BB Exclusive: Dark Phoenix’s Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker Talk the Next Movie in the X-Men Series
Last month, BeautifulBallad and other members of the press got the chance to sit down and chat with Simon Kinberg (Director) and Hutch Parker (Producer) about their new movie, Dark Phoenix.
In our interview, Simon and Hutch talk preparing Sophie Turner for the role, revealing Raven’s death in the trailer, creating this darker storyline and so much more.
From X-Men: First Class to X-Men: Apocalypse and now onto Dark Phoenix, each movie has gotten progressively darker, how does it feel to almost be on a DC level of darkness?
Simon Kinberg: “I don’t know that we’re on a DC level of darkness, and I say that as a fan of some DC movies, and certainly a huge fan of the Dark Knight movies. I think there is still an inherent optimism to X-Men movies, despite them being edgier and darker than a lot of other superhero films. That inherent optimism comes from Professor X and his belief in the good in people; overcoming the bad even when he himself may be someone that needs to overcome that, those darker instincts. But having said that, this is definitely the edgiest, and I would say maybe the darkest X-Men we’ve done. A person who’s a good guy, so to speak, and Jean, one of our heroes, goes dark in the film, and starts to lose control of herself because of this cosmic entity inside of her. Do damage in very real and, sometimes violent, ways to not just the world, but more specifically, the people she loves.”
When did you know that you were going to retell the Dark Phoenix storyline?
Simon Kinberg: “For me it was something that the second I wrote the end of Days of Future Past and we did a reset, I felt as though there was an opportunity to re-tell X-Men 3. I’d be lying to you if I said it wasn’t a part of me that wrote that ending so that we could have another crack at Dark Phoenix. Then I felt as though we couldn’t do it in the next movie, Apocalypse, because we’d be introducing a new Jean, and we’d need to earn our way into the Dark Phoenix story with at least one movie of living with a new Jean. The idea of having another crack at Dark Phoenix, I felt for whatever its merits were, what we did not get right in X3 was the Dark Phoenix story What you said a second ago when you implied in X3 the Dark Phoenix story is the subplot of the movie, a secondary story to the main plot, and that was a mistake and one that we wanted to fix. It goes back to me from writing Days of Future Past.”
When did you share with your team that you guys would eventually be telling the Dark Phoenix storyline, and when did you share it with Sophie this was going to be the ultimate goal?
Simon Kinberg: “We talked while we were making Apocalypse about doing a Dark Phoenix story as the next story in this particular lineage. We didn’t know if it was the next one, or if it would be the one after the next one, so there was some conversation as to what the next movie should be, and then we ultimately settled on this movie being Dark Phoenix.
I took Sophie to lunch about a year before we made this movie, while I was still in the midst of writing the script. I sat her down, and I basically was like ‘Look, this is the story we’re telling. I know you know what it is’. She’d done her research by that point, having been Jean for a movie. I said, ‘It’s going to require you to be the lead and carry the entire emotional heft of the film. You’re going to have to go to some really dark and disturbed places as a character and as an actress, and I want you to do an immense amount of research on schizophrenia, dissociate disorder, really deep dive into the comics’. All the preparation I felt was necessary to get this part right because so much rests on it. And she was a hundred percent down for it. She left the lunch saying ‘I’m in. I’m going to be there entirely. I’m going to be incredibly prepared’. And she was.”
How did you help Sophie prepare for the role?
Simon Kinberg: “That day [after I initial meeting] I sent her links to a bunch of books, a bunch of YouTube videos of people with different kinds of mostly schizophrenic disorder. She just gobbled it up and came back a week later and read everything, sending me new videos, new questions. She was walking around earphones in her ears with voices, so she would know what it would be like to move around the world with voices in her head. We had more rehearsal time on this film than we’ve ever had on an X-Men movie, just to really dial into performances. Sophie was there for three weeks before we started shooting. And she was, for me, a real creative partner in creating this character, and this character is kind of everything in this movie.”
You can check out the rest of our interview below the jump. Dark Phoenix will open in theaters on June 7.
The comic gets pretty cosmic and goes pretty far out there, how much of that did you at least want to try and add in the movie?
Simon Kinberg: “I really wanted to make as much of a nod to the original comic as possible, while also making a movie that was grounded, emotional, intimate, and personal in the ways we felt it needed to be. One of the touchstones of a superhero film that got it right was a film that Hutch and I produced. Hutch was the lead producer on the film Logan, which is really emotional, intimate, grounded, and real.
I knew we needed to have an extraterrestrial and interstellar aspect to this movie. There’s scenes out in space and Jessica Chastain’s character is an alien from outer space. We talk about that force inside Jean being the Phoenix force, the cosmic force. But it really is integrated into a very grounded film, and the performances are much more real and gritty than they have been in the past. That balance between the comic and the very grounded, character-based story of a young woman breaking down psychologically was the biggest challenge of the movie. It was something that Hutch, as my partner from the beginning of this film, was really great at keeping me and the actors honest about in terms of being grounded and real whenever possible.”
How game was Jessica Chastain to play a part in this movie? She’s been a holdout in this genre for a while, so did she take a lot of convincing?
Hutch Parker: “She was, Simon gets a lot of credit for that. They had worked together on The Martian, so they knew each other well and had gotten to spend time together and become good friends. I’ll say for my part, I wasn’t sure we’d get Jessica to do this. We literally never pictured anybody else in the world, which is always a bad idea when you fall in love with an actor/an actress, without knowing whether they want to do it or not. Luckily she shared the enthusiasm we all did for the story he was telling and jumped in.”
Given that we sort of don’t know what the future of the X-Men franchise looks like after this, will fans get a sense of closure by the time this film is over?
Simon Kinberg: “When I first started talking with Hutch and the studio about the movie, three plus years ago, it takes a long time to test a movie, long before there was any idea of a Disney acquisition of Fox. This was a culmination of the cycle of X-Men movies. Not necessarily the end, but the culmination. We’ve lived with this family for twenty years now in one form or another and ten plus years with the X-Men: First Class family. This story, which is the ultimate and most iconic X-Men story, was an opportunity to test that family like they’ve never been tested, break that family apart like they’ve never been broken apart, before bringing them back together in a new configuration. It would feel as though you had culminated where those characters could go within this cycle and started something quite new by the end this movie, as you’ll see.
Fans will feel closure, but not because of the merger, that’s something that happened even after we were shooting, the movie was in the can already. It was something that we had thought of, and I also felt like this was probably the last time we were going to get Michael [Fassbender], James [McAvoy], Jennifer [Lawrence] and Nick Holt for these films. There was this feeling of if in fact this is the last of this cycle, and it was an if, and it remains an if, then this is the right story to tell to do that.”
Hutch Parker: “I do think there’s a bit of closure that comes with it [the movie], and similarly, not because we set out to end it. There’s certain ideas the franchise has been exploring now over these many twenty years, and one of the things that we felt pretty strongly about, but Simon is really the author of, is pushing those ideas more aggressively forward. There’s a tendency when you’re making movies that you know are part of a sequence of movies, to hold back, and to sort of play it safe, to keep some powder dry for the next one. I don’t think these movies can afford that. I think you have to go into movies, given how competitive the landscape is, and play everything you’ve got. And that’s part of what was behind certain decisions, maybe shocking, dramatic ones of killing off characters or seeing some of the philosophies run their course or emotional ideas be completed.
For me there’s a lot of closure just in that, just in feeling like it’s not full of lots of dangling, potential winks. It’s taking ideas and saying ‘We’re going to play them through’ and that’s a bittersweet quality. It’s part of what makes the movie feel more emotional and more sensitive in the end. It was very much my experience on Logan. I had people come up to me afterwards convinced that we were going to up it again, and I’m like ‘No, no, no, that really was it!’ I think that will provide a certain amount of closure, even if it’s not, as you said, it’s not finality.”
Had you had any back and forth with Louis D’Esposito and Kevin Feige [Co-Presidents of Marvel Entertainment] regarding characters and storylines before the Merger?
Simon Kinberg: “There’s always been a back and forth between Marvel Studios and Fox Marvel. Kevin worked with Hutch when Hutch was head of the studio. I worked with Kevin on my first X-Men movie. He was one of the producers and I was a writer, so he goes back a long was with us. Kevin and I have seen each other and emailed with each other over the many years now of us making movies where he would like an X-Men movie or Deadpool or Logan, and he would reach out in nice, generous ways and be supportive about the film. I would obviously do the same because I’ve loved so many of the movies he’s made and the way he makes them. We sit down occasionally, or just get together as friends. We did actually pretty recently, a few months ago.
And there are deals that have been made over the years of ‘We’ll give you this character if you give us that character’ that people don’t even know about. They presume that character was inherent to a Deadpool or an X-men movie, and they might not have been. There’s always been conversations around which characters we would share, what ways we would represent characters, or what ways they would represent characters. It’s been more synergetic than people would believe.”
Having said that, with this merger would you want to continue on with the X-Men series if asked or move on to other things?
Simon Kinberg: “I would love to continue to work on these movies. I love these characters, and we’ll see what form it takes as this merger evolves. It’s just in its earliest stages, I think it just closed last week or whatever it was, so we’ll see what the future plans are. I would like to continue to work on it because I love these characters, but I will say also, separate from all the Disney, Marvel, Fox stuff with it all, the question would be, ‘What is the next story to tell in the X-Men world?’ We really did approach this movie as ‘Let this be the culmination of the cycle’ and then ‘Let us be challenged the same way we were challenged with X-Men: First Class after X3’.
And it’s not coincidental that both X3 and this movie were culminations of a cycle with a cast of characters making X-Men movies. After X3, we rebooted with X-Men: First Class. I think there’s something about the Dark Phoenix story that feels like the ultimate X-Men story. I’d be interested to see what the future holds. But we’ve been so locked down in this movie for years now, and we’re almost entirely done with it, that my head’s been in this and not in what the future of the X-Men is going to be.”
Obviously, the big revelation of the trailer is that Raven gets killed. How far back in the process of time did that plot point enter?
Simon Kinberg: “It was important that a major character die in this film, not for the shock value of it, but because we needed the audience to believe that the stakes of this film were real. That Dark Phoenix could do the kind of damage you couldn’t just dust yourself off from. And from there, I started thinking about ‘Who is the character that is the most central to all the other characters other than Jean?’ Meaning, who is the character that is the center of the radius for all the other characters? She impacts Charles, she impacts Magneto, she impacts Hank, in really interesting, dramatic, emotional ways. We talked about it, Hutch and I, this is a character that could be a lightning rod emotionally for the film.”
In working with a film like this, the story is so dark. Writers, producers, directors have to dive into themselves and find ways to pull out the darkness from within. What type of levels did you guys have to go to in order to pull out this level of darkness?
Simon Kinberg: “It was two stages for me. Answering your question, there’s the writing stage and the directing stage. The writing stage, in some ways, is the harder one for me in it that you’re all by yourself, you’re living in your imagination. The darkness you’re having to inhabit you have to fully inhabit by yourself for ten hours of silence a day. That’s a tougher process where you’re not living in the real world, you’re not really communicating with anybody, you’re living in this dark place. You’re visiting the real world occasionally. When you’re making a movie, there are times when I have to inhabit those spaces with the actors to try and help them get there, but I’m also talking to Hutch. I’m also figuring out the shot list for tomorrow, and what time it is, and when we’re going to have to break for lunch. You’re living in society a little bit more when you’re directing a movie. When you’re writing, you’re really living in your head, and that’s when living in dark places makes me not as pleasant a person to be around.”
How do you pull yourself out then?
Hutch Parker: “Part of the fun of this one for me is the emotional issues are real life. Who here hasn’t lost somebody, right? Who here hasn’t dealt with somebody, a loved one, who has either addiction or some sort of mental disorder and the challenges that go along with that? As you asked the question, I know intellectually it’s a darker world than we’ve gone into before, but experientially, it’s not. Maybe it’s darker than we want to admit at times, but the truth is, those emotional and psychological challenges are the ones people face every day. It’s part of why I’ve loved the opportunity presented by these characters over the years because there is a complexity. It invites one to tackle those kinds of complex issues, and not maybe to come up with easy answers.
I’m excited where these movies are going, and potentially where they will go, because it seems more and more that’s what they’re allowed to do. They’re not just for filling in a plot line based on the comic. They’re actually delving into the underpinnings of the comics, and part of what I think makes them so indelible and so powerful.”
Out of curiosity, why was the X-Men dropped from the title in North America, because I think I’ve seen internationally it’s in?
Simon Kinberg: “Just like it was with Logan. As opposed to X3, we wanted to make it clear this is the Dark Phoenix story. This movie is a more intimate, character-driven movie, it felt like to differentiate us to some extent from the other X-Men movies or from other team movies. We wanted the title to tell you, declaratively, ‘This is a movie about this character and her struggle and her journey and how it impacts the people around her who love her’. It felt natural to do that, and honestly, I was very inspired by Logan. There was something powerful and confident, about naming that movie Logan, or even having it be called Wolverine. We all felt like it was risky to some extent. What I really wanted to accomplish with this film, which is hard to do when you’re how many movies into a franchise after twenty years of making these films, is have it be provocative and bold and original. Make people feel like ‘Oh, shit, I didn’t expect to see that’, as opposed to ‘Oh, okay, just another X-Men movie. I guess I can skip it and watch it when it comes out on video’. This is one where you’re like ‘This is not like the others’ . The title itself tells you immediately ‘This is not like the others’. It is a very different X-Men movie than the ones we’ve done before.”