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Don't think wolves, think wolverines. That's the mistake Hugh Jackman made when researching
his character for the first X-Men film back in 2000, before being told by director Bryan Singer that
he wasn't a wolf at all and to go to a zoo and check out a real wolverine. While as hairy and bad
tempered as its onscreen namesake, a wolverine doesn't have retractable
claws and is more like a hybrid of badger, bear, raccoon and weasel.
But this powerfully built carnivore, who favours mountainous alpine
and arctic regions, does have a habit of watching its back when
competing with other predators for a tasty carcass.
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radically different, believing that the
Wolverine’s humanity, not his superpower,
is the character’s real strength. “In exploring
this character for the last time, I wanted
to get to the heart of who that human
was, more than what his claws can do,” he
explains.
Logan is in hiding in Mexico with the
elderly Professor X (Patrick Stewart) when
his world is rocked by the arrival of a young
girl named Laura (Dafne
Keen), who has her own
set of adamantium blades
and the attitude to match.
Having escaped from a
secret facility and found
her way into Logan's care,
the Wolverine becomes
a surrogate father to
this temperamental little
mutant, whom he must
protect from the sinister
geneticist Zander Rice
(Richard E. Grant) and his
cyborg Reavers.
“I had this kind of strange vision in my
head that I wanted to make a road movie
with these characters, in a way almost
trapping myself as a filmmaker,” says
Mangold. “Putting them in a car and trapping
them on a highway would tie my hands. We
couldn’t do something about worlds colliding
or an alien invasion – the movie would
essentially force itself to operate on a more
intimate level.
“It’s a movie about family,” he adds.
“It’s a movie about loyalty and love
and specifically a character, Logan,
who has been stubbornly avoiding
intimacy throughout his long life,
finally letting it in.
“We wanted to go out with a
MEET THE REAL
WOLVERINE
bang, but the thing is –
once cities and planets
have been destroyed – you
have to earn your bang as
opposed to just getting
louder.”
Indeed,
Logan
is the
most atypical film in
the comic book genre
to date, with Mangold
taking the creative risk
of transplanting the
Wolverine into a brutal
and intense milieu devoid
of the grandiose threats and visual effects
onslaughts synonymous with the X-Men
universe. As moody as its title character,
Logan
is an X-Men film played as a gritty
Western noir.
“The superhero aspect and the mutant
powers are not the focus of attention as
much as they were in the other movies,”
Patrick Stewart explains. “The sense of
people, of individuals, of relationships, I
think is stronger in
Logan
than it has been
before. James has created a world which is
recognisable and familiar and everyday, and
in its way, commonplace, yet wrapped in a
maelstrom of fear and excitement and danger
and the need to escape.”
Logan
also moves the superhero film in
a darker and more violent direction than its
predecessors, reflecting the Wolverine’s
own berserker instincts. Jackman notes that
while he and Mangold were concerned about
“taking off the seatbelt” at first, a more adult
approach allowed Mangold to fully explore
themes of human frailty, mortality, and family
ties.
“I didn’t just want to make a more violent,
sexier, more explicit, more obscene movie,”
says Mangold. “I wanted to make an adult
movie – this is not a movie for nine-year-old
children. When your movie is rated R [in the
US], you suddenly are making a movie about
more grown up themes. You’re not under the
pressure to make a movie for everybody.”
Adds Jackman: “This is far more realistic
than we’ve done before in the X-Men
Franchise, maybe any of the other comic
book movies. It’s far more human.”
•
Logan
is out on
June 7
I wanted to
make an adult
movie – this
is not a movie
for nine-year-
old children