From IGN
by Lucy O’Brien
Director James Mangold isn’t really interested in making a comic book movie. Not in the traditional sense. He’s not really interested in explosions or bombastic action sequences or 3D. He’s not interested in quip-spouting super heroes or nudging his audience in the ribs with a sly wink.
What he is interested in, is character. Mangold, whose previous works include Girl, Interrupted, Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma, is an actor’s director. He’s the man responsible for Angelina Jolie’s Lisa Rowe, Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash and Christian Bale’s Dan Evans. Mangold is unequivocally sincere in his approach and his actors have the Oscars to prove it.
It might seem odd, then, for a director who cut his teeth on character-driven drama to be turning his attention to a comic book franchise, particularly one so established in the pop culture consciousness as The Wolverine. But Mangold is approaching the Marvel poster boy as he would with any of his sociopaths and his addicts; with a confidence that here is a multi-faceted, flawed human, waiting to be probed and exposed.
He just happens to be a mutant.
(Story details on The Wolverine ahead)
“One of the most interesting things about Logan is his immortality,” says Mangold on a sunny Thursday at The Wolverine set in Sydney’s Chinese gardens, near the production’s central home at Fox Studios. “The fact that there’s a kind of exhaustion that sets in when you’re here forever. And I wrote these lines on the back of my script when I first met with Fox: ‘everyone I love will die.’ I felt that the saga I wanted to tell was the story about a man who in a way felt cursed. And everyone he’d ever cared about in the world, whether it be the people he fought with – the X-Men, his wife, or others – had perished.”
It’s a point Mangold returns to many times, this idea of finding Logan not at his iconic yellow and black high but at his most defeated low, with his “tank empty,” as he puts it. “There’s this idea of the ‘ronin’. Which in a sense is exactly what Logan is. A hero without a purpose. A hero without a mission. Does he even have interest in a mission any more? Or is he so bored with them because mankind keeps f*cking up. What’s the point?
“I think that’s a really interesting place to start a film. And a really interesting place for this character to go on a journey.”
Logan’s New Era
The Wolverine doesn’t lend itself easily to an elevator pitch. It’s not an origin story; X-Men Origins: Wolverine already trod that ground. It’s not part of any existing narrative chronology in the Marvel film universe. It’s a reboot where the central star remains the same as the previous films. In fact, the only definitive thing you can say about The Wolverine is that it is a standalone film. While Hollywood’s ruthlessness cannot be discounted in the future, this is not a movie made to birth a ‘The Wolverine’ trilogy. And for Mangold, that’s liberating.
“The Wolverine doesn’t deny the world, but it also is its own film. And in that way, the liberating aspect of the journey to another country, has freed us from the shackles of a lot of standard sequel making. It’s just a movie. A movie on its one from the moment it fades in to the moment it fades out. The aspect that I think we’ve gained from that is we don’t have the burden of doing the origin story. We can start in media res. We can start in action. We can just start telling you a story.”
That story, of course, is based on the classic 1982 Claremont/Miller Wolverine comic book mini-series, which famously took the common portrayal of Wolverine as a bruiser and brawler and turned him into that aforementioned ronin, the Samurai without a master. These days it is widely regarded as one of the most influential Wolverine story-lines, redefining the character as someone grounded by a strong moral code who struggles with his animal nature. The movie adaptation will take the bones of the character arc but update it for a contemporary audience; not least by stripping it of its rampant ‘80s look.
Broadly – and if you don’t want to know anything about the film’s storyline please stop reading now – The Wolverine sees Logan, isolated and in despair, travel to Japan in pursuit of an heiress named Miriko with whom he has fallen in love. There, he must contend with her murderous father Shingen and a female mercenary called Yukio, who is deeply attracted to Logan’s wild nature. The emotional through-line is grounded in Logan’s inner-conflict between his base instincts and his purer self, reflected in the honourable Miriko and the chaotic Yukio. Throw in the yakuza, the seductive villainess Viper and Shingen’s illegitimate son The Silver Samurai, and you’ve got yourself a film that still fits nicely into the ‘comic book movie’ mould but houses a character drama at its heart.
“To me, the idea of exploring the idea of gods,” explains Mangold, “which is what superheroes really are – mutants, superheroes, are all in a sense touched people, bigger-than-people, more than people, immortal people, what’s interesting is to explore that but still be rooting for who they are and what they are and give a sh*t. Because to me, any sequence in the kind of arms race between movies of spectacle; the one way you’re going to be more spectacular is if your audience gives a sh*t. If you’re not just bludgeoning them over the head with sound and fast cuts but if they’re actually emotionally invested in the outcome of the sequence they’re watching.”
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