We wrap up our Wolverine coverage with a special interview with James Mangold. Last week, after theh film premiered in London, we sat down with the director for a chat about bringing the mutant ronin to the screen for a decidely darker adventure...
IMPACT: With The Wolverine you are directing a film that is, technically, the sixth apperance of Hugh Jackman as the character on screen and following a previous 'solo' outing that got decidely mixed reviews. Did you feel the weight of expectation on your shoulders?
JAMES MANGOLD: When people do the same characters or story and maybe even keep the actors the same… it’s almost a bake-off, isn’t it? There is no way around it. Certainly, it’s directorially revealing – good or bad. I’m not saying that somehow I get the best of it, but I was aware that we making 3:10 to Yuma that I was looking at the same story through the eyes of a different director with a different cast. Here you’re looking at a slightly different story, but the same character with the same actor through the eyes of a different director. You can do a helluva lot to change tone without dumping everything. Having made a wildly differently toned picture with Hugh Jackman (Kate and Leopold) he’s an incredibly versatile and capable actor. He had his own agenda – very much matching my own – that he had a hunger to go darker with the character and felt he hadn’t had the chance. In a way, every other X-Men movie has been an ensemble movie feeling. He gets about twelve minutes of the picture to himself. He’s sharing the film with other mutants who have their own stories…
There's also a lot of Japanese influences in this film - not just in physical locations but in style and actual language. In fact there's a very high number of subtitles for a summer tent-pole picture. You shot scenes in both Japense AND English? How important was it to immerse yourself and the audience in that language and culture?
Japanese cinema has been huge to me all my life. Also it’s tied to westerns, which has been another love of mine. I think the western and the samurai pictures are intrinsically kind of balanced. One thing that we were trying to do was make a Wolverine movie that was built on the architecture of a samurai western movie and less so on the architecture of your standard ‘will the world be saved from thus super-villain or alien incursion?’ which is usually the kind of structure that the classic comic-book movie of the last few decades have been about.
One of the great experiences of my life was, once we decided we were making this film… we wanted a real Japanese cast and yet we needed bilingual Japanese actors. I came here to London, I was in New York, I was in Los Angeles and, of course, in Tokyo – reading lots of people. It’s a pretty miraculous cast. Hiroyuki Sanada is someone who I was after from the beginning, He belongs in any film like this. Actually I think this guy was UNDER utilised in this movie – I wish there was more to do with him. He’s a phenomenal actor. Even if I wasn’t making an action film at all, he’s an absolutely phenomenal actor. On top of that, he’s one of the biggest action stars in Japan, not only a great actor in film but also worked out every day in our training facility with the other actors and stunt people. He’s something of a martial arts god in Japan – and justifiably from what I’ve seen of him.
I was terrified that if I’d sent dailies back to Twentieth Century Fox and they were all in Japanese then they’d freak out. I shot the scenes in both Japanese and English, hoping all the time that we’d cut the movie in Japanese and that we wouldn’t have a problem with it later. When I cut the film I showed them the Japanese version and they loved it. You know, the thing about doing the scenes in both Japanese and English was that it helped me stage things with the actors. Obviously, I’d direct them in English and then they’d paly it in English and then we’d convert it back to it’s native language. It helped me because I don’t speak Japanese. It also seemed very organic. It’s always bugged me in more modern films where you have Japanese characters who are alone with each other in Japan, speaking in English. It seems like some very strange affectation now and has done when I’ve seen it in other major movies. It’s a WORLD cinema now. I think we’re all used to different languages being spoken. There’s a gigantic Asian market for movies. I also think it makes it a more interesting movie when a character is dropped into a world where he can’t understand everything that everyone is saying. It makes you focus on making the images more important. I also like the idea of taking a major tent-pole film and having there be a different quality in the film – the audiences being asked to lean in a little bit and work a bit harder and not having EVERYTHING handed to them on a silver spoon, as it were...
There IS definitely a darker tone to this film, a sense that we're getting a much better look at what makes Wolverine / Logan tick rather than jjust an action movie or an ensemble piece...
What was interesting was simply that Hugh wanted something that he hadn’t gotten yet from the picture. He wanted the chance to do something he hadn’t felt he had done. He wanted a chance to deliver to the fans that had come to him wanting to see more of the darkness, more of the rage and the fighting style. His fighting style comes off weird in relation to other mutants. There have been characters that make the clouds open up, another that can make aircraft carriers rise. ‘Snickt!’ doesn’t seem so advanced (laughs). You get him on his own, away from that and suddenly he’s much more bad-ass and his physicality isn’t out-scaled every three seconds by these weather-changing, global-changing, magnet-making other mutants around. Part of it was just giving him the air-space and the air-time in the movie to be his own bad-ass self. I think that was something that Hugh hadn’t had the chance to do. I played it, just as a coach, trying to steer him maybe a little darker. Let Downey Jnr. have the joie-de-vive
This is a film where you get to see a man survive both a nuclear explosion as well as more personal hand-to-hand (claw to claw?) combat. Was it hard to find a through-line... keeping the film both fantastical yet in some ways plausible?
Plausibility in a movie is an interesting question about story-telling. Plausibility in a movie isn’t to do with scientific plausibility… I don’t know if there’s any scientific plausibility in the film. But by putting in the bomb across the bay from the POW camp we gave ourselves a little window. I always think that plausibility for an audience, in terms of action, comes from the little logistical decisions and geographies. That’s also the joy in action to me… when you can understand the geography of a sequence and make it have some kind of sense to you. It’s also one of the toughest things to do. that’s why, I think, people appreciate western and samurai films so much. I think there’s a reason when we watch sports games on television that they don’t cover it all in close-ups. For some reason many film-makers haven't learned that lesson completely, it’s a good way to have lots going on, but not to completely know at the same time. One of the things I very much want the action to do was to actually allow you to follow it. That helps in the plausibility – that you can believe that every action is because of a reaction or a physical thing that another character is doing…
One of the things that can happen when you start planning a sequence on paper is that there’s a temptation for the director to get quite fruity with the camera and start flying through keyholes. With the ability to dream on paper you start planning stuff you’d never do. I wanted to do the action on the film as if it had somehow been shot in a kind of 1970s style action film or Outlaw Josey Wales or French Connection way…. A kind of simplicity and urgency to the action. I’d be saying to our story-boarders ‘Why are you drawing us here, the camera couldn’t be here?’ How would you put a camera here on a train that’s going 300mph? We only had the shots we could’ve taken from a parallel track and another train or from a strapped-down camera on the roof of the bullet train itself, with them.
For a summer blockbuster there was also some independent-like guerilla/opportunistic film-making in downtownTokyo, with REAL crowds, wasn't there?
On the day we were doing that, I was thinking ‘This is madness!’ You only had so long before a cop discovered you. We were stealing it! (laughs) The Japanese production advisors would be saying we literally had five or six minutes before people catch wind of what you’re up to and we’ll have to hop back in the van again. I did feel like I’d come full circle. I didn’t come up through the studio system, I made independent films and made them very much this way. I just didn’t anticipate we’d be doing it on The Wolverine when I signed on. Nonetheless, I was determined to get Japan on the film and sometimes, especially in the Tokyo area. They don’t have a film commission of japan that you can talk to and that could help you deal with police, local businesses…
Though the X-Men movies have gone for a wider audience, there's still a feeling that there could be a strong 'R/18' rated Wolverine movie someday. Is this '15' certificate movie as close as you think we'll get for a while?
There is a ‘R’ or unrated version of The Wolverine that will come out eventually, but I will say that it wasn’t as if we lost a helluva lot. It actually surprised me. I think in many ways, due to the ratings board in the States... it has a very generous idea of the violence you can commit towards mutants. They’re kinda anti-mutant. (;aughs). You can do heinous things to mutants and it’s okay as long as it’s not people… particularly as Logan can eventually recover. I actually think there’s a special cautionary note on the movie: ‘…contains extreme sci-fi violence’ or something. It was their way to allow us to do it. There was a bit more blood in the other version, but not much. There was some violence that we could never have got under a ‘15’, but I just felt the sequence wore out its welcome…
The Wolverine, is unsheathed by Fox at cinemas across the country from today....
Read our review HERE
Read our interview with Wolverine creator Len Wein HERE
