When you're an adolescent, you suddenly wake up one morning and your body is an enemy. There are hormonal changes, physical changes, emotional changes. People are saying to you, 'Now you have to make the decisions that define the rest of your life.' The X-Men takes those elements and pushes them one giant step farther.
— Chris Claremont
I always had a sense of where I was going with 'Dark Phoenix.' Jean had the greatest power imaginable... and, how's she going to deal with that?
For me, writing the 'X-Men' was easy - is easy. I know these people, they're my friends.
I'd love to do writing for Hollywood.
What you want to do in a film is encapsulate the characters and the stories into one focused, coherent two-hour time block, and that's sometimes hard to do especially when you have a group as varied and distinctive as the 'X-Men' are.
One of the virtues of 'The X-Men' was that it managed to transcend the expectations and prejudices of the medium. It appealed to a vaster audience than anyone had ever anticipated from any superhero book, much less 'X-Men.'
You know, for a normal kid it might be how to ask somebody out on a date or how to deal with the SATs or just how to deal with the bully down the block. And the X-Men have the conflict of Magneto or aliens or what-have-you.
Like 'Uncanny X-Men,' 'New Excalibur' is the story of people thrown together by fate and wild circumstance who find their way to true and lasting friendship.
The success of 'X-Men' paved the way, I have to presume, for Sony to make Sam Raimi's 'Spider-Man.'
The weirdest, most eloquent memory I have of the time on the kibbutz is, every Saturday night was movie night, and one of the first movies I remember seeing there was 'Judgment at Nuremberg.'
From Captain Britain's point of view we live in a great, heavily populated omniverse and our reality is just one part of that. In each of the parallel worlds there is a lighthouse on every shore of every England where the champion has his base.
My view of Magneto is that he's the terrorist who might someday evolve into a statesman.
I want to talk about what I'm doing now... I'm not interested in what I've done, I'm interested in what I'm about to do.
The thing with mutants is, they've always stood in for the disenfranchised and downtrodden. And no matter how hard they fight, how hard they work to live among humans, the humans always push back with new laws and new ways of hurting mutants.
If at some point Fox decides that the X-Men properties are no longer lucrative I'm sure that they will cut a deal with Disney.
It is very hard for me to think of Logan without thinking of Hugh Jackman and I have no idea who out there could take over from him if they moved ahead. It's like thinking of anyone other than Harrison Ford playing Han Solo or Indiana Jones.
I would like to do a story where the country found itself a presidential candidate who actually will get elected preaching traditional values and then sets out to enforce them, where it actually comes down to the fact that reality as we know it may not be as etched in stone as we tell ourselves it is.
The fundamental thing that makes the 'X-Men' different from every other series out there is it's all about prejudice. It's about a group of young people trying to make a place in a society that doesn't want them.
One of the fun things in the old days about writing with Frank Miller was that every issue of 'Daredevil' was a challenge to every issue of 'X-Men.'
I find now I'm reading a lot more nonfiction, simply because every time I read fiction, I think I can write it better. But every time I read nonfiction, I learn things.
My desire as a storyteller is to always catch the readers off guard; to give them something they aren't expecting, and take them in a direction that is satisfying in the here and non.
In terms of the 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' movie, Bryan Singer has been a part of the X-Men family from the first movie. He knows about the comics canon and how it relates to his work as a filmmaker. He's more well versed in the canon than most, as are the people that are working with him.
When you're given the assignment to write, for example, 'Spider-Man,' the concept, characters and environment are all laid out for you. Everything is pre-established, and your sole responsibility as a creator is to craft an exciting, entertaining, hopefully original adventure, to add layers and colors to a canon that already exists.
Superman has always been a battle for hope.
I get to watch stories I wrote brought to life by the most brilliant actors in cinema.
No creator in modern times is going to stick around with a concept for 20 years. There are simply too many alternatives that writers want to pursue.
Every significant book at Marvel had its key antagonist. 'The Fantastic Four' had Doctor Doom; 'Spider-Man' had Doc Ock, among others; Thor had Loki, if not Surtur. Without Magneto, the X-Men had nobody.
Even in the face of the greatest adversity, the key is to never lose hope, never lose sense of the dream that drives you.
People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they're just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they've had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.
I'd rather have Ben Affleck feeling something than twenty minutes of punching CGI Zod. You want moments that resonate with your audience.
The challenge is, in terms of a canon like 'X-Men,' it's more like 'Harry Potter' and Hogwarts, or 'Game of Thrones.' It needs time and space to evolve and to bring the reader or viewer in and give them a result that's worth the investment of that time.
I'm contractually not allowed to work in comics in the United States other than for Marvel.
I will say there is only one caveat as far as 'Logan' goes: I got to the end and went, 'OK, what happens next?' To me, as an audience member, damn. If you can get to the end of the third act of a trilogy and your reaction is 'what the hell happens next,' someone did their job incredibly.
I never talk about work in progress because once I talk about it I don't do it anymore.
Comics deal with fundamental archetypes. We've been called the myth-makers of the modern age.
The interesting thing I realized writing the 'X-Men' is I always had a sense of where I was going.
The nice thing about genetics is, I can see my kids doing what I used to do, which is inhaling books like breathing.
The cool thing about comic books and prose is that if a reader gets confused on page 8, they can backtrack. With films, you sit down in a seat and once the projector starts going you're stuck for the next two hours. There are no do-overs, rewinding or starting again.
Creative life should be more than preaching to the converted, more than going for a core audience of 100,000 people. It should be taking risks, challenging the readership and having enough faith in one's own talent and craft to take readers on that ride.
My wife and I have this discussion all the time. Her primal influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Mine are Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit and T.H. White. So, we have certain structural differences in form and content right off the bat!
You have an iconic character in Superman. You want to keep him vital and relevant to the audience as it evolves. So there's a creative dynamic.
I'm an immigrant.
There are no heritage concepts at Marvel or DC that are untouched.
Captain Britain is not about representing an empire, he's about standing up for everyone and fighting for the betterment of all.
X-Men has always been about finding your place in a society that doesn't want you.
The key thing if you're a writer is to visualize the scene and convey it to the penciller and turn the penciller loose.
I was an actor in New York, dude.
My problem with both iterations of 'Dark Phoenix' onscreen, the original by Brett Ratner and the newer version by Simon Kinberg, is, I don't think you can do it effectively in 90 minutes.
It never would have occurred to me in 'Days of Future Past' to cast Peter Dinklage as Bolivar Trask, and yet as soon as he got onscreen I couldn't think of anyone else.
We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.
