Interview (Written): James Mangold
An in-depth conversation with the co-writer/director of ‘Logan’.
One of the absolute best movie and screenwriting resources online is Cinephilia & Beyond. In fact, we have been mutual fans for almost a decade. The site is a treasure trove of well-researched articles on filmmakers throughout the decades and well worth your moral and financial support.
Here is an example of what C&B does: A great in-depth interview with filmmaker James Mangold whose writing-directing film credits include Cop Land, Girl, Interrupted, Kate & Leopold, Walk the Line, and his latest Logan which writing credits read “Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green, story by James Mangold”.
Here is an excerpt from the Cinephilia & Beyond interview with Mangold which focuses on the movie Logan:
Logan is actually my favorite X-Men film so far. At the same time, it’s the least like an X-Men film. The fact that you steered the story away from the canon, kept it in the same universe but took it in a completely different direction. You didn’t experience any interference or objections from the studio?
No. The biggest complexity we had was when Scott Frank and I came up with this idea for the comics being real in the world. The only thing we couldn’t do was use the actual Marvel comics in the movie, we had to make new ones, we had to make fake vintage comic books. We used all the original artists from the seventies and eighties to do them, so they were actually not even that fake, they looked just like the real thing.
You made Logan as an exciting and at times spectacular superhero adaptation but at the same time a full-blooded family drama that touches the heart. One would say that you believe a film’s primary purpose shouldn’t only be to satisfy people’s hunger for spectacle, but offer something more and something deeper. Should a film move emotionally to be real art?
I think any proclamations about what is art tend to be very dangerous, but I would say this. The movies I remember all my life are the movies that moved me. The movies that affect me, that make me cry, that tear me up inside. The movies I remember all my life are the movies that somehow burn in my heart, as opposed to only on my retina. For me, the goal is universal: no matter what genre, what I’m doing, what scale, I believe that it’s a solemn duty for me to grab you and move you. It could be frightening you, it could be making you upset, it could be making a moment that’s erotic, or feels dangerous, but I somehow want to play the emotional pedals of your organ. I mean the church organ, not any other kind. (I laugh.) For me, that is the spectacle. If you ask me what the most spectacular scene of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was, I’d have to say it was the air traffic controller scene. The reality is there’s many kinds of movie magic. To me, the definition of movie magic would be if an audience member is looking at a moment in the movie and say to themselves: how did they do that, how did they capture that. In these days of computer-assisted visual effects I don’t think people even ask themselves that anymore, it’s almost become de rigueur that they used computers and generated it. But when an emotional moment happens in a movie, you ask how they did it and it’s still a mystery, there is no computer that could do that. To me, that is still the core, critical Lego unit of filmmaking, the ability on an emotional level to get involved, to identify with the characters, to empathize with them and feel the pain they feel. That is the dominating special effect that beats and trumps all others. And it also makes your visual effects look better because your heart is also in it, not just your eyes. Whichever kind of a movie I’m working on, it’s real simple for me, and Logan is a fine example because some of the moments I’m most proud of from the movie are reductive emotional two-person scenes between Charles and Logan, or Laura and Logan, scenes that are more fitting for, as you said, a family drama. In many ways I think that was our spectacle, because people are tired of what spectacle has come to mean in the conventional sense, which is million dollars a minute, lots of light, fury and sound thrown at you. The idea of having a film that is accessible but also emotional is kind of ideal to me. The favorite movies of my life have been that.
Speaking of emotional impact, the scene from Logan that made me cry wasn’t any of the death scenes or the ending, but since I’m a person who grew up surrounded by grandparents, the scene where Charles manages to use his powers to calm down the horses. It might seem trivial, but for me, it was like watching a grandpa with Parkinson’s succeed at fixing a light bulb, you know?
Absolutely. It’s the simple things. But that’s the sign that we’ve done our homework. Meaning, the reason that scene had power for you is that you bought all that had come before in Patrick’s performance. That he’s been impaired, that he has doubts about his own abilities, that he doubts his own value. And when he can suddenly do something, it’s very moving. I find it moving, too. It’s simplicity — it’s not large scale magic. Maybe it’s not even magic, who knows. Maybe he was just wishing it to be so, and the horses came back. The fact is, whatever it was, you sensed that beautiful little modest feather of pride that he feels helping these lovely people out.
That he can be useful again, not just a burden. It’s a very powerful feeling.
Of course. Particularly for a character whose whole life has been one of being paternal, a leader and a kind of a protective figure for a lot of unruly characters. His wayward mind has suddenly relegated him to being a problem character. It must be so painful for him.
I suppose you came up with this particular scene?
It was Scott Frank and I, we wrote together. But the initial idea that Charles has dementia or Alzheimer’s was an early story projection and very much a kind of a building block of the whole story, the idea that we were taking from these characters their strengths, and replacing them with not just weaknesses, but actual liability and frailty. The idea that someone as paternal, gentle and reasoned as Charles could actually become a danger to people he cares about. What could be more painful? And because it is so painful, it becomes really interesting.
Was the decision to portray violence in Logan in a realistic, devastating way rooted in a desire to please fans of the X-Men franchise frustrated by the constant mellowing down for the sake of ratings, or did you feel it a kind of a responsibility to the viewers who might idolize it?
Well, a lot of it is the function of a rating system. One of the conditions for me making the movie was that it would be rated R. And we made it for less money for that reason. There were multiple reasons. One is that I did feel as though fans have never gotten to see the kind of a knife fight that the presence of Logan’s abilities and blades always promised. In many ways the American rating system is very skewed against knives. It resembles the pornography rating system in the sense that, you know, in pornography penetration makes something rated X, and in violence a knife going into a body makes it rated R. Whereas bullet, because they are invisible to the human eye, are a more PG weapon if you will, because you don’t have to see the bullet go in. But this is a very strange logic to me. Beyond that, it makes it very hard to stage interesting knife fights if you can never see a blade penetrate. It means every time anything gets slashed or stabbed you have to be looking from behind or looking away. But rating also played a much deeper role for me, and more important frankly. Although I agree with you, I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made and one I would support, that PG13 violence is in many ways more disturbing than R, in the sense that you don’t feel the ramifications, you don’t feel flesh getting torn, you don’t feel lives getting ended, you just see people falling over like ants. In many ways we are in danger of fetishizing murder. By cleaning it up we make it less disturbing, which is in many ways more disturbing because it makes death look clean and tidy, palatable and unmessy. And anyone who’s been around death or violence of any kind knows it’s quite the opposite. That’s important to me, but the rating system also had other advantages. The primary one is that when a movie knows it’s going to be rated R in advance, not later when it’s hard to get through the ratings board but from the very beginning, the entire marketing establishment of a movie studio is blocked from trying to publicize, pre-market and set up marketing deals and cross-promotions to support the movie with children. So the movie becomes a film that’s completely, 100 percent for older teens and grown-ups. The moment that happens, the ideas in the film can be more interesting. One of the first things I wrote was the scene with Charles and Logan in that big inverted water tank, I think it’s nearly eight minutes long. If I was making a movie that had to play for seven-year-olds, there’s no way that I could have a scene that’s eight minutes long between two men talking about their grudges and pains and past together. That scene, which I’m quite fond of, while it isn’t racy in language or violent, is still the result of the rating, because the movie was then allowed to play as an adult film.
I’m not a fan of superhero movies due to their repetitiveness, derivative storylines, and reliance on spectacle as entertainment. Logan is the antithesis of what passes nowadays for a superhero movie, most notably this: I estimate 80% of the movie is characters interacting with each other. Yes, there are fights and fantastical feats of physical prowess, but the movie universe in grounded in the real world. In short, it’s a terrific film.
Here is a scene from the film:
For the rest of the interview, go here.
You can learn more about Cinephilia & Beyond here.
Twitter: @LaFamiliaFilm, @mang0ld.
