Anytime Lauren Shuler Donner steps into an interview the attention will always be turned to the X-Men universe, which now includes an upcoming Wolverine movie, a Young Magneto and who knows what else. The questions were launched and she answered, check out what was said:
What is the story on Wolverine and Young Magneto?
Well, we’re going to do Wolverine I hope in the fall and we’re out to a director now, we have a good script and I think we’re going to do Young Magneto, we have a really great script, we have a director that is interested and he’ll do a rewrite on the script. It’s young Magneto and it’s a young Xavier, not kid young, but when Magneto got through the Holocaust and when he Eric Lehnsherr became Magneto.
What about Bryan Singer as director for Wolverine?
I would love it. We would love nothing more than to have Bryan do Wolverine, but Bryan is developing the sequel to Superman so I don’t know, it depends on scheduling. But nothing would please all of us more.
Hugh said he would like four months to get into shape for the role and he was thinking January or February of ’08.
Yeah, he’s thinking that, we are thinking Fall. [laughing] I’m sorry Hugh.
Any chance of a whole year of X-Men movies, sequels and spin-offs?
Yes, we could and there are some other ideas that we are going to be delving into, but it’s often availability of actor, availability of director and weather conditions so you don’t always have that luxury and most importantly the release date. What else is coming out? What other comic book movies are we going against? So we always set our release dates before we start filming those movies.
Did you expect what you got out of X-Men and what it has become?
In our wildest dreams we wanted it to be a franchise, we wanted it to be able to spin-off, there’s 40 years of comics but I will tell you, we never previewed it and there was a day when Bryan, myself, our editor and I think Tom Rothman was in the room and we all looked at each other and said, ‘We’ll never work again,’ because we didn’t know what we had.
Tom Rothman said even though X3 was last of that group, what of Gambit, any chance for a movie with him and what else is in the future?
Probably, the reason we didn’t use Gambit was because in a sense his persona is a bit like Wolverine in that he’s got attitude and his power is not quite as exciting as the others, that’s why we went to Nightcrawler on X2 because he looked different than everybody else and he had a great power. So, yes, I think we would weave Gambit within our story, it wouldn’t be ‘the Gambit movie.’ I love him and remember in ‘Lost’ there was a guy in there that was the perfect Gambit, the guy with the stray hair, he’s good-looking, the bad boy… Sawyer (Josh Holloway)!
Are we ever going to see a sequel to Constantine?
Yes, you might, you might.
With Keanu?
Yes, with Keanu. We have been working with a team of writers for a story and yes, we will.
