Ever since officially signing on to direct ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’, Bryan Singer has been pulling together a rather ambitious film. In addition to bringing back the stars of Matthew Vaughn’s ‘X-Men: First Class’, the originator of the X-Men movie franchise has been bringing in his team back into the franchise as well, including Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, and most recently Ellen Page, Shawn Ashmore, and Anna Paquin. With such a large cast and an acclaimed story, the director certainly has a lot to take into consideration when assembling the film, but apparently things are really starting to jive.
In a recent interview with Empire Magazine, Singer sat down to talk about various aspects of ‘Days of Future Past’, which he calls “epic” and declares that “people [don’t] realize how big this movie’s going to be”. The first thing that he touches on is the time travel element of the story. In the original comic by Chris Claremont, Kitty Pryde from the future transfers her mind into her younger self to prevent a moment in history that causes widespread hatred for mutants that spawns encampment similar to that from World War II. Singer’s story will likely change a bit considering how different the movies are from the comics, but he looked to a venerable sci-fi elder for assistance with the this particular aspect of the upcoming X-Men film:
“We’ve cracked it in a way that it makes sense. I had a two-hour conversation with James Cameron about time travel, string theory, multiverses and all that. You have to create your rules and stick with them. That’s why ‘Terminator’ and ‘Back To The Future’ work so well. And there are certain mechanisms in X-Men, certain powers, perceptions and characters, that make this possible.”
Though fans should anticipate that the story would be changed to fit into the X-Men movie universe, Singer claims that he’s heavily drawing from the source material for this one:
“It has a lot of aspects of the comic. The actual comic of ‘Days Of Future Past’ had a whole ton of stuff going on, so it’s like any of these things; you have to distill it. But I think the fans will be pleased that some of the most exciting parts of ‘Days Of Future Past’ are going to be connected to this movie.”
Finally, he touches on the other movies in the franchise and how they’ll fit into this film. Previously, Singer worked on the first two X-Men films, but since his departure from the franchise, things started to slip with ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’ and ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ until Matthew Vaughn came along to make Xavier’s team cool again. Now that he’s back in the driver’s seat, he has some “clean up” to do with Fox’s Marvel franchise:
“I’m taking into account every movie – I’m not just grabbing my first two movies and ‘First Class’ and smashing them together. I’m taking into account the entire universe as it’s been laid out so far on the screen, and really respecting it and trying to work with that. People took things in various directions, so there’s some clean up. But ultimately I’m not just ignoring them either.”
While it’s quite noble of him to try to clean up after Gavin Hood’s uber-mess that was ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’, I’m very curious to see how he remedies the continuity issues that exist in the canon right now. And you know what? I believe in Bryan Singer. I think he can do it. And I’m very excited to see it happen once the movie hits the big screen.
What do you think about Bryan Singer’s massive undertaking? How do you think ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ will turn out? Are there any characters that you want to see return like Kelsey Grammer’s Beast or Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, and many more is scheduled to be released on July 18, 2014.
