This article was taken from the June 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Director Bryan Singer (pictured, not the blue ones) is the daddy of contemporary comic-book films. His original X-Men (2000) launched a franchise that has made $2.4bn (£1.4bn). X-Men: Days Of Future Past (in cinemas 22 May) is set in the future and in 1973 -- it's an "inbetweenquel", Singer says -- and is the seventh in the series. Singer took time out from planning the eighth X-film to talk mutants with Wired.
Wired: The film opens with a lot of dead X-Men.
Bryan Singer: Yeah. It's a dystopian future: there's a group of mutant refugees on the run, and they're then joined by our three remaining older X-Men: Xavier, Storm and Wolverine, who have joined with their old arch-enemy, Magneto.
Together, they use Kitty Pryde's power to send Wolverine's consciousness back to 1973, to try to avert the disaster.
It's a bit of a downer to start on...
Yeah, it's pretty brutal. A lot of carnage.
Did you research the time-travel aspect?
I had to create a conceit that enabled events to occur simultaneously in the past and future. So I turned to quantum physics and Schrödinger's Cat -- if a cat's in a closed box full of poison, and you can't see the cat because it's inside the box, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until it's observed.
That's the superposition: until objects are observed, their actions are not defined. So the notion is, when Wolverine's consciousness is sent back in time to his younger self, he is the observer. And so long as he is observing events in the past and hasn't woken in the future, both past and future can co-exist simultaneously. The moment he wakes, he's collapsing the superposition, and whatever he's done in the past will take hold and become history. Once I'd decided on that conceit, I was able to tell this story.
And you've brought Professor Xavier back.
My notion is that you've got mutants that can do extraordinary things, walk through walls, teleport, move people through time... so if someone got hold of Xavier's consciousness, it wouldn't be any shock to have a mutant who creates things to build a body around it. Which is why he'd still be in a wheelchair -- he'd be a replica of what he was.
From the first film, the issues at the forefront were alienation and discrimination. Does that still drive the franchise for you?
I think it's eternally relevant, and it speaks to a common experience that most adolescents have. The X-Men universe is about a very specific community of people that have unique powers, living among a larger body of humanity. And how they deal with it and reconcile with it is a source of an endless amount of conflict and wish-fulfilment. At some point -- I don't care whether you're the most popular heterosexual person on Earth -- there will be moments in your life where you will feel different, where you will feel uncomfortable in your skin, and you won't know why. That's why X-Men affects people and stays with them. These themes make it darker sometimes, but it's more interesting to me than action for action's sake, or comic-book fluff.
**How deep are you into the next film, X-Men: Apocalypse?
Has it grown from this?**
Yeah, it has. We're just in the final stages of breaking the story. It will probably be one of those movies that has more shit being destroyed! Apocalypse is, ultimately, an Earth-cleanser, and with that comes a lot of destruction. So it will have a lot of that in it. But I promise it will be very well motivated.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
