Film News
Throwback Thursday: X-Men: First Class
First Class Entertainment
♦Back in Tripwire 0.02, the second of our digital editions from 2013, we interviewed the writers of Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class Ashley Miller and Zach Stenz and with X-Men: Apocalypse out now in the cinema, we thought it would be appropriate to run it…
TRIPWIRE caught up with Miller and Stenz at MCM London Expo in Docklands in May to discuss the movie…
TW: The film has got four screen credits. How does that break down?
ASHLEY MILLER: In terms of the work, it’s one of those things that’s very tough to say ‘I can claim this piece of the pie and this piece goes to Jane [Goldman] and this piece came from Bryan Singer.’ It doesn’t quit work out that way because when you’re putting together a film, when you’re creating a script for a film or even for a TV show, there’s a continuum of work. So you can find a footprint of one writer in different ways to different degrees in any scene; from a single line of dialogue to the structure of the scene to the entire scene possibly although not necessarily the whole lot. So in a way answering the question and saying: ‘You know that scene that you love that’s about 45 minutes in and it was amazing and exciting and everybody thought it was awesome? That was all us.’ Answering in that way really isn’t fair to Jane and Matt.
TW: So what you’re saying is that it was very collaborative?
AM: It was both collaborative and it was something that the final script had earlier material from the same script and even material folded in from another project. So when the script went to arbitration, there were seven different writing entities in contention and there simply aren’t enough credits for everyone. So the Writer’s Guild has to make the determination of who they thought did the most that rose to the level of credits. So there are people, some of whose material ended up in the final version that unfortunately didn’t rise to the level of credits.
ZACH STENTZ: And once again even that’s on a continuum. Even if you’re reaching back to 2005 to David Goyer doing a rewrite on Sheldon Turner’s Magneto script, and you’re saying: ‘Wow, that is a great little scene and I’d love that line of dialogue and that’s going to go in,’ again it’s David’s footprint and presence
is felt in that scene but writing is rewriting whether you’re talking about a single writer or whether you’re talking about writers on a list. You’re getting everything ready to make a film and the film is really the final draft. That’s the thing that you’re making. Nobody makes a script, you make a movie.
TW: How much of the original Magneto film made it into this film?
ZS: In terms of what was specifically part of that project, it was legitimate to consider that material because I’d say that there were certainly pieces especially towards the beginning of the film that really found their origins as scenes in that project. But the deeper you go into the film, the more it diverges and the more it doesn’t resemble that. There are definitely moments that you can point to and go ‘Oh, that was David or that came from this draft.’ But once he and Charles meet up, it’s a completely different movie.
TW: So stepping back a little bit, even further, with the history of X-Men in different media over the years. How did you start to put together a universe for this particular movie?
AM: Step one, you look at what has been defined for the film universe. That’s ground zero for what this film has got to be. And the two movies that we looked at and most tried to serve were X-Men and X2 because that’s the film universe. That’s the film universe continuity and everything else is up for grabs. Everything else is about how do you feel as a fan? How can you make little bits of the mythology that might not fit exactly with the continuity that’s been established, fit in a way that pleases you, that is recognisable to you as a fan and doesn’t change the meaning of what those things are. We had Bryan’s story which was very much a Connery Bond movie, I think more From Russia With Love than Thunderball. I think the final movie became Thunderball almost literally at one point. So we had that and we had those two films and then it was pick your mutants. There’s lots of things that enter into it and certainly the Magneto script looked back at a lot of different pieces of the Magneto history. You have to choose your battles. And then when you’re sitting down and wrestling the page, you’ve just got to tell the story. You’ve got to decide who’s Charles and who’s Erik, what story are we telling about them, how do they meet?
TW: Is there a way that you took the current popularity of certain characters and incorporated that? For example, Emma Frost was nobody 15 years ago but now she’s very popular…
ZS: I don’t think that’s necessarily because of who’s popular now. I think it was much more driven by who’s serving the story and in the case of…it’s come out in interviews that until fairly late in the game Sunspot was going to be in the movie and we remember that we had a whole conversation with Bryan Singer where he was saying: ‘I see Sebastian Shaw and he has Sunspot on one side and Emma Frost on the other because I like the idea of Fire and Ice as his two assistants’ and so there are a lot of other things besides who’s popular right now that go into who ends up in it.
AM: That and if you’re starting with the Hellfire Club as your bad guys and you’re dealing with Sebastian Shaw, you’ve got to have Emma Frost. Nobody really knows who the hell Sebastian Shaw is. There’s no groundswell of support for Sebastian Shaw…
ZS: They know who he is. He’s the guy with the Dark Vader mask…
AM: We love Emma Frost and it was fun writing Emma Frost but she was there because Bryan loved the idea of Emma Frost but mainly Bryan loved the idea of the Hellfire Club which is a great idea.
TW: Are you X-Men fans?
ZS: Yes big-time fans.
TW: Who were your favourite characters to write?
AM: When we started out, I would say that Erik was probably the most interesting to write because he’s the most internal and he’s the most dramatic. On paper, he’s got the biggest arc, it’s a tragic arc and it’s an interesting arc. It’s very emotional and it’s tragic because you know how it’s going to end. You know that this guy isn’t going to be the anti-hero like Wolverine who turns out to be a hero. He’s the anti-hero who goes the other way and becomes a villain. And it’s heartbreaking. When you get into writing the script, Charles becomes very interesting because you don’t want to start Charles as Patrick Stewart with hair…
ZS: Patrick Stewart never had hair…
AM: You want to start Charles as the guy who you meet in that bar when he’s picking up the girls. That guy is swinging and you love that guy and you want to take a little bit of the swing out of him and you want to see how Erik does that in a way. Number one, bringing a sort of seriousness to Charles and saying: ‘Look you live up here and I live down here. And down here is real and up here is bullshit. And you need to live down here or people are going to die.’ And I think that’s an interesting move for a character. And in a lot of ways by the time you’re through the script, Erik has moved THIS much but Charles has moved a lot more. And you realise that he’s the protagonist and if you see that on film it’s pretty much a movie about Charles Xavier. It’s certainly Erik’s movie as well but I think what McAvoy does is fascinating in taking that guy who starts off as ‘Hey’ and becomes the man who’s pleading with Erik on the beach. That’s quite something and that was quite something to write.
TW: Did you find it difficult to write because it’s not usual to have two leading men in the way that this movie does and was it difficult to find a balance between them because it’s pulled off well?
ZS: Bizarrely it was not difficult because the dirty little secret of this movie is that it’s a tragic bromance and that’s not a coincidence. Bryan [Singer] has said and he told us that his model for this was JJ’s Star Trek. And if you look at that, that’s essentially structured as a happy bromance. It’s a romantic comedy. Two characters meet each other, they hate each other at first but over the course of the movie, they realise they can do great things together if only they can not kill each other. And this is the opposite: it’s two characters who meet and love each other but are driven apart by a combination of circumstance and the fact that Erik can never get over the trauma of what was inflicted upon him when he was a child. So it’s the tragic story of two characters who are meant to be together and can’t be together. So when you’re writing a relationship it becomes really easy to treat it as this story of two protagonists.
TW: So how much pressure was there for you as writers to make everything gel since this is a reboot?
AM: There was enormous pressure and I think the point we were brought onto the project, the pressure wasn’t ‘Please guys, make this work creatively’, it was ‘Holy shit, guys! We’ve got to have a movie out in a year! Please give us a script that we can shoot.’ So that was the pressure. The pressure for ‘Oh Dear God, make it great.’ Nobody says ‘Let’s make a shitty movie. Boys, go to town!’ Obviously the studio wanted a movie that worked. Bryan [Singer] wanted a great film, to write a movie that was great but hopefully worked. So there was a lot of pressure in that regard. There was pressure from all different directions and it was a very tight schedule to get it written and get it ready and then for Matthew [Vaughn] to get it prepped. But internally as fans we felt a lot of pressure and the way that X-Men and X2 are great movies. I think the way that you get over that pressure and you put that pressure aside is 1)you remember that it’s a job and that’s where our experience in TV came from. And 2) you just let the characters do their thing and once we understood who they were, once we understood what the emotions of that were, we just let that carry the writing and that got us through.
It’s amazing how even if little individual scenes don’t work and individual bits of action don’t quite work, you can go back and revise. When people read a script, when the emotions are there and the characters in that story feel right, then they go ‘Okay, I get that. That’s a movie.’
ZS: And when you’re writing it at first, when you’re looking at your copy of Final Draft up on the computer and you see names like Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr and things like that and it’s like ‘Who the hell am I to be writing these characters?’ But when you’re into the process you very quickly forget about it and as long as you know in this particular script who they are, they could be Bob and George…They’re just the characters that you’re writing.
TW: What about a sequel?
AM: I don’t know but I see Watergate. It’s 1970s. What do you think?
ZS: No it’s Studio 54.
AM: There’s a place for Dazzler in the sequel.
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