do that and it would feel organic and not gratuitous.
♪♪
And this is a, you know, as you were saying before,
the complexity of the visual effect that's happening here
between the hair and the eyes and the cracks
and the cosmic force in the different colors
that are in the cosmic force...
I mean, we were doing this down to the very last second
of like handing this over...
I mean, these guys, our visual effects team,
Kurt and Phil especially, I think didn't sleep the last couple of weeks
- before we delivered this movie. - PARKER: For sure.
KINBERG: They were back and forth between here and Montréal
where a lot of the work was being done.
They were on the phone to every continent on the globe
because all of these are bits and pieces.
Let go!
SOLDIER: There's one! Get him!
Jean!
PARKER: That's another piece of impressive practical filmmaking,
where they actually pulled the stunt woman through the ceiling,
through that... that shot is a real woman
flying through that ceiling wall and into that... into the exterior wall.
SOLDIER: Take him out! Come on!
Out, out! You guys, come on. Train.
SOLDIER 2: You four with me, let's go!
- Let's go! - SOLDIER 1: Come on, move, move, move!
- She's alive. - Scott, you have to get her out.
You have to... No!
(indistinct radio chatter)
We're clear.
♪♪
KINBERG: Quite a lot of talk here about just how much power
would remain in Jessica's hand there.
Because obviously, we didn't want it to feel like Tinkerbell
but we wanted it to be clear that she had...
she had retained some of that power,
that cosmic power from Jean and really wanted the rest of it.
There was a scene that I wrote
and that we shot that was a sort of interstitial scene
between this scene and the next that made that explicitly clear.
But we all felt like it was clear enough in that look
and then the fact that she's actually here
and then James McAvoy says,
"She'll be coming back for the rest of it,"
that we didn't need that extra scene.
And this was a train car,
obviously, the exterior of that was a visual effect,
but all of these were train cars that were created
and put on a gimbal, a hydraulic system,
where they could be jostling around like normal train cars.
They could be moving and give the actors a sense of reality
and give the camera a sense of, of movement and reality.
...I was.
I should never have lied to her.
I was wrong.
But this power...
inside of her, I never put that there.
I would never do anything intentionally to hurt her.
That isn't me and this is not Jean.
PARKER: This is a scene I was really excited about,
getting everybody together in a scene for a dramatic exchange,
all of which kind of felt to me
like the culmination of the political and social arguments they'd been having.
But it's informed by Jean and Jean's story.
So, it's informed by the emotion of the emotional crisis of the movie.
And seeing, as I said before,
seeing Charles have to own and take responsibility for what he's done,
and that being the basis for the action sequence that's going to flow,
I thought was a really powerful and exciting idea.
...thing...
has had a taste of that power,
and she'll be coming back for more. She'll be coming back for Jean.
PARKER: As Simon mentioned, it is, this was a triumph of practical effects
because these trains were big
and they were double... double high, sort of two-story high.
And to put all of that on a gimbal both for the normal rock and shake,
but also you can move them as if you were going around a corner
so that you had that sense of real movement?
It was pretty remarkable.
They also have to make them so that you can...
you can gain access to them in different ways through the set.
So, you could remove the ceiling. You could remove certain walls
to get the camera in and get lighting in.
So, the challenges of getting this done were formidable.
...you have multiple hostiles on board.
KINBERG: Yeah, and our art director, Michele Laliberte,
deserves a huge shout out for this,
because she was really integral
to designing and building this and so much in the movie.
She's been, really, our rock from a production design standpoint
for quite a few movies in a row, actually.
Been through a few different production designers.
She's local to Montréal and incredibly talented
and like you said, there's just so many things
that go into the reality of building something
that seems like it would be simple because it's just a rectangle.
(soldier screaming)
PARKER: Yeah, one of the biggest challenges of this sequence
was getting things ready in time to shoot,
and when we had the actors and balancing out...
because obviously, it's the same set we're using both for first unit
with the lead actors and Simon
and also with second unit to do all the stunts.
So there was a lot of very intricate planning
that goes into trying to figure out how do you execute the sequence
and get everybody what they need in order to finish properly.
- What? - (radio static)
They're not what?
- They're not mutants! - They're here for Jean.
Get ready to open fire!
Your kid was right about us.
We can help you!
(banging on door)
(banging on door continues)
Please!
Fire!
PARKER: Yeah, these healing effects were really tricky for us, too,
very demanding on the visual effects guys
but also trying to find the right balance between wanting to stay real
and also suggesting the alien-ness under the exterior.
KINBERG: Yeah, the notion of creating
an endoskeleton for an alien underneath human skin was tricky,
because we didn't want it to look too reptilian
and like you say, too sort of supernatural.
But we did want it to indicate that they are alien
under the sort of shell of human skin.
♪♪
We only want the girl. Step aside.
No!
KINBERG: And this is something that I think...
once we sort of committed to this, this was the natural culmination,
was this idea that finally, you have all of the X-Men
standing together, working together.
People who were foes or friends, everybody's on the same side.
And then there's a lot of the kind of teamwork that's been in the comics,
but hasn't really been in the movies before.
There's one moment coming up later where Hank throws somebody,
Storm blasts that person while they're in the air.
Storm is a character in the comic
who is incredibly powerful and incredibly popular.
And we've given her in the past some cool stuff to do,
but I think this is the first time she's really let loose in terms of her power,
and early reactions from audiences have been
that they are happy to see Storm be a bad ass.
PARKER: Part of what I like about this sequence for everybody
was that everybody gets to sort of be unleashed
from, you know, this martial arts notion
that Brian Smrz used to inform Magneto's fighting style,
that kind of enraged Beast,
Storm really getting, as you said, to unleash,
and even Nightcrawler, getting to really be ferocious.
It's something that we all talked a lot about,
wanting the fight to feel different than what we've seen them do before,
and that was sort of the underpinning,
was that they're coming together, they're fighting for Jean
and they are enraged by the circumstances they find themselves in.
KINBERG: And one of the things we talked about was,
even though Alan Cumming is in X2 sort of being controlled,
there is a more ferocious side to him,
and we've played Kodi Smit-McPhee as this sort of comic relief Nightcrawler
and we wanted to see that transformation into something more mature and violent
and so, obviously, the trigger is the death of the person that had trusted them
and now he's on a rampage, so to speak.
(grunts)
Even this is sort of a maniacal smile.
PARKER: Small detail, but I even really liked the way
the visual effects team and Simon evolved the beam.
It just feels more visceral somehow,
more lethal than what I'd seen in previous movies.
KINBERG: Well, it's literally a rip off of lightsaber.
Like, Star Wars was my favorite movie growing up,
The Empire Strikes Back, actually, but the Star Wars franchise
was my favorite movie growing up, kind of remains,
and the lightsaber has a little more fluctuation to it.
And that is what gives it a feeling of it being a little bit more organic and real
as opposed to just being like a straight up flashlight beam.
And so, we just imported some of that idea to Scott's beam
which we hadn't really done before in the past.
When in doubt, steal from Star Wars.
(PARKER chuckles)
Another unlikely partnership. That was part of the fun of this,
it was like, "who's going to team up with whom to do what?"
and that Magneto-Storm moment was kind of a cool one.
This was a very hard visual effects shot to pull off.
The interior of that. We worked a lot to get the lighting right,
to make it all feel as real as possible
despite the fact that obviously, it's wildly unreal.
♪♪
And then this is just the kind of stuff I like in movies, backs of people's heads.
I'm not even sure that's the back of Jessica's head.
But somebody's got that wig on.
PARKER: I'm still not crazy about that jumping shot but...
KINBERG: Yeah, well.
Hank!
(Storm grunting)
♪♪
PARKER: Another place where the score plays a big part
and is so methodically and carefully built
to bring all the pieces together
both in terms of the action but also ultimately,
in terms of the emotion of what choice Jean makes in the end.
KINBERG: This scene was exciting to me.
I wish we had even longer just to have Michael Fassbender and Jessica Chastain
in a scene together to me was sort of historic, iconic kind of moment.
I hope they do more acting together
because they're actually very complementary styles of acting.
Both very subtle, nuanced actors, both incredibly precise,
and so I managed about four lines of dialogue
and then 50,000 rounds of ammo.
But just having them face off to me was exciting and a cool opportunity.
PARKER: We actually shot an escalation of that,
where in addition to firing all those guns and all those rounds of ammunition,
Magneto then pulls a series of hand grenades off the wall
and pulls their pins while protecting himself behind a barrier.
It was great, it was really fun, but as great as it was,
it ultimately felt slightly redundant to what we'd already done.
So, we decided to drop it, but cool idea.
KINBERG: Yeah. He also kind of does it in X-Men 2.
PARKER: Yeah.
I'm so sorry for what I did to you.
I know.
All I ever wanted was to protect you
KINBERG: This was amazing, I have to say, to Mauro's credit,
because all of that flaring that's happening behind her,
which would ordinarily be-
this kind of level of flaring would be a visual effect
was... we got there on the day and that's the way it looked.
The light was coming through the window.
We were using lenses that caught them and all of this is real.
That's a real flare. That's a real flare.
We overlit the background there.
PARKER: Summer also did a great job of this.
KINBERG: Yeah, she did. She's a really great young actress.
I forgive you.
PARKER: That was back in our abandoned hospital location.
KINBERG: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
♪♪
PARKER: Another challenge of the train sequence
is you can't shoot it chronologically.
So, you also have to... as you're shooting out of order,
you've got to destress or put back,
so whether it's pre-fight and damage or not,
it's something that took a tremendous amount of thoughtful management
on the part of the art department and the AD's and props
and making sure that it all would track when we put it into the proper sequence.
KINBERG: This was one of the visual effects
that I was the most suspicious of and terrified of which were these bubbles.
I mean, that's a pretty extraordinary visual effects shot
and obviously incredibly intricate, but these bubbles,
the notion of them being protected by bubbles,
I have seen work terribly in movies before,
some of which I've even worked on.
And yet these guys found a way to make those all seem organic
and I guess realistic, for lack of a better description, and cool.
And it was not an easy thing to do,
because it really was a series of iterations
so that they didn't just feel like they were stuck in a plastic,
you know, "I'm a bubble boy."
♪♪
PARKER: Another really unique location we found in the outskirts of Montréal
and then art department and Michele dressed really extensively
both the train bodies and a lot of other... all these fires,
and to serve as the... sort of the final staging ground.
(breathing hard)
KINBERG: Like the smoke behind Magneto
is a visual effect there and really powerful.
In fact, all those cutaways... almost all those cutaways,
the cutaway to Magneto, the cutaway to Beast that you saw,
is those guys on a sound stage and a green screen
with just set extension behind them.
♪♪
KINBERG: And this action sequence was one-
we had two really great second unit directors.
Guy Norris, originally,
who was the stunt coordinator on the most recent Mad Max,
and then Brian Smrz, who'd been a stunt coordinator for us
and a second unit director on so many of the X-Men movies
came in and helped with this ending.
And this was just a really nicely choreographed sequence,
then, obviously, enhanced by visual effects that are different
than the visual effects we've ever seen in these X-Men before.
That shot of the camera on a cable going flying toward her and bouncing back
was something that Brian Smrz and I talked about
because it's something he did in the Lady Deathstrike-Wolverine fight in X2.
And I always loved the way it sort of went slamming toward them
and just slightly bounced back.
There was just something even more visceral about it.
But this is just really cool visual effects work the guys created.
PARKER: And right down to the last second.
KINBERG: Yeah.
Still amazed that Jessica ran in these heels.
(KINBERG chuckles)
KINBERG: There's very little that Jessica Chastain cannot do.
PARKER: That is true.
KINBERG: I am not sure I have discovered anything yet.
But I am still actively searching for it.
And this was a shot that I always envisioned
as a shot I wanted to do which is a 360 around them, obviously, or 780
or however many times it rotates around them.
And to see it first empower Jessica's character,
and then to see her start to deteriorate I thought would be interesting to do.
And the visual effects guys... it's a challenge for the visual effects guys,
it's a very long shot, obviously, and they did a really great job of it.
Jean!
PARKER: Really hard moment but really effectively done, I think,
where you're dealing with such cosmic forces
and yet you're playing a really intimate moment
between Scott and Jean, and a pretty important one,
because obviously it has a lot to do with informing the choice she's made.
And it's a credit, I think, to Simon
that you were able to find that within that much visual noise.
KINBERG: Well, and a lot of it was taking down the visual noise, you know?
Just protecting her face enough, her eyes enough,
so that you could really see her gesticulating and feeling those moments.
Jean!
No.
Jean!
♪♪
KINBERG: And ultimately, you know, if you know the Dark Phoenix Saga
and even if you just are someone that understands drama
and given all she's done,
you know that there's some element of sacrifice
that's going to be necessary at the end of... at the end of the story.
And I felt like one of the things that was really important about this movie,
not just because she's a female character
but also because she's a female character
is that the notion of emotions making you weak, I wanted to flip.
I wanted it to be that emotions are something that make you strong.
And I think we live in a world now where instead of people feeling
as though emotions are something to be afraid of,
they're something to be embraced.
And this moment where she really goes... obviously explodes and then goes Phoenix
was something we really, really, really worked on
to be defined and yet not so defined
that all of a sudden you were in a different kind of science fiction film.
And so, there's still a level of subtlety and nuance to it.
♪♪
But if you know the comics or you just remember the title,
it's clearly a Phoenix and that I felt was important
because it indicates that she's not exactly gone,
that she has evolved into a different kind of entity.
And Charles says that here.
She's free.
KINBERG: And then she says it in her monologue to come.
And this was all on the location.
Some of these fires are visual effects fires.
But most of this is real, just taken from the day.
♪♪
KINBERG: Back on our location where we started the movie.
And this sign, for people that know the comics well, is...
was not a creation of mine.
In the comics, it does actually turn into...
the Jean Grey school, eventually.
I am not simply what others want me to be.
KINBERG: And this was another place, just like the opening,
where we debated who should be speaking.
At one point, it was the president, at one point, it was Charles,
and ultimately, we felt like this is Jean's movie
and Jean has evolved into a larger entity
that has a sort of wisdom greater than all of theirs.
And so, she could be this disembodied voice
and give you a feeling of continuation.
PARKER: That's another thing I like about this ending
is that while some of the characters have evolved
into the things you hoped they would... certainly Hank, Scott, Storm as teachers
and Hank is now head of the school,
there's a sense that some of the characters
have been irrevocably changed.
Certainly, that's the way we're meant to feel about Charles.
And that goes back to that notion of consequence
that we were talking about earlier
and just the degree to which we sort of wanted to make sure
we were trying to do something that we hadn't done
and that felt different for the audience.
And felt like we were pushing the characters
further along in their complex journeys.
And that's what these scenes are trying to do.
(speaking French)
KINBERG: This, I think, is in fact the last scene that we ever shot.
PARKER: Mm-hmm.
And if you remember, it was a challenging day.
KINBERG: Yeah. I do remember. Noisy, too.
PARKER: Yeah.
Came to see an old friend.
KINBERG: I just love in the cycle of X-Men...
in all of the X-Men movies,
but especially in the cycle of the X-Men First Class movies,
this notion that these guys started as strangers, became enemies,
and by the end become brothers is a very emotional journey to me
over the span of six, eight hours of storytelling.
And if you look back on X-Men First Class
and you look at how young these guys looked
and they're still obviously very young men
but I mean they looked like babies, especially James.
They were guys in their 20s and now they're guys in their late 30s, 40,
and I feel like they have matured with the franchise.
And this idea that they are all that's left at the end for one another
was something that I felt was a really strong way to end the movie
without making the end of the movie about them.
It just was simply a sort of come full circle
about the fact that strangers have become family,
have broken apart and yet ultimately, remain family.
I'll go easy on you.
No, you won't.
(chuckles)
- PARKER: I love that you did it over... - KINBERG: The chess.
PARKER: Yeah, the chessboard.
♪♪
KINBERG: Montréal looks a lot like Paris
when you throw the Eiffel Tower in the background.
PARKER: Giving away all our secrets.
KINBERG: Yeah, well.
And then this we wanted it to be subtle but, you know, pronounced.
It's not exactly the spinning top in Inception
but it's also not super obvious.
And there you have it. That's me. That's me and Hutch.
And these are all the other people that were our partners on the movie.
Stan Lee obviously is, uh, the creator of all of this,
and sadly passed away while we were completing the movie,
but left this extraordinary legacy.
And I'm very proud that we are a part of that legacy.
PARKER: Yeah, hear, hear.
KINBERG: I think maybe since these credits are another hour and a half long,
um, it's a good opportunity for us to talk about...
we've talked about the people that worked on this film,
but just to talk about the fact that we've been very blessed
to be part of this legacy ourselves
and to get to play in the world of the X-Men.
You know, I grew up reading X-Men comics,
uh, watchin' the cartoons as well actually,
and didn't think that I would see an X-Men movie when I was a kid,
certainly didn't think I'd be a part of it.
So to watch both as an audience member
and then in these last 15 years or so...
and it goes back even further for you, Hutch, as an executive,
to be a part of building this legacy, to tell this story, has been amazing.
And... I think one of the things that we've been able to do
is because these characters are so rich, each of the movies is different
because we've been able to explore different aspects,
different colors, different... different corners of the characters.
And it's always been... I know for you, Hutch,
as you and I have worked together on however many of these we have now,
for you it's always been character first.
What's this movie about thematically?
What's it about emotionally?
And we found that in this, and really probably drilled in deeper,
at least in the mainland X-Men movies,
drilled in deeper than we have in the past.
And so in a way it feels kind of like...
we talked about this in the very beginning.
It's a culmination of however many X-Men movies
and especially this cycle of X-Men First Class movies of these characters,
these actors who were strangers when we started whatever it was...
seven, eight, nine years ago...
who became friends, who became family members,
who were ripped apart as characters at least,
who were pulled apart in terms of just life,
on the other sides of the globe.
And this is the film where they're finally sort of most tested as a family
and then ultimately come back together as a family
that it just felt like this... this natural culmination of storytelling.
PARKER: Yeah.
♪♪
PARKER: And a credit, as you said earlier, to the power of the underlying material.
To me the richness and the breadth of all these movies is a credit to that.
And it's invited remarkable filmmakers to come to the table
and bring their different instincts to the material.
It's also been really fun to watch
the way these movies have evolved from the first X-Men,
and what I think Bryan did so remarkably
in introducing that radical tone, opening in Auschwitz
which was such a bold move, to what we saw in Dark Knight,
or what Marvel has done now so consistently with Avengers,
and others and then you with Deadpool and Logan.
It's just been so much fun to explore all these different facets
of these characters and different tonalities,
and get to live within the story world of the X-Men comics.
Pretty remarkable journey.
KINBERG: Yeah. No, and I think the thing that's been fun
in addition to obviously being able to explore these characters
that for me were just...
lived in my imagination and on the page when I was a kid,
is that something that we've tried to do so much in this franchise,
which isn't necessarily done in others,
is each time sort of create a different subgenre of the comic book genre.
You know, in the way that X-Men First Class,
let's say, was a spy movie and Apocalypse was a disaster movie.
And Days of Future Past was obviously a time travel movie.
And for me this is very much a psychological thriller.
And so with each of these movies,
and Logan was a western and Deadpool is a R-rated comedy,
it's given filmmakers, and even us as the filmmakers,
consistently, from movie to movie, it's given us a chance
to explore sometimes genres that aren't explored anymore.
Nobody's making westerns for the big screen these days.
Not a lotta people are even making R-rated comedies, psychological thrillers.
And all of the genres I was just talking about are rarely made these days,
and to be able to make them
under the umbrella of a comic book adaptation or a superhero franchise
just gives you the opportunity to really play and be creative.
And I think for audiences it's part of what they love about these movies,
is it's not just another chapter or another episode of something they know,
it is a new treatment of characters they love.
And so they come back.
And it's part of the reason why it's become the most dominant,
popular genre in film over the last decade or so.
PARKER: Yeah, I think that's true.
And as we're watchin' the credits roll,
also I have to say a special thanks, really, to FOX,
and Tom Rothman, who initially championed this franchise,
and the incredible opportunities that they gave all of us
who've gotten to work on these movies. It's a powerful legacy.
It's kinda the... I guess the end of that chapter.
Kind of an honor to get here... to sit here and chat about it.
KINBERG: Yeah, for sure.
And I think, you know, ultimately it was a coincidence,
but the fact that the end of that cycle
is the most beloved, popular, complex, challenging of the X-Men stories
and a story that perhaps we didn't get as right as we wanted to,
I can say as the co-writer of it at least...
with X-Men 3, the fact that we got a chance to go back and tell this story,
and tell it in a way that was more true to the essence of the original comic
also feels like this sort of full circle in the experience of making X-Men movies,
which I think is valuable, too. And you're right.
We've always had these incredible partners at the studio,
Jim Gianopulos, Emma Watts, who's been incredibly involved
especially in the last three or four of these movies
and in Logan and in Deadpool.
It's just been a... we've become this little family.
The actors have become a family. A lot of the crew have become a family.
You and I have become brothers and partners in this.
And, so, it's fun... it was fun every day to come to set,
even when it was challenging. It was a privilege.
- I think one that we saw a privilege too. - PARKER: Yeah, for sure.
KINBERG: And it is... I say as a fan of the X-Men,
and I would've said this after X-Men 3,
I'm excited to see what the future holds for the X-Men.
PARKER: Me too.
Me too. Incredibly rich world,
and we'll be excited to see how they choose to explore it.
KINBERG: Yeah. And the possibilities are quite limitless
when you read the comics
and you know that there are literally thousands of powerful characters
in the source material,
you know that there's so many different ways you can go
and so many great story lines have yet to be explored by the films.
It'll be really great.
This is also looking at the people being thanked,
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Len Wein, John Byrne.
Those are the people that actually created,
gave birth to, nurtured, raised the X-Men.
And we have the good fortune of being able to sort of babysit them
through however many movies we've worked on now.
But those were the, those were the true parents of the X-Men.
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