The Wolverine Director Mangold Modeled Film on The Outlaw Josey Wales

James Mangold, director of the forthcoming X-Men tie-in film The Wolverine, sat down with [...]

Hugh Jackman as The Wolverine

James Mangold, director of the forthcoming X-Men tie-in film The Wolverine, sat down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss the film, what it means for the franchise and the character, and how closely-adapted it will be from the Chris Claremont-Frank Miller source material. It's the second such conversation he's had in a few days, of course, but this time around we got a better sense for where Logan is as a character in the piece. "What brings him [to Japan] is an old ally in Japan," Mangold told the magazine. "We find Logan in a moment of tremendous disillusionment. We find him estranged. One of the models I used working on the film was The Outlaw Josey Wales. You find Logan and his love is gone, his mentors are gone, many of his friends are gone, his own sense of purpose – what am I doing, why do I bother – and his exhaustion is high. He has lived a long time, and he's tired. He's tired of the pain." That, of course, ties in with what was said earlier this week about a version of Logan who has been stripped of his support network of the X-Men but who retains the baggage that comes with having been part of a group like that and lived through those experiences. Xavier and Jean Grey are both gone by the time The Wolverine begins, and Logan is dealing with those and other losses, from the sound of it. "What I wrote on the back of the script when I first read it was 'Everyone I love will die.' The story I've been telling, he enters it believing that. Therefore he's living in a kind of isolation. He gets drawn to Japan by an old friendship and then finds himself in a labyrinth of deceit, caught up in the agendas of mobsters, of wealth, and other powers we come to understand." On that same note, he added, "For me, watching this decade of superhero films and having not participated while I was making other movies, what was interesting to me – and it had not been done, with a few exceptions – was to be free to tell a real story of an immortal character. Too often these films are burdened with origin stories that produce a very unwieldy script, because you spend half the film creating the character and then you only have half the film to then tell a story about the character. When stepping into a franchise, one of the scary things – for a person in my position – is that it's like directing the fourth episode of a TV series, and everything is on autopilot. They're doing what they're going to do, and what are you really going to bring to it?" Mangold said that he's a lifelong comic book fan who was happy to get the job when Darren Aranofsky, the previous director, dropped out of the project. Aranofsky, of course, is one of a handful of directors who almost rebooted the Batman franchise before Warner Brothers landed on Christopher Nolan for Batman Begins. "I couldn't tell you why they hired me, but I can tell you why I wanted it. I have a long friendship with Hugh Jackman. [They made the 2001 romantic comedy Kate & Leopold together.] And I'm a huge comic book collector. When I was a kid, I had both Marvel and DC. I was my own librarian. I made card files. I had origin stories of all the characters, and cross-referenced when they appeared in other comic books. I was full on." He added, "What I felt like I hadn't seen as a comic book fan, was I felt I hadn't seen Logan and his rage. That sense of darkness. Without getting into the [2009] Wolverine movie, which is an origin story, with the X-Men movies he's part of a team, so he gets little scenelets, but they're essentially team movies. The liberty I have making a film like this is I can find him.  I'm not cutting away to catch you up on any of the Thunderbird team members. It's his emotional experience, his trajectory, his sense of loss, and his own ambivalence about his powers and talents." That said, Mangold said, even though it's tempting to turn every superhero into a megabucks action extravaganza, The Wolverine will bring character and heart to the fore, in order to distinguish itself in a marketplace where it's competing against a handful of superhero films just in the same year it's being released. "A fantasy film is often improved by some kind of human reality," Mangold said. "What makes them hard to sit through is that the modern-day tentpole film has become a lot of fast cutting and an incredible amount of money spent generating effects. What are we left with? We're left with what we see – a kind of inundation, a head-banging barrage in which they keep turning the volume up on the mix, and flying things at you faster in the hope that it keeps you in your seat. For me, the idea of making a film with hardcore action, with physical action like I grew up reading in the comic books, but also with a heart – and this character has great heart – to me, it's no different from making a western. Or a cop film."

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