CS: A pivotal course change for everybody, but especially for Professor X, was this incident that we never see, where he sort of accidentally kills a lot of people and a lot of mutants in Westchester having one of his fits.
Mangold: Yes.
CS: Was it ever a question of showing that scene or not showing that scene, since it’s so crucial to where the characters are when we find them?
Mangold: Yeah, I wrote that scene. I wrote it, and at one point, it was even the first scene in the movie.
CS: Really? Was it just too traumatic? Too much?
Mangold: It also made the movie about that. It was really interesting. It suddenly made the movie about X-Men dying, as opposed to allowing the movie to be a kind of unwinding onion, like allowing you to kind of enter the story and go, “Where is this going?” It was so large and loomed so large, and I felt like it also was still falling into the formula of the movies, with the big opener, that is setting up the mythology first. I thought, “What if we do an opener that leans into character first? Actually underplay those things?” Let them just feel like it’s more like a—what’s that?
Keen: Normal thing?
Mangold: A normal thing, like it’s happened. And instead of underlining it, yeah. Just let it live in the background of all these characters.