MARK: You turned down X3 for some chick in spangly knickers. Give me a brief rundown of your essential ingredients for a great X-Men movie. What are we missing given that your name is not on these credits?
JOSS: Well, there’s probably more of me in the third than the first, since they’re using my ‘cure’ scenario as a jumping off point (to be clear, I know many people have done cure scenarios before me – X-Statix did one that came out just months before – but I didn’t know that when I wrote mine. So my wildly unoriginal idea was, in fact, mine. Avi told me they were using it (and the character of Kavita Rao) for the movie, possibly because of the more modern genetic forum, possibly because they didn’t read the other ones either. And let me also say that the long trailer looks awfully cool. BUT. Were it me, I would do sort of what I did taking over Grant’s book – pare it down. Take a few characters and really **** them up, instead of the everybody-in-the-pool monster epic they (hopefully) have pulled off. The mission statement I always ‘Why do I love every single character? What makes them worth writing about?’ I thought about the movie in the brief time I thought I might be able to work on it and of course Phoenix was central. I was playing with the idea that her out of control power was making everyone else a little nuts as well. A chance for Xavier to be Not Picard, for Logan to get feral, Scott funky, Rogue homicidal(ish). Mutants becoming an actual menace, if mostly to themselves. And there were Sentinels, ‘cause, dude. Actually I have the whole trailer in my head. I’ll tell you about it sometime.
MARK: The only idea I had for the movie was that all the girls take their tops off. But I’m really rooting for Ratner. The amount of **** he’s eaten online with all the movie sites treating the premiere like the Nuremberg trials is just pathetic. His heart really does seem to be in the right place. I haven’t heard anything especially annoying and, God bless him, Red Dragon was a really smart popcorn movie. I had dinner with the excellent Joe Ahearne (Ultraviolet and Doctor Who director) a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about how cleverly made Red Dragon was. The opening six chapters of the book were just beautifully and perfectly condensed into five or six minutes in that wonderful pre-cred. I really hope he pulls this off because he really is the underdog this summer. I’m looking forward to Superman Returns like it’s the birth of my next child, but I really have a soft spot for X3 and hope it does well.
JOSS: I’m rooting for Ratty too (which means I probably shouldn’t call him that). He was a solid, logical choice and he can tell a story. It’ll come down (as it almost always does) to the script. People can carp at directors forever, but without the story… Anyway, no matter how much flack the poor guy’s taken, I don’t think anybody WANTS the movie to be bad. We need good superhero movies, and though that’s no longer a pipe dream, there’s still plenty of the other kind.
