Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 35 Things We Learned from James Mangold’s Logan Commentary. Here are three of my favorites…
1. He and Hugh Jackman began thinking about a follow-up immediately after completing 2013’s The Wolverine, and they knew it would most likely “bring the curtain down on his character.” They both agreed that superhero films in general had grown repetitious and wanted to do “something different, something deeper.”
2. The first thought on the road to crafting the story here was “what is Wolverine frightened of? What is Logan afraid of?” They wanted his final story to be the thing that scares him the most, and after scouring the comics he realized there was no villain or end-of-the-world scenario that would unsettle Wolverine. “The answer that came to me was love. Love scares him, intimacy scares him, being dependent on others scares him, being vulnerable scares him.”
10. Some people assumed Mangold’s interest in the R-rating was that he’d be able to increase the level and detail of violence, foul language, and sexual references, “and in many ways all those things were attractive.” His biggest reason for going this route though “was a little more complicated than that.” An adult-rated film means the studio won’t make an effort to market the film to children with Happy Meals and toy tie-ins, and “what does that mean to the filmmaker?” He says what it changes for the writers/director is that no one at the studio is reading the script on a marketing level and then dictating editing choices to ensure it plays well to kids. “The ideas of the film are allowed to be more sophisticated because you’re no longer having to pace up the movie, edit it faster, make it more charming or colorful for a nine year old’s attention span. The film becomes what I had hoped for which is a comic book film for adults.”
