Yesterday, 20th Century Fox gave X-Men fans our first look at next year’s time-travelling mutant epic X-Men: Days of Future Past thanks to the first teaser trailer for the Bryan Singer-helmed sequel, and now the director who originally launched the X-Men franchise back in 2000 has offered up some further insight, captioning a number of screenshots from the trailer for Empire Online….
“The grey in the hair is something I took from X-Men Days of Future Past, it’s a look in the comic. “I liked it, even though he hasn’t really aged physically it’s something that shows how tough things have gotten in the future, and brought that out in him and given him a little more world-weariness.”
“She’s one of the last surviving X-Men in this post-apocalyptic world. She’s part of that with Wolverine and Charles and Magneto, they’re some of the last folk standing from the original X-Men. They’re at the spearhead of this mission, this last chance at saving the world. This is their only hope, their mission into time. Can you actually go back and affect time? Can you go back and change things or will time correct itself? Will history fight you back and is your destiny pre-determined or can you change it?“
“They’re on the run. There’s no organisation. It’s all been shattered. Most of them have been hunted down. Most of them are dead.“
“They’re not really fresh recruits. They’re more refugees that are living day to day in this hideously ruined world. They don’t have much hope in the future. They’re on the run and they join forces with the remaining X-Men to try to do this one last attempt at fixing the world.“
“There’s a line in the movie, ‘he’s always had a way with guns’. That’s how he crippled Xavier, and he’s such a powerful mutant but in this particular moment he’s holding a gun and I like that. He’s a product of the Second World War and he knows how to use a gun as much as he does his powers.”
“[Colossus] may be his human form in that shot, I’m not sure. By that time in the sequence he may actually be metal but I have no visual effects done! So for that shot you just get what’s on the set – a big, live, real explosion. No CGI yet. We’re in process on very elaborate effects but there’s really none of them done except for a couple of backdrops and a couple of shots I could slide in.“
“He doesn’t have his metal yet in 1973.” – Although with William Stryker in the film once again, I’m guessing that’s going to change…
“When I try to direct an actor, you always try to give them a sense of who they were as young men, who they were in their past lives, and in my imagination I always had that [with Charles and Erik]. “I was able to introduce those notions in X-Men: First Class but to actually have them performing simultaneously on screen, that was a real thrill and a challenge.”
“It’s an abstract scene, without giving away its origin and how it happens. It’s a trippy scene, it has a bit of 70s style in it and the entire scene involved a lot of interesting practical photography using mirrors and other things. It was fun to shoot, and it was great to get the two actors together.
I did get goosebumps. I’ve got a picture on my iPhone of the two of them talking to each other. These moments need to be photographed.“
Meanwhile, speaking to the magazine, Singer has also revealed how the whole time travel angle works:
“The future’s about 25, 30 percent of the movie. The past is most of it. It’s about figuring your rules and sticking to them. The principle I looked at is this theory that until an object is observed, it hasn’t really happened yet. The time-traveller whose consciousness travels through time I call The Observer, and until The Observer returns to where he travelled from, the result hasn’t occurred yet. So he can muck about in the past and it isn’t until he snaps back that the new future is set. As a result, we’re able to have parallel action, and there’s an underlying tension because there’s always that threat Wolverine’s consciousness could return and leave the world in an even darker place.“
X-Men: Days of Future Past is set to open on May 23rd, 2014 with X-Men veterans Hugh Jackman (Wolverine), Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique), James McAvoy (Professor X), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Patrick Stewart (Professor X), Ian McKellen (Magneto), Lucas Till (Havok), Halle Berry (Storm), Anna Paquin (Rogue), Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde), Shawn Ashmore (Iceman) and Daniel Cudmore (Colossus) joined in the cast by franchise newcomers Evan Peters (American Horror Story) as Quicksilver, Booboo Stewart (The Twilight Saga: Eclipse) as Warpath, Omar Sy (The Intouchables) as Bishop, Fan Binbing (Iron Man 3) as Blink, Adam Canto (The Following) as Sunspot, Josh Helman (Mad Max: Fury Road) as William Stryker, and Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) as Bolivar Trask.
Originally published October 30, 2013. Updated January 18, 2020.
