The third act is something you were still tweaking later in the game with reshoots. What were you looking to change?
With the
Avengers movies, there are inevitably pickups you do when you are making the movie. You build it into the budget and the schedule. They know exactly when they are going to do it.
On the Fox/Marvel movies, we have never done that. We probably should have, because it just makes life easier. Getting this kind of cast all at the same place at the same time is not an easy thing to do. They go off and they have other things going on.…
In postproduction of the film, what I felt in watching the third act of the movie…this film is so much about the family that was established in
X-Men: First Class.... It's this family of outsiders and outcasts, strangers who come together to form this surrogate family and over the span of these movies have conflicts, but mostly their conflicts are with the outside villains, so the family is tested but remains together. This is a film that would tear the family apart.
What I felt in watching the third act of the film [before reshoots] is it didn't fully pay off, the reconciliation of that family. There was not the kind of catharsis I wanted the audience to have where having gone through all of the trauma with this family that you as an audience have gone through with them, you want to see them come together at the end. You want to see them come together in a different form at the end, a more mature form. When you heal, you get stronger, but you're different from it. I wanted the third act to reflect that and so we went back and did pickups to really create for me what was a more satisfying, cathartic ending.
