The age of Hugh Jackman playing hirsute living weapon Wolverine has come to a close, and the person chosen to usher him out was James Mangold. The longtime writer-director â known for helming Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma, and the previous Wolvie flick, The Wolverine â crafted this weekendâs superhero tentpole Logan as a gory swan song, filled with hope, regret, and decapitations. Shortly before the movieâs release, we caught up with the booming-voiced Mangold at a Manhattan hotel room to talk about Donald Trumpâs influence on the story, why itâs important to have the female lead be Latina, and whatâs broken in the superhero-movie industry. (Warning, this interview contains major spoilers for Logan.)
Why was it important to have the movie begin along the U.S.âMexico border?
When I first started sketching out what the story would be, the first thing I did was I put Charles in an abandoned Kentucky bourbon factory. He was living inside a distillery tank. And then there was this moment I moved it to the border. I think the political scene at the moment was already influencing me; the sense of America in a kind of upheaval. I first was writing the story in late 2013 or late 2014, but I think I moved it to the Texas border somewhere in 2015.
But it was motivated by several things. One was this sense that it gave us ⌠yâknow, youâre making a road picture, so, on a mechanical level, youâre looking for destinations and departure points â destinations that are very clean and have some value for the plot. Suddenly itâs kind of a run from border to border, like a Huck Finn run in reverse. That seemed really logical to me. I didnât anticipate that Trump would win the presidency.*
But you have a border wall along the Mexico border and bros yelling âU.S.A! U.S.A.!â at Latinos.
Yes, well, thereâs a border wall right now, actually. Yâknow, X-Men movies in general and the best Westerns, heroic films of any kind, have always tapped into something going on in the culture at that moment. To me, the sense of nationalism and anxiety of people who are Other seemed to fit very well into an X-Men idea.
And whatâs interesting about that is that X-Men stories often only deal with bigotry through the metaphor of mutants, who are usually straight, white men. But here, the co-star is a mutant whoâs a Latina girl. Why was it important for her to be Mexican? Did you think about it politically, or just as a cool thing to do?
I wasnât that flip. In making a film and writing a film and starting with zero, unlike the previous Wolverine movie where we had this kind of Japanese saga to begin with, I was starting from an absolute zero place. No one knew what movie to make next. All we knew was that Hugh was willing to make one more. That means me going, Whatâs interesting? And whatâs dangerous? The first thing I asked myself is, what is Wolverine most frightened of? And itâs not a super-villain. Itâs not the end of the world and it certainly isnât the end of his life. So then, what is it? Itâs intimacy or love.
So if thatâs the thing heâs most frightened of, then you have to construct a movie where heâs confronted with that and the trick is, if you made it a movie about romantic love, which in some ways I did in The Wolverine, itâs too easy to break up. But you canât break up from a child. And you canât break up from a father. Theyâre there forever. So suddenly, in a way, I was constructing a kind of dysfunctional â but real â nuclear family where he is a patriarch suddenly caring for what was his patriarch in distress and confronted with a child. And not a teen, but a real child. But thereâs been a lot of movies with a dark hero trapped with a wisecracking, precocious child. So [co-writer] Scott Frank and I were looking for ways that we could undermine their relationship, and language became one of them.
Sheâs a Spanish-speaker, as we learn in that scene where she finally talks and just unleashes this huge bit of dialogue in Spanish.
Spanish. Itâs such a cool scene. Sheâs completely unfrightened of him, which also cements the idea that sheâs his daughter. She punches him and screams at him and has absolutely no intimidation from the fact that sheâs taking on Wolverine at the end of his rope. If anything, that is a testament to the fact that they are father and child.
You say heâs afraid of love and intimacy, and I get the feeling that heâs most afraid of loving himself. He thinks heâs a monster. And by the end, itâs unclear whether heâs forgiven himself.
I think youâre on it, but I think thereâs another aspect. I had this thing when I was working on the last Wolverine which I wrote on the back of the script and kept thinking about while directing the film. It was: Anyone I love will die. Every time he opens up and feels for someone, they become a target. When you have a character who has existed as impervious, then the only way to get at that character is to hurt something he loves. So in a sense, the entire liturgy of Wolverine stories is the story of someone grabbing, getting, hurting someone he cares about, because they canât hurt him. The one experience heâs had more than any other is his proximity to death. Thatâs huge. The other thing thatâs interesting thatâs a bit of a spoiler is that, in the final battle of the movie, heâs essentially battling himself.
Right, he literally battles a clone of himself that looks just like him. Itâs pretty blunt, but it works.
Heâs also battling Weapon X, meaning heâs battling himself at the height of his powers, at the height of his healing. Youthful, unstoppable, and without remorse. Logan doesnât have the physical ability he used to have, plus he has a conscience, which is very much getting in the way of being a successful warrior.What I always find interesting is the moment that creature is disposed of is the moment â is the one minute â he gets to exist on this Earth in a way that is free of that shame. He looks into this girlâs eyes and knows that she will not necessarily die because he loves her.
He dies in front of her and says two brilliantly on-brand final sentences before dying. How does one go about writing the last words of Wolverine?
Ultimately, to make movies like this, itâs no different than making a movie about Johnny Cash. Thereâs a huge amount of people who are attached to this icon. You have to put it out of your head. I learned this, weirdly, making Walk the Line. Almost every day, Joaquin [Phoenix, who played Johnny Cash] would come up to me before weâd start shooting a scene, he goes, âSay that thing.â And I go, âYouâre not Johnny Cash.â And he goes, âThank you.â In order to channel Johnny Cash, he had to free himself from the weight of expectation, from the pressure of mimicry, from this intense sense of importance that people attach to a role or a scene. So the easy, but confounding, answer is that you actually have to just pretend Iâm writing a death scene for Christian Baleâs character in 3:10 to Yuma and that itâs not so important. Thatâs the only thing thatâs going to free your mind.
Sure, but how does his final line come about? Who writes it?
Scott Frank sent that to me one morning. One day, weâre trading the script back and forth in emails and I get that. I got chills and I knew it was done. It has multiple meanings. The reason I kind of started doing cartwheels around my office when I read it was itâs not just what death feels like â itâs what love feels like. Iâm holding your hand. Iâm looking in your eyes. And also, Iâm going down this dark tunnel. Iâve always gone down this tunnel and come back again, but now I sense Iâm not coming back. I tried to remind Hugh that that line is ecstatic. The gravitational pull of expectation is this scene is so sad, but, in fact, I donât view it as a sad scene. I view it as this character, whoâs lived four lifetimes of pain, finally getting set free.
I was struck by how non-futuristic the setting is, despite it being set in 2029. It reminded me of what Alfonso CuarĂłn said about his near-future world in Children of Men, which is that it shouldnât look futuristic because everyone got so depressed and hopeless that they stopped inventing things.
Iâm happy with any parallels to that film, because I think itâs an incredible film. What I agree with is, I feel like Iâve grown up through the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st with a lot of pronouncements about how different the world is going to look 10, 15 years from now â and now that Iâve lived long enough to see those 10 and 15 years come and go, Iâm always startled that itâs very modest, whatâs occurred. Maybe itâs that thereâs an economic interest in our own stagnation. But the world doesnât move that fast.
Listening to all this, itâs pretty apparent that Fox isnât running its superhero properties the way Disney or Warner Bros. do with theirs. You werenât being told to keep things close to a franchise-wide tone or a shared continuity. What do you think about the state of the modern superhero film?
Blockbuster summer extravaganza movies, their template is costing more. Thereâs a kind of arms race. Theyâre costing nearly â if not more than â a quarter of a billion dollars per picture. And thatâs before marketing. So the money theyâre making is getting closer and closer to how much theyâre costing. This devilâs bargain of it doesnât matter that weâre spending so much because weâre making so much is getting closer and closer to the point where itâs getting frightening. You sit and watch these movies and start to zone out, despite the fact that youâre watching shots that cost $100,000 per second go by. Itâs not holding you. So the experiment granted to us under the umbrella of saying good-bye to Hughâs character was, Try something different.
To be fair, for a lot of people in the audience, thatâs more or less what they want to see â consistent tone with changes at the margins. Variations on a theme.
And for some people, itâs not a movie anymore. It becomes just an episode in the worldâs most expensive episodic television show. The point Iâd make to fans, before they get up in arms, would be: The comic books themselves reinvent the worlds over and over and over again. There are multiple Earths circling on opposite sides of the moon. There is time travel. The original Superman is not the Superman we saw in the â60s and not the one in the â90s and heâs not the one in comic books now. Artists from Frank Miller to Neil Gaiman to Chris Claremont to Joe Kubert and on and on and on are reinventing the design, the philosophy, the tone, the style, the uniform, in every way with these characters, and no one had an issue. In fact, everyone loves it. But the idea that the movies themselves have to be perfectly sealed is ⌠I donât think it works for everyone.
I think also thereâs a unique bargain that the internet press and the press in general have played, in the need to be able to generate copy. Thereâs a never-ending fount of stories you can write about when someone is breaking away from canon or not, and create many controversies all the way through preproduction and production and even until a movie opens, about whether or not theyâre breaking canon. Is it a blasphemous movie or not? At some point, you gotta stop and say, Is there this expectation that itâs like weâre doing Godfather Part I and II, only itâs going to nine movies? And weâre just gonna cut them into this kind of Berlin Alexanderplatz that never ends? Weâre gonna suddenly take a moment to really savor the fact that these movies exist in an identical tone? The reality to me is that you canât have interesting movies if you tell a filmmaker, âGet in this bed and dream, but donât touch the pillows or move the blankets.â You will not get cinema. You will just get a platform for selling the next movie on that bed, unchanged and unmade.
This interview has been edited and condensed. It has also been updated to reflect Mangoldâs prediction about the 2016 election.