X-Men: The Last Stand (X-Men 3) (X-Men: The Last Stand)

This is Brett Ratner, director of X-Men: The Last Stand

and I'm here with...

Zak Penn. I am one of the writers...

And Simon Kinberg, the other writer of X-Men: The Last Stand.

I wanted to change this 20th Century Fox logo, but I could not get permission.

- (Zak) We wrote it in as Warner Brothers. - Or 21st Century.

But the X stays. Watch that... Ooh, wasn't that cool?

Now, this is different than the Marvel logo that was in X2.

- Was there a Marvel logo in X2? - Yes.

This is all X-Men comic frames.

And specific to the plot lines of this movie.

So if you freeze-frame each frame one by one, you'll see the entire story.

This is one of the first scenes we wrote, I believe.

That's correct. It sort of frames the entire Dark Phoenix story in one short...

Appropriately, the first scene of the movie as well.

The reason I loved it is because it introduced a back story I wasn't familiar with.

And actually this car is my favourite car.

It was driven by dictators, and Magneto's somewhat of a dictator,

so it was the perfect car for him.

We did a visual effect here. I don't know if you guys know this, but we've aged them...

Sorry, is it aging them? De-aged them by 20 years.

We made 'em look 20 years younger. It was a very complex effect.

How was that done?

We take photos of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen from 20 years ago and kind of...

- (Zak) Do they work with plastic surgeons? - Yes.

- (Zak) That's on set for all the actors. - Even the writers on this one.

Pull their skin back with clothespins.

I love the period costuming here. They did a fantastic job.

They really look like they're from the early '80s.

I thought the parents were great.

I totally believed that they were Jean Grey's parents,

and this little girl, I thought, was a perfect match for a young Jean Grey.

One thing that excited Simon and I about the opportunity to do this scene

is that it establishes a slightly different history for the X-Men.

The idea that Xavier and Magneto started the school together

and that they recruited all these people

and that Jean was the one they were most interested and concerned with.

It's alluded to in X1, actually,

when Xavier says the only other person that knows intimately about Cerebro is Magneto,

cos he helped him build it.

And here you see an example of what makes Jean so compelling to both of them.

Magneto sees the possibilities of her power.

- (Zak) That's Chris Claremont... - And Stan Lee.

Chris is the creator of the Dark Phoenix saga, among other X-Men titles,

which most of you probably know.

I love that line: "I like this one."

Thanks. We wrote that. Me and Simon wrote that.

I write the nouns, Zak writes the verbs.

Or let it control you.

I think that line is a lot more important than some people realise

in terms of the overall structure.

This scene coming up is one of my favourite scenes in the movie.

I felt tonally I did a good job, I must say so myself.

This kid is pretty incredible.

So it was important to me to keep the tone consistent

with what Bryan had done in the first two movies

and make this third movie feel like part of one big movie.

It's like the third part of one big movie.

And I wanted to make sure this scene was not tonally changing what Bryan had done.

The whole vignette structure -

for example, the first movie opening in Auschwitz -

one of the things we liked is the idea of opening with a couple of random scenes

that then reverberate through the script.

As opposed to starting off in a conventional Hollywood way with action scenes.

The father is Michael Murphy, from one of my favourite movies ever, Manhattan.

And in terms of preserving tone, some of it is directing

and some of it is casting - you cast really good actors.

You're hearing John Powell's score,

which I was incredibly happy about and excited about his collaboration.

He really, with his music, kind of shaped and helped create a tone in this movie

and an emotional resonance that I was looking for.

And his music is exciting, but at the same time has a lot of emotion

and a lot of leitmotifs where each... You know, the cure had its own theme,

Dark Phoenix had its own theme, the Brotherhood had their themes...

And they repeated in various forms with different instrumentation,

and I thought he did a brilliant job with the score.

The one shot that I...

Remember that shot of Leech? That was a good shot. Too bad it didn't fit in.

This is a scene that, when I came on the movie, I said to Zak and Simon:

"What have they tried to do in the past that Bryan hasn't been able to accomplish?"

"Something that really is of huge importance to the X-Men fans."

And both of the guys said the Danger Room.

And I said, "Let's try to figure out why it didn't make it into the other two movies."

And not only was it something that was very expensive to do,

but it always felt like it was not connected to the plot because it's just a training room.

And I said, "Then we have to come up with something to connect the dots

and make it more part of the plot."

And I don't know if it was Zak or Simon, but you told me about the fastball special.

- (Zak) I think that was by Simon. - (Brett) Simon.

It was trying to set something up that we can pay off later in the movie.

So we wrote the fastball special into the end of this sequence,

which paid off in the third act.

When the studio read it, they said, "Well..."

And it was the climax of the third act, which is when they take out Magneto.

You needed this set-up, so there was no way they could cut this out,

and we kind of tricked everybody to get this in.

One challenge of these movies is there's so many characters to service and introduce.

This was a great context to introduce all the characters and their powers

fairly quickly, economically.

The other thing fans were obsessed with from the comic is the Sentinels,

and there was no way that Bryan could get the Sentinels in - it was too expensive -

and we got it into the Danger Room.

There was a big resistance against doing any kind of giant robot.

I would like to mention the look of this scene is based on Days of Future Past,

which, if you are a comic-book geek you will know, and that was another nod to the fans.

People know I was a comic-book fan, but I was not an X-Men comic-book fan.

So Zak and Simon were really my teachers in the process,

where I forced them to justify every scene in this movie

because I knew how much judgment I would get from the fans.

I said, "You have to show me where this came from."

So every single scene in this movie has a comic-book reference.

We took Brett to the Philippines for an intensive boot camp,

where we quizzed him on X-Men lore. And he did pretty well.

The leeches got to him after a while, and the mud and the diphtheria, but...

On that last scene, by the way, notice that Cyclops...

It's more that he's being tormented by some sort of psychic message from Jean,

rather than that he's going crazy. Cos some people get confused.

Jimmy's not in much of the movie, but I think his performance is great.

This is a lovely scene.

- Moment for moment, the best performance... - Per capita. Ever.

Per second.

This is a nice scene. I know that's not good DVD commentary, but it's a nice scene.

- (Zak) We'll tell you when it's not nice. - (Simon) Now it's bad. Now it's good again.

Bad...

And here's John Powell's score, which was emotional but not overly sentimental.

- (Zak) Yeah, very subtle here. - (Brett) Very subtle.

Tone is tricky, cos it needs to be emotional, but not schmaltzy.

The writers said, "Brett, Beast has to be hanging upside down."

Kevin Feige deserves a shout-out.

Kevin Feige - Marvel - was adamant about us shooting this scene. And we did it.

This idea that Beast is a cabinet member

is something we came up with early on -

let's not just make him a super-smart guy who's on the team,

let's try to put him somewhere else in the realistic universe of the first two films.

And obviously mutants have been a little better integrated into society.

This is the brilliant work of one of my cinematographers, James Muro.

This is a Steadicam shot, believe it or not. It feels like a dolly.

It's so smooth and he nails it every time. Incredible camera work.

This is one of my... All the Mystique scenes came out incredible.

And one of the best lines of the movie.

Zak and I worked so closely, 99% of this script I can't tell who wrote what,

but there is a line here that Zak wrote that's fantastic.

- (Brett) Which one? - "I don't answer to my slave name."

Zak also wrote this line coming up here: "You pathetic meat sack."

That's definitely a Zak Penn line.

I got a hard time about that, but she delivered it...

Yeah, she killed it. I was not fond of it, personally.

Well, that's what my mom called me when I was a kid. "Pathetic meat sack." So...

Anthony Heald...

Anthony Heald was in Red Dragon - my movie - and in Silence of the Lambs.

He was the doctor in Silence of the Lambs. Great stage actor.

- (Zak) And his twin is great right here. - (Simon) That's not Rebecca Romijn.

Great sound work here.

They gave me one line. You know which line it was?

- They don't even know. - (Zak) No, we don't know.

"In here with us."

- (Zak) I don't like that line. - (Brett) That's the one line you didn't like.

I love that guy, the bald guy. He's in a lot of scenes. I don't know who he is.

- (Zak) He's actually a child, not a bald man. - I believe he has progeria.

The president is played by Josef Sommer,

a fantastic stage actor who was in my movie Family Man.

There's a lot of actors from my other movies. I have a bit of an ensemble...

Yes, you do.

And an entourage.

This shot is from X2. Bryan Singer shot that shot.

Is that true"? My God. Did we do anything in this movie?

I believe Patrick Stewart improv'd this entire scene.

And shot it himself.

Here is our introduction to the lovely Kitty Pryde, played by...

Ellen Page.

They did a great job, whoever the people are who do the effects for these movies.

John Bruno, our visual effects editor.

I love that little effect of the girl who has the power to take notes.

And I like the kid with the paper airplanes.

I don't know if you remember this, guys, but we talked about reintroducing...

One of the greatest scenes in X2 for me was the reintroduction of the powers... Was it X2?

X1 introduced the school and in X2 they reintroduced it.

I said, "What if people hadn't seen X1 and X2?"

"We gotta show people that these kids have powers."

So we tried to do it in very subtle, simple ways.

I promised the fans online that I would mention

you should pay close attention to who the person in that bed is,

because it's not a random person.

I don't know if it'll be revealed on the DVD, but that's my little...

And the nurse is Olivia Williams, one of my favourite actresses from Rushmore.

She flew all the way from England just to do that little scene, which is shot on video.

And that character - Moira MacTaggart - is a big deal in the comic book.

And she is at the funeral later on in the film.

- (Simon) Who is this actress? - (Brett) She looks familiar.

She...

I know she plays Storm, but her name escapes me. But she's really good.

She is.

- Halle Berry. - (Zak) That's right. Good call.

See, subtle things like the airplanes,

just reintroducing the fact that all these kids are mutants and have powers.

And you can see there's a bunch of invisible kids behind them.

Actually, there's the Stepford Cuckoos,

triplet characters from the comic book that Brett threw in as another...

- (Brett) Wink. - This movie is filled with winks to the fans.

- Look, they even walk the same. - I think they are actually triplets.