X-Men Director Bryan Singer on the Birth of the Franchise
Bryan Singer spoke at Edinburgh International Television Festival on Thursday, where he revealed an X-Men tattoo on his leg and discussed what drew him to the first X-Men film from 2000.
“There has to be something in the main character or in the story that I connect to. I have a knack for ensembles. I like groups of people. Each [project] is individual. In ‘X-Men’ it is just that feeling of being isolated,” he said.
“I had issues growing up with not being a good student and sexuality issues, whatever they were, and I identified with the ‘X-Men’ characters as being outcasts, so I responded to that. And from there it grew into ‘Wow! This is a cool universe.’ But I always knew I wanted to make the movies I waited in line to see as a kid: big-budget action-adventure movies.”
Singer tells a fascinating story about the creation of the first film, which he sees as the "birth of the modern comic book movie." "“’X-Men’ collapsed – we lost our entire crew, we couldn’t get a budget or script, or anything. And at one point it was myself, my friend Tom DeSanto, and you. The three of us sitting on the floor of a small office in West L.A. pasting pieces of paper together trying to construct a story.
"It was the night before Thanksgiving. But we didn’t let it go… and part of that is we all knew what we were trying to do: make a serious story based in a comic universe; let’s take ‘X-Men’ and make it real.”
There were also "early screenings, early version cuts of the first ‘X-Men’ movie that were not so good. And there were no other comic-book movies, so we weren’t sure it was going to work."
In the same conversation, he discussed the earlier reported Legion TV series, which will connect to the franchise.
Source: Variety
