SCREENWRITER SIMON KINBERG TALKS X-MEN: THE LAST STAND
posted by: George             source: iF Magazine

This is a great interview done by iF Magazine. It gives some great insight into a lot of the reasons the X3 story went the way it did. The answer to the "Where the hell is Gambit" question is here as well as "WTF, where's Nightcrawler". What Kinberg tells iF makes sense, but my opinion is that this movie went wrong when Bryan and his team left. These guys did a decent job but the fact that the studio rushed it didn't help matters either. Check out parts 1 & 2 of the interview below and post your thoughts.

As posted in iF Magazine:

Love it or hate it, call it a box office flop even though it broke records, X-MEN: THE LAST STAND has certainly made an impact at the box office and in the hearts of comic book fans everywhere.  One of the men directly responsible for that is screenwriter Simon Kinberg who together with his writing partner Zak Penn were with the project from the beginning. 

Kinberg chatted with iF to dispel rumors of an abandoned script, what it took to research the movie, and what X-MEN characters they want to include but didnt have room.

iF MAGAZINE: Were you brought in after one whole version of the film had been rejected?

SIMON KINBERG: No. Actually, Zak [Penn] and I were brought in separately.  Bryan Singer had left to do SUPERMAN and Bryan took his writers with him to work on SUPERMAN. They had talked with Fox about a general direction for X3, but they had never written an outline, and they had certainly never written a script.  Fox hired me about a month after Bryan left to start to write the script.  They wanted to start production in July of the following year.  I had seven or eight months to go from start to finish to have the script ready to go into production. I started writing for a couple months, and Fox did what many studios do now especially on these big tent-pole films, which is they hired another writer to write a separate simultaneous draft.  They had done that with FANTASTIC FOUR, and Warner Bros has done that on several of their superhero movies.  What happens 99 out of 100 times, is different writers write different drafts, and then another writer is hired to create a Frankenstein draft that combines all of the different and best elements of each separate draft.  That was the path we would have been on, but Zak and I, instead of competing and looking over our shoulders, contacted each other and decided to write the script together.  Given the short time frame, and the fact that both of us are collaborative guys, we had the same sort of sensibilities about this movie.  In January or February of last year Zak and I decided to join forces and become a proper writing team. Wed never met before, let alone worked together.

We started doing outlines and started writing a draft together and then in February of last year Matthew Vaughn was hired to be the director of the film.  We worked incredibly close with Matthew, and wrote a very fast sort of structural draft so they could budget and start prepping the movie.  The dialogue and nuances of it werent there yet, but certainly the structure of it was.  We worked with him for three or four months, and then Matthew ended up leaving the movie for personal reasons in June or July.  The movie was hurtling towards production, and they needed a director to come in with about six to eight weeks of prep, and make the it work. 

Brett was one of the only directors that the cast felt strongly about, and who was willing to take on that very daunting challenge.

iF: There were rumors that there was a Sentinel script at the time, is that true?

KINBERG: There never was a Sentinel script that veered away from the story we ended up with.  I have no idea where the rumors came from, but it may have something to do with the Sentinel in the danger room.  It also might have something to do with the fact that there was an earlier draft of X-MEN 2 that had Sentinels in it.

iF: How much research did you do in the writing of the script?

KINBERG: Im a huge X-MEN comic fan, and I grew up a huge X-MEN geek.  So, I had read the vast majority of the comics that were in my lifetime, and I was certainly familiar with the Phoenix Saga.  I went back and re-read the Phoenix comics in great detail.  Not just the [Chris] Claremont saga, but also the other incarnations of the Phoenix over the X-MENs history.  We did a lot of that type of research, and Zak and I photocopied pages that we felt were especially relevant and posted them all over our office. The walls were literally wallpapered with pages of comics. 

iF: You also brought in elements of the most current X-MEN storylines like Joss Whedons ASTONISHING X-MEN as well correct?

KINBERG: One thing that I knew going in was that it was going to be the Dark Phoenix story since Bryan had laid the groundwork for that in X2, but what we didnt know was what the other parallel stories would be.  I think everyone felt that one of the strengths of the first two X-MEN movies was that they had a number of parallel stories.  In many ways the Phoenix story is the emotional A plot of the film, but the political A plot of the film became about the cure.  That was actually a studio executives idea.   One of them had read Joss Whedons gifted run with the mutant cure in it and thought that would be an interesting quandary for the characters.  One thing that youll find when you look online, is that whether fans do or dont like this movie (and the opinions are pretty wildly diverse as you can imagine), they certainly acknowledge that there is a lot of the comics represented in this movie.  I wont claim credit for anything good in the movie except Zak and I are the biggest X-MEN geeks that were anywhere around this film with the exception of Avi Arad.  Zak and I were certainly the ones on set everyday, who were fighting really hard to shoehorn everything into the movie that we loved about the books. 

iF: Was Alan Cumming in the original script as Nightcrawler?

KINBERG: I dont know if Alan backed out or whose decision that was.  There was a draft of the script where Nightcrawler had a cameo but not a big part.  I think the studio felt that either we should give Nightcrawler a major story since he was so well established in X2, or we would do sort of what the comics do, which is to move onto another story with a new set of characters knowing that Nightcrawler is out there in the X-Universe and can possibly return for some other X-MEN movie in the future.  Bryan did such an excellent job with Nightcrawler in X2 both in terms of representing his powers and giving him an emotional arc, that there wasnt much left to do with the character in X3.  It also felt like he might tread a little bit on the terrain of Beast; in terms of similarities in the characters and their political standpoints in terms of dealing with their mutancy.  We ended up jettisoning the character.

iF: Were there any other favorite characters that you wanted to use in X3 that you didnt get to use?

KINBERG: I think the one character we really wanted to find a way to include in the movie, and ultimately just couldnt find a way to do it, was Gambit.  We wrote a cameo for him, and then really felt like it was better to save Gambit and give him a major role in a future X-MEN movie, rather than give him a cameo where fans would be saying "thats all I get of Gambit?"  The plot that we chose for the story, felt like it was so good at introducing Beast and Angel, because of the department of mutant affairs and Warren Worthington the first being the creator of the cure.  It all felt very right and very resonate.  Finding a place for Gambit where he wasnt going to be just one of the team didnt come to us.  We didnt want to introduce a fan favorite character and not be able to do him justice.  There just wasnt enough space in this movie.

iF MAGAZINE: If the film follows true to the comics, did anybody really die or did the studio request that you not kill any of the main characters?

SIMON KINBERG: That was us being entirely true to the comics. The studio was incredibly open to doing whatever was the most dramatic thing to do for the movie. I think they viewed this as the end of a trilogy and potentially the end of this time of X-MEN movie.  There might be spin-offs and young X-MEN movies.  Certainly because of the success of the opening weekend, the studio has to be wondering how they will do an X4 when there arent a whole lot of movies that open at that number.  When we were making the movie, I would say the studio was not only open, but was encouraging of taking out certain characters if that serviced the story. We, as the resident geeks, realized what it meant to kill someone in the Marvel Universe. 

Its a combination of things that influence how big James Marsdens part was in X3.  Certainly him going to do SUPERMAN had a lot to do with it, he couldnt be in two places at one time.  When we sat down and said Jimmy is doing SUPERMAN there was the potential for re-casting Cyclops.  Kitty Pryde was recast; Pyro was recast from the first film. Cyclops wears a visor, so we couldve recast him.  Hes not the sort of iconic celebrity that Hugh or Halle are, but its sort of like recasting someone in the LORD OF THE RINGS movies.  The character is a bigger celebrity than the actor in these types of films.  What we all felt was that in a way, the most dramatic incarnation of the Phoenix story would be to have her wake up and kill her lover.  Past that point in the story, you know no one in a room with her is safe.  If shes literally capable of killing the man she loves right off the bat; then you know there will be no holds barred for the rest of the movie.

Not just Marvel movies but also STAR TREK movies and STAR WARS movies, these kinds of sagas treat death differently. They have fantasy elements to them so death and life are relative terms.  Thats just part of the nature of the genre.

iF: How close to the big bird of fire did you get with Phoenix?

KINBERG: We got very close.  It was a fight, well not really a fight, it was a discussion.  There were some fights but that was a discussion among all the different filmmakers -- meaning the producers, the writers, the director.  There were some of us that thought it should be closer visually to the representation in the comics. I personally really wanted to see, especially at the very end when she goes nova, her as a big bird of fire. I also wanted to potentially see the bird of fire leave her body when Wolverine stabs her at the end.  Both of those things were discussed and explored. John Boone the visual effects coordinator even did some versions of what that would look like.  I think the decision that was made by the vast majority of the people working on the movie, was to try to create the most realistic grounds in tone.  Certainly it was something that Bryan did very well in the first two movies.  In doing so you sacrifice certain things; you sacrifice certain things from the comics.  Certainly in adapting the Dark Phoenix Saga you know that you dont have the Shiar Empire, you dont have Jean destroying planets, you dont have her flying around the solar system.  Its a very different version of Phoenix.  That is less about our own personal taste, and more about wanting to remain true to the tone of the first two films, which are really good movies. 

iF: Have you been approached to continue working in the super hero genre with the next Marvel films?

KINBERG: Yeah, I talk to Avi [Arad] all the time and there are certainly different things whether they are in the X-MEN universe or in other franchises that theyre interested in me doing.  I have to say that after living with the X-MEN for a year and a half now, I mean I really lived on the set of this movie in Vancouver for three and a half months; Im sort of open to taking a little break from comic book adaptations.  Im working on the MR. AND MRS. SMITH TV show, and Im working on this movie called JUMPER with Doug Liman and we start shooting in four weeks.  Im doing a sort of more adult thriller with Nicole Kidman and thatll take the next six to nine months of my life.  On the other side of that, Im not sure what it will include but it might be something involving the X-MEN Universe again, but no immediate plans.  X4 I would certainly be open to doing, and WOLVERINE has a really good writer working on it now, but you never know.