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From Chud.com:
Source: http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=interviews&id=6738EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: SIMON KINBERG & ZAK PENN (X-MEN THE LAST STAND)
05.21.06
By Devin Faraci
Were just a few days from the final verdict on X-Men: The Last Stand, the long awaited and feared third X movie, and ostensibly the end of the franchise. Early word has been coming in that the film is not at all the disaster some of us expected, which is nice not even the most cynical nerd wanted this movie to be bad, no matter who was directing it.
I havent seen the movie yet my screening is Monday night but after talking to writers Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn last week my expectations definitely went up a notch. Any time you speak to someone involved in a film before its release, youll find that they have plenty of good things to say about the movie. Kinberg and Penn, while being positive about the movie, arent against being honest about the process and its shortcomings.
Its kind of weird talking to these guys about this film CHUD is one of the sites that hasnt been kind to the movie while it was in production, and Kinberg and Penn read us. People have asked me what happens when celebrities Ive smack-talked meet me in real life. The honest truth is that the only ones who know who the heck I am are the writers and directors, and they tend to be a little understanding. Its what we do here.
By the way, keep in mind that Zak Penn wrote and directed one of my favorite films of the 21st century, Incident at Loch Ness. I think it's entirely brilliant, and you should click here to buy it from CHUD. It's so cheap that you have no excuse.
Q: One of the most interesting things about this film has been its tortured development process. Were you guys involved from the very beginning, when it was still Bryan Singer directing?
Kinberg: Bryan was going to work with his writers, Dan Harris and Mike Dougherty, the guys who worked with him on X2 and ultimately Superman. I dont know if those guys ever wrote a word for X3 before Bryan went on to do Superman. Zak and I came on to X3 without a word or a page having been written. We were on from the beginning, but the beginning sort of started after Bryan left.
Q: So you were on when Matthew Vaughn was on.
Penn: We were on before Matthew.
Q: What were the big changes from that period to the finished film? Were there characters you lost, storylines you abandoned?
Penn: There always is. And yes, there were definitely things we toyed with and ultimately didnt use. Certainly Matthew had some very specific opinions which, after he left we discarded, but many of which we actually kept. Theres still plenty of stuff that Matthew sat in a room with us and talked about that still made it in the movie. But we locked in to a story which I know theres been a lot of controversy about and we did stick with it one way or another. We went through many drafts and variations.
Kinberg: Theres never been a radical overhaul of the script. There certainly have been changes in terms of the character arcs, and some very secondary characters were introduced after Matthews departure. But from the beginning it was always two parallel storylines, one being the Dark Phoenix saga, which is the emotional side of the film, and the other being the cure, which is the political throughline of the movie. Those two things were working in concert when Matthew was working on the movie and when Matthew wasnt working on the movie.
Q: I guess the image of screenwriters is often that you come on, write a script and the production ignores you afterwards
Kinberg: Thats pretty well founded!
Penn: Thats too true.
Q: When youre working on a film like this, when directors change in pre-production and theyre rushing to hit a release date, how does your role in the film change? Did you guys stay involved heavily throughout production?
Penn: We did. Normally you do get kicked to the curb immediately, but because of the way the movie happened Simon and I never got rewritten and we were on the movie til the end.
Kinberg: Its a unique thing that in a movie of this size any movie in the studio system, but especially one of this size the continuity was Zak and I, because like you said the directors changed and elements changed, but Zak and I were there from the start of the film. Brett is an incredibly inclusive director who not only welcomed but in some ways needed our input during the process of the production. We were very intimately involved in making the movie.
Penn: This is something that a lot of people online dont get. Weve been doing Q&As online, and I read your site and all the other sites, and have since you guys started. One of the things people dont realize is that the real hobgoblin of the whole system is the treadmill of writers. When you have twenty writers working on a script and they keep coming in and out, you can be sure that theres going to be no vision behind the movie, no matter how good the director is. People lose sight of that, they think that its all about who the director is, or who the particulars who are involved, but the main thing is keeping the same people who were working on it from the beginning to the end, so that you dont end up with some horrible blender version of a screenplay.
Q: Why does that happen?
Penn: Because people are dumb. People are really dumb. [laughs] No, you know what? Its a very long, complicated it has a lot to do with the studio system breaking up in the 50s, but its a very inefficient system. My wife is a studio executive, and Simons is too, and I talk to her and its a very inefficient system, and it very rarely works.
Q: When did the idea of this being the last X-Men film come in, and why did it come in? Out of all the comic book franchises, X-Men seems the most open-ended because there are thousands of characters.
Kinberg: I think the idea of it being the last one of the entire franchise came in during post-production/marketing. I think the truth is its the last of this trilogy. We look at this as its the third chapter of a book with three chapters, but there could be other books. There are thousands of characters, and there are even characters that exist in the movie universe now that could be pursued for future films, but we looked at it as, how do we close up and complete the arcs, the conflicts and issues that Bryan started in the first two movies to make this feel like a complete story.
Penn: Right. But we definitely were not sitting there writing the script thinking the whole last stand, that this is the last movie coming out, it didnt come from us. To put it politically.
Q: When you guys were writing the script, how much did you have to take into account the actors interest in returning? Without giving too much away, some of the characters dont make it to the end of the film how much of that came from the creative end, and how much of that came from Actor A only wanting to do a week on the film?
Kinberg: As with every studio assignment, which is what this was, it wasnt a spec script or something Zak and I dreamed up it was an assignment to write the sequel to an adaptation of a comic book we were given certain parameters about certain characters. Those parameters had to do with actor availability and/or studio politics. We worked within those parameters within the best of our ability to give those characters and those actors the best scenes we could write for them. And the most scenes we could write for them, because the truth is Zak and I more than anybody else I can honestly say more than anybody else in the process of making X3, Zak and I are the most religious fans of the comic books. We were looking not so much to protect the first two movies, although we wanted to honor the tone of those movies, but to protect the comic, and we were very precious about those characters because we have a different relationship to them than some people do.
Penn: We get asked this question all the time online, and once the movie comes out well probably have to deal with people running up to us on the street. The thing is this: its a movie and the actors are human beings and get paid huge salaries and its incredibly complicated and expensive; its not a comic book. Its not like when Brian Bendis decides to change the continuity in some comic book if we wanted to follow the comic book literally and religiously, it would be physically impossible. We wouldnt have the actors, we wouldnt have the studio to make it.
There were choices some were made for us, having to do with actor availability and also studio preference, and there were some that in the first two we took liberties with the comic books and they worked better on screen and thats the way we had to keep them. I always say to people who ask, Why would Fox rush this movie? I try to explain to them would you rather recast Magneto and Professor X because those actors are doing plays in England when you want to go? Its not like Mission: Impossible where you get Tom Cruise and reassemble the cast around him. With this you have to assemble so many actors that have such tough schedules to begin with.
Q: How do guys deal with all the internet nonsense, including from sites like CHUD?
Kinberg: Not well! Honestly, and Im going to be honest about this, it keeps us up at night. We were talking the other day about how we have to disengage a little bit, because its stressing us out too much. I say this affectionately, but were geeks. Were fanboys; we grew up reading comics, we read those sites religiously, even when it has nothing to do with what were doing. So when we read something good on your site or Aint It Cool or Superhero Hype or any of these sites, we get excited. And when we read people freaking out or wanting to kill Brett Ratner or whoever for whatever reason, its upsetting. We try to understand that there are going to be millions and millions of fans out there who are going to be happy with the movie and others who are going to be unhappy and we have to survive that. But its tough.
Penn: Its also tough because when we read the sites there are things people say about the filmmaking process and about Hollywood that are completely accurate. There are times that Simon and I wish we could go on there and say, We agree with you. **** the system, this is ****ed up! Its not like Simon and I are sitting there and boom! heres our next assignment, X-Men, best get to it. You fight for the job and you take it on knowing its going to be difficult. There are choices where you do what needs to be done and you try to make it the best that you can and preserve whats good about it or you quit and someone else is going to do exactly what the studio wants them to do, or exactly what the director wants them to do. As a writer you find yourself in a weird position where you go online and you see people saying, I didnt want them to do this to this character or I did want them to do this to this character or I want Gambit to be in the movie, thats not how it works. Its not a comic book. We cant just sit there and say, OK, lets do Gambit, and well go after so and so to star in it.
Q: This has been going on for as long as there have been movies, and its not just from fans but from critics in that theres not a lot of understanding of what a writers position on a film really is. Youll read reviews that take the writer to task, but often theres no relationship between what the credited writer handed in and whats on screen.
Penn: All you need to do is look at my credits and youll see a battlefield littered with the corpses of my original ideas.
Kinberg: I will say one thing about X3, and its that we had the real pleasure of having been there from beginning to end. We had to make compromises to stay in that position, but we also had to fight fights. We won some of the fights we were forced to wage not all of them, and we look at the movie and see the fights that we lost and they upset us in the ways that they might upset some fans. But we won the majority of the wars we waged, and those wars were waged based on our love of the comics.
Penn: We won the war but lost some battles along the way. Have you seen the movie yet?
Q: They did not let me into the screening. No.
Penn: Heres the thing, youll see the movie and judge it for yourself. Ill stand behind it if you asked me about twenty other movies I worked on I would say, Thats a piece of ****, dont go see it. X3 is a good movie. Whether youll think its great or whatever, I dont know. But heres the thing, fundamentally its telling the Dark Phoenix story, which is one of the most dark and complicated stories that have ever been in a comic book. Its pretty crazy that they made a 200 and whatever million dollar movie with that as a central story. Just the fact that we were able to accomplish that and get that story told on screen with whatever changes were made, Im really proud of that. Its really difficult to get studios to make anything other than heroes fighting a bad guy and killing him in the end.
Kinberg: I would have to say one of the things that has been so effective about the movies is the grey areas the characters inhabit; the fact that theres no ultimate and pure evil and no ultimate and pure good. This is probably the grayest bad pun intended of the three movies, and at the heart of the movie is this destructive, empathetic, schizophrenic character. Those are usually characters you see in Capote or Ordinary People; those arent characters you see in X-MenX-Men 3 coming out Memorial Day.
Penn: So take that, TalkBackers!
Q: Zak, you start pre-production tomorrow on your new poker movie.
Penn: The Grand.
Q: And you have Werner Herzog back for that.
Penn: I do have Werner back.
Q: Is this going to be a series of The Adventures of Werner Herzog?
Penn: Seriously, if I could get someone to fund me making a series of movies about Werner Herzog alone I would do it. Hes one of my personal heroes but I also think hes just an amazing person to watch on screen.
Kinberg: Hes an amazing character.
Penn: As an actor I think hes fantastic. I would have put him in X3, he would have been great. I dont know what part. Maybe Gambit.
Q: Are you worry that hes overshadowing your films, though? Hes saving Joaquin Phoenix from car crashes, hes getting shot at
Penn: My friends all joke that hes like a superhero. Ive been very privileged to get to know Werner and hang out with him, and I helped to write the movie he shot in Thailand with Christian Bale, Rescue Dawn. One of the things you learn about him is that you cannot make up stuff about him that will be as interesting as what really happens to him anyway.
By the way, I know this is crazy, and Ill probably be crucified somewhere, but in that way thats probably the only similarity between him and Brett Ratner. If we told you the crazy stuff that happens to Brett or happens around Brett, you would just say I was making it up.
Q: Could Brett Ratner be the star of your next mockumentary?
Penn: Bretts going to be in The Grand.
Q: Who else is in it?
Penn: Right now its Woody Harrelson, Ray Liotta, David Cross, Richard Kind, Werner Herzog, Simon Kinberg will have a small part, a whole part of other people Jason Alexander, Fred Armisen. Its a big cast.
Q: Simon, whats next for you?
Kinberg: A couple of things. Im in Rome right now. I just flew in a couple of hours ago. Im writing and producing Doug Limans next movie, a film called Jumper. Its based on a series of young adult novels about a teenaged teleporter. We start shooting in a month in New York, Rome, Toronto and Tokyo. So Im in Rome this week and maybe Tokyo next week scouting.
Were also doing the Mr. and Mrs. Smith TV show.
