LOGAN ( Spoiler Alert)

[jo]

Deadpool can't count! The LOGAN finale happened in 2029!

And --

Doesn't Deadpool know that Wolverine ( aka Hugh Jackman) has the ability to come back

*From death to rebirth ( The Fountain)
*From death to singing on top of an elephant monument in Paris ( Les Miserables)
*From death by drowning, but not after cloning himself ( The Prestige)
*Time-travel and let the "new" XMen live again (Future Past)

*From possible death... to being rescued barely alive, maybe? (Prisoners)

*Or just goes to RIO heaven ( The Boy from Oz)


Never say die -- is Jackman's motto


Jo

[jo]

Ha - this one is for real!

[hughmanity]

This is pretty fascinating if you like visual effects and lots of digital mock-ups of Hugh's head!

[jo]

Did you ever watch LOGAN NOIR ?


www.gq.com/story/logan-noir-makes-the-new-feel-old-again

Culture
Logan: Noir Makes the New Feel Old Again
The new version of 2017's best superhero movie is a perfect companion piece.

By Tom Philip
May 18, 2017


There is not a single new frame in Logan: Noir, the black-and-white re-release of Logan, the R-rated X-Men film that's already being crowned the best superhero movie of the year. There is no alternate ending. There is absolutely no post-credits sting. And yet, this is also not just a film for superfans who have seen the original version 28 times. First-time viewers might be just as receptive to this as they were the original.


Director James Mangold was adamant this is not his planned version of the film from the beginning. "If I said it was my preferred version, my production designer would faint, all that work out the window." It is true, especially in the final act when the SFX start ramping up and the verdant forests of North Dakota come into play, that you start to wish they'd perhaps switched to color for the final few key sequences. (Those blood splatters sure do look good in deep, deep gray, though.)


The joy of Logan: Noir isn't its elevation of the original, but how it further underlines the film as a labor of love and trust from Mangold, star Hugh Jackman, and producer Hutch Parker, all of whom participated in a post-screening Q&A at Brooklyn's Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. "This came from the fans," Mangold said of Noir, which was inspired by public response to his black-and-white photos from the set during filming. Jackman himself also revealed he had run into Stephen Colbert the day previous, who admitted to having seen Logan three times, and crying at each and every viewing.


Perhaps most amusing and endearing is the group's shared reverence of 11-year-old actor Dafne Keen, who plays the mercurial X-23 in the film with such mature intensity. "We wanted a kid," Mangold said. "Not a CW post-pubescent teen... She's a real actor. She wanted just to know the vibe of the scene, and got disconcerted when I gave her what I call 'results notes' like 'do this, feel this.'"

"She hated being dragged from set every day," Jackman added, "She wanted to stay and work. She's super cool and very relaxed, though at the MTV Awards last Sunday, she came up to me all shy and said, 'Can you get me a photo with Emma Watson?'". While Logan is a definitive ending for one of the best superheroes of the modern era, it is very, very likely the beginning of another.


It really is in the film's first scenes that the whole endeavor makes sense. Logan's high-tech limo, his dispatching of the requisite dispensable villains right at the top of the film, his first conversation with Xavier in the overturned, rusted water tower, all suddenly feel much more in line with the film's obvious Western influences. This is a movie set in the future with most of its runtime spent in a desert warehouse forgotten by time. The monochrome only enhances this juxtaposition, the brooding of Jackman's Logan himself, and the unfortunate plight of the once-great, already-limited Professor X, now further relegated to a hospital bed.

"It makes the new feel old again," Mangold said, to applause.

And for those clamoring to watch Logan: Noir who don't live in New Yorks hippest borough, it's part of Logan's home release, so you can watch it right this second

If there is a portrayal of a superhero that deserves an Oscar, it has to be Hugh Jackman's in LOGAN!

The AMPAS turned the other way when Hugh's portrayal touched many movie fan's heart, even those not fans of superhero movies.

Jo

[jo]

If you are a great fan of LOGAN also because of its terrific screenplay ( nominated for an Oscar, the first superhero movie to get that accolade) -- here's a great interview with the movie screenwriters. It is pretty long but very insightful. Better to read something of substance such as this discussion of an acclaimed screenplay than spend hours dissecting the storyline of say, as someone calls it " AVENGERS : ANY GAME" ( jk)


creativescreenwriting.com/logan/

Added on March 3, 2017
Christopher McKittrick


Myth vs. Man: James Mangold and Scott Frank on Logan


Writing an intimate superhero film, the summer blockbuster arms race, writing for children, and dialogue as a delivery system of lies.

After eight previous films playing Marvel’s most famous mutant superhero, Hugh Jackman promises that Logan will be the final time that Wolverine’s iconic adamantium claws will extend from his fists. Leading Jackman through what is purported to be his final adventure in Fox’s latest X-Men movie is writer/director James Mangold, who previously directed Jackman as Logan in 2013’s The Wolverine.

Before agreeing to make Logan, longtime friends and collaborators Mangold and Jackman sought as much creative influence as they were allowed on a film that is both the third Wolverine solo movie, and also the tenth movie in Fox’s X-Men franchise.

One of the conditions was that Logan would indeed be the “Last Ride” for Jackman’s Wolverine. After Mangold wrote an initial treatment for Logan, screenwriter Michael Green (co-writer of the upcoming Alien: Covenant and Blade Runner 2049) expanded Mangold’s treatment. Later, Mangold returned to the screenplay with Scott Frank, the veteran Oscar-nominated screenwriter who co-wrote The Wolverine.


Logan is set in 2029, a time when mutants are almost entirely wiped out from existence. Logan’s mutant powers – particularly his healing – are fading, and he ekes out a living as a limo driver in Texas, while he takes care of a nearly century-old Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), whose vast mental powers are failing him.

The two aged mutants come into contact with X-23, a young mutant named Laura (Dafne Keen) whose abilities and temperament are reminiscent of Logan’s own. Laura is being pursued by Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) and a group called the Reavers, and Xavier convinces Logan to fight the good fight one last time and lead ­Laura to safety to a mutant haven called Eden that may not actually exist.

Mangold’s films cover the spectrum of genres, yet they also cross them. In addition to directing a traditional Western, 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma, both his 1997 film Copland and Logan are narratives that adhere to Western sensibilities.

Similarly, Frank’s writing has crossed a number of cinematic genres (and thus has been featured numerous times in Creative Screenwriting), and his first novel, a crime story titled Shaker, was recently released in paperback by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. He is also the creator of Godless, a Western mini-series that will be released by Netflix.

Creative Screenwriting interviewed Mangold and Frank separately about reuniting for Wolverine’s final cinematic adventure, why the film’s R rating wasn’t just about violence, and what surprising aspect the Wolverine character has in common with music legend Johnny Cash, the subject of Mangold’s 2005 film Walk the Line.


Hugh Jackman as Logan/Wolverine in Logan. Photo Credit: James Mangold.


After The Wolverine, what did you feel you still wanted to accomplish with the Wolverine character?

James Mangold:


Hugh and I set a goal that if we were going to make another, that it would be the last one. In that context, we wanted to find a way to do things that had never been done with the character.
The Japanese saga [depicted in The Wolverine] had its own definite world and limits, in the sense that it really told a specific story about Logan in a specific circumscribed universe and an exotic locale. We wanted to do something more final, but for me – and I think the same was true for Hugh – there was not really an interest in going back again unless there was an opportunity for greater self-expression.


I’m not implying that we were somehow denied self-expression on The Wolverine, but the material we were adapting defined itself. The fact that we had the opportunity with Logan to start something from a blank page meant in a way that I had the chance to make an original film of my own about this character, as opposed to serving the grander needs of a comic book saga.



Scott Frank: The Wolverine was very frustrating for me, because there was a different regime running the studio at the time. When I came on The Wolverine, he didn’t lose his powers until the last five pages of the script and then gets them back. I said to Jim, “Let’s write a movie about a guy who is invincible and self-healing who loses his power on page twenty, and explore that.”

There was a lot of pushback from the then-powers-that-be with The Wolverine, to get back to the giant robots and all the other stuff. But what was really fun for us was the character study of this man, alone, in the middle of Japan, and out of his element. I kept thinking of the movie Witness. That to me was a real character study, because you could explore what it would be like to lose everybody that you love, and to suddenly understand what it feels like to be mortal. We were exploring that, and I think in the end we were stymied.

But with Logan there was a newer regime at the top of the studio, and they were very supportive of experimenting with the character, because they know that with these movies a kind of sameness sets in very quickly. They become a snake eating its own tail when they keep doing the same thing over and over again. We were very conscious of chasing down what we had started in the last one, but really doing it deeper now.

Wolverine is older and he’s at the end, and Charles is in a bad way. We wanted to explore all of that, along with debunking the whole mythology of the superhero to a degree, while at the same time re-mythologizing them. That was an exciting thing for us to do – find out what it is like to be Logan the man. It’s even titled Logan because we’re really exploring that aspect of his life.



Can you talk about the story development process for Logan? I assume Hugh Jackman was involved as well.

James: Hugh and I have been friends for almost twenty years now, and he was there every step of the way. For Hugh and I, the first goal was to construct something more intimate. Hugh often brought up The Wrestler and Unforgiven as examples. I used those references as well as others. I pitched to both Hugh and the studio that I had an idea for an extremely bloody, existential Little Miss Sunshine.

I wrote a fifty-page treatment for the movie that effectively laid out that our characters are on the run, and Charles has a degenerate brain disease and is being cared for by Logan. That set up a kind of Alzheimer’s father-son relationship, but in this case because Professor X has the most powerful brain in the world, his deteriorating condition makes him a threat to people.

That idea was married to the other idea I had, which was X-23 arriving on their doorstep and serving as the catalyst for the flight across the country. The most basic idea I had was that to make a more interesting movie about Logan: we had to make a movie about what frightens him the most.

That was the defining idea of this movie. He’s not frightened of supervillains, and he’s not frightened by the end of the world. He’s certainly not frightened of his own demise. Given that, it struck me that the only thing that I could think of that he is truly frightened of was love itself and intimacy for a variety of reasons.

One is the shame that he carries on his shoulders from all that has come before, and he has also been shellshocked by the very simple realization that anyone he loves dies. He tries to avoid caring about anyone because his affection almost becomes a guarantee of their doom. In a sense, romantic love is not as permanent or constricting as family love. There’s something immutable about the connection between parents and children. Therefore, I felt that was the right place to dig.
At that point, I was also working with Scott Frank on The Deep Blue Good-by, a Travis McGree movie that we were getting ready to shoot with Christian Bale. While that was happening, Michael Green came on Logan and did a pass to lay out some of the ideas I had put in my treatment into screenplay form. When The Deep Blue Good-by collapsed because Christian tore his ACL, Scott and I took over writing Logan to flesh out the story.

In some way, I felt we had still not gotten to a satisfactory ending.

The biggest breakthrough Scott and I had was this meta idea about the comic books existing in the world of our heroes. Like fallen sports stars or old Hollywood stars, these characters were haunted by their own legends. It was a way to define their own positions at the start of the story even further, but it also helped us chart how the story would take care of the second and third acts in ways we hadn’t conquered yet.



Hugh Jackman as Logan/Wolverine in Logan. Photo Credit: Ben Rothstein.
© 2017 Marvel. TM and © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.


Speaking of those comic books, it was clever to incorporate the idea that the X-Men are also fictionalized comic book heroes in the future. What was the thought process behind including that?

Scott: We were sitting in a hotel room in New York City with Hugh working through the script. I don’t know how many drafts we had done at this point. This notion came up about Eden, where the idea of Eden came from, and whether or not it was even real. The notion of using the comic books became really exciting to all of us. That idea to use it in the world plays with the notion of myth versus man.

James: It always strikes me as very unusual that in some of these sagas superheroes have their own jets, spotlights that shine in the sky with their insignia, costumes, and elaborate identities. These are the kind of things that would generate a bonfire of publicity in the media. Yet, there is very little attention paid to that. How they would navigate the weight of that kind of publicity and their own infamy in this celebrity-driven world is so interesting to me.


Logan is obviously influenced by Westerns, and the movie even includes clips from the classic Shane. Why does the Wolverine character lend itself to Western themes?

James: The Western itself is more than horses, guns, stagecoaches, and varmint talk. In fact, the least interesting part of the Western to me is the Knott’s Berry Farm aspects of it. What is most interesting to me about the Western is the simplicity, clean lines, and economy of storytelling.

Westerns are essentially character-driven and not plot-driven, and they allow more space for character and interesting explorations of theme through character, dialogue, and conflicts.

In many ways, in the last decade the summer blockbuster has become a rehash of the same plotline over and over again, almost like an arms race of one picture trying to outdo the other with the level of destruction: You destroy a city, we’ll destroy a continent; you destroy a continent, we’ll destroy the Earth; you destroy the Earth, we’ll destroy the galaxy.

At the same time, the secondary arms race is the number of characters, until these movies have started to approach the Tora! Tora! Tora! level of a cast of thousands. Given the finite runtime of a movie, you have too many of them – just take 120 minutes and divide that. And you also have action sequences and titles.

It’s no wonder then that in some of these movies these characters don’t have much more of an arc than Elmer Fudd does in a Warner Bros. cartoon. Elmer actually has more screentime than they get. It’s not a lack of talent among screenwriters and directors of those movies, it’s that the architecture itself is doomed to only be able to scrape the surface of the character because you just don’t have the real estate to explore it.



Scott: The loner who stumbles into somebody else’s fight is always fascinating to me. It’s an interesting aspect of Westerns. I love it in Unforgiven and it’s a huge part of my own Western, Godless. There’s also a code, and I think there’s a code in the world of superheroes as well. The rules and the feel of the Western are different than that of the something like the cop genre, and there’s just something that I’m very comfortable with in that world.


Speaking of stumbling into somebody else’s fight, that actually happens to Logan in the opening scene.

Scott: I told Jim that I’ve always wanted to write a James Bond movie where at the beginning of the movie Bond is in a bar somewhere in London getting drunk, and he ends up getting the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of soccer hooligans. I thought that would be a great way to pick him up at his worst point, because I like picking up characters when they’re in some sort of extremis in order to dig them out. I thought that would be a fun way to pick up James Bond, rather than picking him up in a casino or somewhere else where he’s in a suit.

Nobody was asking me to write that movie, but they were asking me to write this one. [Laughs] I kept pitching this idea of an opening where that happens to Logan. It would also announce that it’s not going to be the other kind of superhero movie. It’s not going to be full of CG or gravity-defying effects. We even had a two or three paragraph manifesto in the script stating that. It was a great way to hum the key of the story right up front.



James, I also saw connections with Cop Land, another Western-inspired movie, which also features a damaged hero with few allies standing up against a corrupt, powerful organization.

James: That’s another movie of mine that doesn’t take place in a Western milieu, but is very much influenced by Westerns. We were more than conscious of it while we were making the film.

I feel a connection with all my films. I feel a connection between Walk the Line and Logan. I feel a connection between Girl, Interrupted and Logan. Certainly, 3:10 to Yuma and Logan. For me, it’s the idea of a protagonist who is struggling with his or her own sense of psychological stability and depression to the point of almost having a death wish.

There’s a very interesting story Johnny Cash told me personally only a few weeks before he died. I had been talking to him every week doing research for the movie, and in the months after June [Carter Cash, Johnny’s wife] passed I would call him in the morning on Saturdays.

On one particular day I was asking him random questions, including what his favorite movies were. It was a rambling conversation across different decades of movies that influenced him, but the one that was most interesting to me is that he brought up James Whale’s Frankenstein, which he saw when he was eight or nine years old.
He said he had this very palpable experience watching the movie. Everyone in the movie was frightened of this monster, but he identified with the monster and saw it as an extension of himself. He said, “I identified with Frankenstein because I felt I also was made up of all these bad parts.”

It was a very moving conversation with John, but it also would very much be the words coming out of Logan’s mouth. He is a character that feels in some way cursed and made dark by God, and is forced to live in this body with this destiny of violence and regret.




Scott, when I interviewed you about The Wolverine you told me that the only Wolverine comic book that influenced you was Mark Millar’s Old Man Logan. There are also a lot of influences from Old Man Logan in this film – the aged Logan, the fact that it’s an on-the-road story, and so on – but obviously this isn’t an adaptation of that storyline. Can you talk about the Old Man Logan influence?

Scott: The attitude of that comic is what blew me away. I never encountered a superhero story like that. It is almost like you are reading about Dirty Harry. It is a very different sort of character.
My pitch to Jim was always, “If we are going to be on the road with a man and a child, let’s do a hyper-violent Paper Moon with no sentiment whatsoever.” In fact, let’s hold off on any emotion until the very end. He is constantly trying to get rid of her.

That made it easier to write. The Old Man Logan comic, which I read while we were working on The Wolverine, was something I could relate to, whereas the other superhero stuff I read I didn’t relate to because it just felt fake. Nobody dies, nobody gets hurt, nobody ages, nobody has any real issues. If there’s any kind of humor, it’s usually winking humor.
Old Man Logan felt like it was written by somebody completely different. It had its own feel, and I loved it.


There are always challenges when you have children as major characters in a screenplay. You obviously don’t want a younger character to influence a childish tone or the character, to turn out like a kid sidekick or a designated victim. When writing Laura, what steps did you take to ensure that she would be the strong, compelling character that she is on screen?

James: First of all, you treat the character like an adult. You have to be responsible for giving the actress playing this role the same kind of depth that you would give to a character played by an adult. You also need to find an actress capable of really bringing humanity to the role, and not a kid who is used to doing cereal commercials and being cute.
I think we also did several other things that assisted. One of which was trying to undo the natural gravitational pull of writing precocious banter that adults often have with children in movies, by making her someone who didn’t speak English. Even when she speaks in the film, the movie is forced into cinema because they don’t speak the same language.
What I mean by “forced into cinema” is that I am a big believer that we have gotten way into dialogue as the delivery mechanism of meaning in movies. If anything, I tend to find that my results are much more pleasing – at least to myself – when I view dialogue as the delivery system of lies in a movie. What we see is the truth, and what we hear is misdirection.

Scott: I read a few other drafts of the script that Jim worked on, and in all those drafts she was talking from the beginning and had an attitude. I thought that was a giant mistake. I felt like she should be mute for as long as we could keep her that way. She should be feral, but also super-intelligent. But you don’t realize that. At first, you think she’s just this animal, but the more you learn about her the more you learn that she’s super-intelligent but without her speaking.

There was a little beat that we cut from the script. In the film when she’s at the farmhouse in the middle of the movie, she walked in on the son doing his math homework and she actually helps him with it. You would see this kind of mind that she has.

There remain little things like that in the film, and you get the sense that she’s a lot smarter and that she understands a lot more than she lets on. If you can do that without saying that, she becomes a stronger character because she is much more interesting. From the get-go, I was really pushing hard to mute her.


Dafne Keen as Laura and Hugh Jackman as Logan/Wolverine in Logan. Photo Credit: Ben Rothstein.
© 2017 Marvel. TM and © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.


Did you or the studio have any concern about the level of violence in the screenplay, since much of it involves children?

James: There was concern at the point when we were getting the OK to do an R-rated film. The commitment to making the film at that rating was really early on in the treatment process. I think because I made a bunch of movies for the studio before, there was tremendous trust, and because Hugh and I were allied there was tremendous loyalty between us about pursuing the goal we were after.

The other thing that is interesting is that I didn’t want the R just for the violence. I wanted that rating because I wanted to make an adult film. What I mean by that is you cannot explore adult themes in a movie that also has to entertain nine year-olds.

One of the things that people don’t consider is that in the modern economic system of Hollywood, when you agree a movie will be rated R at the get-go, the studio marketing and merchandising departments and the distribution networks have to all come to terms with the fact that it is no longer a four-box film. Because it’s not a four-box film, they understand that there will be money left on the table because you’re not going to be selling this film to nine through fourteen year-olds. That’s also the end of opportunities to sell action figures and do tie-ins with fast food companies.

It also influences your scenes. One of the first scenes I wrote early on in my treatment was the first scene between Logan and Charles in the tank. That’s a six-minute scene. That scene has no violence, but it could never exist in a movie written to also entertain children simply because it’s a scene from an adult-themed film. The emotional turns in it are just not what you’d write to keep children engaged. That is a kind of freedom brought to you by rating simply because the film doesn’t become short attention span theater; it becomes a movie for grown-ups.



Scott, your first novel, Shaker, recently was released in paperback. I see some similarities in it to Logan, and also some Elmore Leonard influences. What inspired you to write your first novel after so many years as a successful screenwriter?
Scott: The book is something I’ve been noodling on forever. I’ve been working on it since the 1990s. It was originally going to be based around the 1994 Northridge earthquake, so that’s how long ago I started.

Even since early on in my career, I had become increasingly frustrated as a storyteller with the format of screenwriting. It’s not a particularly satisfying format, though I do think that scripts are an art form unto themselves. I really do believe that a script could be a great thing to read.

But it’s difficult because you only have sight and sound. Anytime you try and use the other three senses along with it, it reads purple. You’re really just describing something that you’re watching and listening to.
I have always been inspired as much by books as I was by movies. In fact, I probably learned more about character and dialogue from books than I ever did from movies..

I wrote 100 pages of the novel, then forgot about it for many years as life took over, and then rediscovered it by pulling it out of a drawer and reading it on a whim. Suddenly I found this year of time where I thought I was going to be working on something and that fell through, so I decided to finish the book.



Scott, you are also working on Godless, a Western mini-series for Netflix. What was different about creating this series from your film work?

Godless was a feature script that I had written a long time ago, and then expanded into a six-hour story. To be honest, it was like reverse adaptation – I could go deeper with everybody, which was a pleasure. It is a real old-fashioned Western. It’s dark and it’s violent, but there’s also a large romantic element and a lot of humor.

I really miss the big, sprawling Westerns. I wanted to do something like that forever, and it was very hard to make it as a feature because studios aren’t making them. The expression they always say is “Westerns don’t travel,” meaning that you can’t sell them overseas. But now with what’s happening in television the rules are all different, and Netflix was actually really high on the idea of doing a Western.

We finished shooting in mid-December and I’m deep into cutting it right now. I was in New Mexico for eight months, and we shot for 120 days because we shot it like you would shoot a six-hour movie in scheduling a 360-page script. We didn’t shoot an episode at a time because it’s a finite series, and we used the locations as we went. It was a huge job and we encountered every season and all kinds of weather. It was a real challenge for me, and I’ve never done anything this big before.

I’m having a great time, and for me the best thing was being able to go deeper in exploring the characters, which is what I love so much about television. I got to tell more story about characters I care about. That’s what’s really exciting and fun, as both a writer and a director.

Featured image: Hugh Jackman as Logan/Wolverine in Logan. Photo Credit: Ben Rothstein. © 2017 Marvel. TM and © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

[jo]

www.cinemablend.com/news/2477828/marvels-kevin-feige-wanted-tony-starks-death-in-endgame-to-be-just-as-impactful-as-logan

Marvel’s Kevin Feige Wanted Tony Stark’s Death In Endgame To Be Just As Impactful As Logan


Marvel’s Kevin Feige Wanted Tony Stark’s Death In Endgame To Be Just As Impactful As Logan
Adam Holmes



It was expected going into Avengers: Endgame that while those who were dusted at the end of Avengers: Infinity War would somehow be brought back, there would nonetheless be permanent casualties when all was said and done. Sure enough, Black Widow and Iron Man both perished during the course of Endgame, with Tony Stark meeting his demise when he channeled the power of the Infinity Stones to turn Thanos and his army to dust.


While speaking about Tony Stark’s death, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige recalled how when planning out how the hero who launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe would fall, he and the Avengers: Endgame filmmakers looked to the death of Wolverine in 2017’s Logan for inspiration on hitting the right emotional chord. In Feige’s words:

We saw Logan like the audience did, in a theater having nothing to do with the making of that film and went, 'oh my god, what an amazing ending for Hugh as this character.' And there are only a handful of examples where an actor so associated with a character can go out perfectly. That's what we desperately wanted to give Robert, and that was what our focus was on.

Like Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine was a superhero audiences watched in action for a long time, with Jackman’s tenure as the clawed mutant lasting nine movies across 17 years. Wolverine died at the end of Logan from wounds sustained during a battle with his berserker clone, X-24, and his final words were to his daughter Laura, telling her she doesn’t need to become a weapon like she was made to be. That moment definitely pulled at the heartstrings.



In his interview with Empire, Kevin Feige talked about when work on Avengers: Endgame started, he and the other creative minds wanted to deliver the “stakes and real emotion” that fans wanted after years of there being the sense that deaths didn’t matter in the MCU. They were committed “100%” to taking Tony Stark off the board, and by making Tony’s death just as impactful as Wolverine’s would help with sticking the landing.

Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo previously said that Tony Stark’s fate in the movie was “destiny,” as Tony was a futurist who could not rest until he defeated the threat coming for humanity, Thanos. He finally accomplished that goal, bringing into existence the one successful future that Doctor Strange glimpsed in Avengers: Infinity War, and whether you find Tony death more emotional than Wolverine’s or not, you could feel the heartbreak as Tony’s allies and loved ones watched him die.

While there’s always technically the possibility that Robert Downey Jr. could return to the MCU years down the line somehow, Avengers: Endgame gave a fitting and emotionally resonant conclusion to Tony Stark’s journey. We’ll be revisiting Black Widow’s life next year, but Iron Man will not be gracing the big screen again anytime soon, if at all.

Which makes sense, as Phase 4 marks a new direction for the MCU. Sure we’ll be reuniting with other familiar faces in the coming years, like Thor, Doctor Strange and Captain Marvel, but we’re also meeting plenty of new characters, like the Eternals, Shang-Chi and Blade. Tony’s death closed one MCU door and opened up a new one, similarly to what Wolverine’s death did for the X-Men franchise.

An original has the patina of greatness, while a copy is still a copy! And ironically, a great original (no matter the tragedy surrounding it) does have a sense of immortality!

Also, it is not so much that a beloved superhero died, but it is the circumstances which led to his death which makes the ending so heartfelt and stunning! And that reversal of the cross to an "X" was truly inspired. When Logan expired ( and you are not sure what he really meant when he uttered " So this is how it feels like " - was it the imminence of death or the final acknowledgement of his fatherhood) your heart broke! But when you saw the inverted cross by the graveside, you were mourning the whole XMen tribe ( no matter that Kinberg kept disastrously trying to keep them alive )...and there was a tiny, tiny hope that maybe a faint SNIKT can be heard again?

I remember how it was in 2 IMAX screenings I had seen here in Manila - both having practically having the same kind of audience reactions.

As THE END flashed and the screen went dark -- you would expect to see the audience to start leaving.

No - we all seemed stunned!  And in shock!  We all sat there to collect ourselves through the tears/choked feelings, thought about what we had just seen, speculated internally that "This is could not be the end! Oh No!"), calmed down...in deep thought... calmed down further and then started accepting that we have just seen WOLVERINE/LOGAN leave his beloved audiences for the final time! Luv ya


Jo

[jo]

And if I may add --

Soliciting tearful reactions by being overly emotional per se does not always work. It is the circumstances leading to a perceived tragedy or death leaving one stunned -- which makes it shocking and wishing to forget what one has just seen and which is masterful in impact! That was what elevated LOGAN - the whole backstory to his end ( from the very first scene in the movie to the finality of his death) which left such a powerful and dramatic impact on the audiences. We did not want to accept what we had seen - this is NOT inevitable - that is why most everyone looks up to LOGAN as the definitive character study of a superhero...And that is what Kevin Feige saw!!


Jo

[jo]

[jo]

In case you want to reply --

[jo]

There's an emotional attachment to the character!


Jo

[jo]

Fandom
✔
@getfandom
· 7h

Kevin Feige wanted Tony Stark's death in #Endgame to be as impactful as 'Logan' — [We saw] that film and went, 'oh my god, what an amazing ending for Hugh as this character' ... And that's what we desperately wanted to give Robert'

Haha!

Jo

[jo]

Vote*Vote*Vote!!!

Thanks!


Jo

[jo]

[jo]

Look who is growing up so fast!

[jo]

Here's an excellent interview with James Mangold when LOGAN was about to be released. I do not know how I missed this one!

There are quite a few new things about Hugh that he mentions


birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/03/01/an-exclusive-interview-with-logan-director-james-mangold-part-ii

An Exclusive Interview With LOGAN Director James Mangold: Part II
Our epic chat with LOGAN director James Mangold concludes.
By Priscilla Page Mar. 01, 2017



Logan is out this week (buy your tickets here!). To celebrate, we're featuring a week of articles in honor of everyone's favorite mutant.
It’s no secret that I loved the hell out of Logan. It’s as violent and desperate as The Wild Bunch, as redemptive as a John Ford western, not unlike a Wolverine story written by Cormac McCarthy. Logan is beautiful, and I can’t wait to see it again.
I was very lucky to be able to meet Logan’s director James Mangold in his office at 20th Century Fox. He told me they had just finished Logan 72 hours prior, and he seemed relaxed — definitely more relaxed than I was. There was a big beautiful Frank Frazetta-illustrated poster for Clint Eastwood’s The Gauntlet on the wall, and tons of records and books on the shelves that I couldn’t stop staring at, and Shane playing on the television just outside the door. If I could do it all over again, I might have asked Mangold about his first film, the quiet and lonely Heavy about a shy diner cook; the Super 8 movies he made as a kid; his time studying film with Alexander Mackendrick at CalArts or Miloš Forman at Columbia; his remake of 3:10 to Yuma or his Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line; the miracle of The Wolverine — a superhero-meets-samurai film with notes of Clint Eastwood and Yasujirō Ozu, the antidote to the first soul-crushing solo Wolverine movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. But I feel pretty great about all the topics we did cover: his influences, what makes Wolverine compelling, Dafne Keen, superhero costumes, Cop Land, avoiding labels, Travis McGee, and how to create an intimate story in a world of superhero films often defined by sound and fury.
(continued from Part One)



Priscilla: I do want to talk about Dafne Keen because she’s awesome. How did you find her and how did you know she was the one?

Mangold: The bandwidth of what I was looking for was so specific. First of all, I did not want to make a movie with Logan having a daughter older than 12. A) I didn’t want there to be any kind of “me and my sexy daughter” thing going on, and B) I didn’t want the CW kind of Flash or Supergirl energy. I also felt like that’s something Bryan [Singer]’s done in the other movies, which is cast very young, attractive people in these roles and then grow them up. I wanted a kid, a true child, a child that required the guidance and love and protection of a parent. So that meant I was looking for someone between 9 and 12, and for reasons that you will not understand yet I needed someone who spoke Spanish because she does speak later on in the movie. But I also really enjoyed in The Wolverine making a multilingual movie, and I love the way it forces your hand to tell the story through acting and feeling, and the mishmash of language almost makes the movie a silent movie again. It forces you to tell the movie that way, and that’s really interesting.

So I was looking for a Spanish-speaking 10-to-12-year-old phenomenal actress who was also physically capable because there was no way I could do this with 100% doubling. When you make movies like this a lot, even when you have someone who can’t quite do a lot physically, they need to be able to finish a blow or a fight or start it. And you’d be amazed at how many actors can’t even finish or start a fight move or a turn or a twist or a landing that either, A) they’re just too fragile, or B) too weak or too slow. The level of physicality in movies is so high now that what you need this person to uphold is intense.


So that’s a pretty narrow thing: Spanish-speaking brilliant actress, physically capable, and also emotionally capable of holding up one of the legs of a fairly large movie for 4 months. This tape arrived from Madrid. We had casting going on in Europe and South America and the United States obviously and everywhere else. This tape arrived, this Quicktime that Dafne’s dad had shot with her — Will Keen who’s an actor himself — of her climbing around their house on their bookshelves and leaping down onto a table and onto the floor and then doing these scenes with just no affect, no acting, no child-acting. The whole world of child-acting is horrifying to me. You do these commercial auditions and you know they’ve all been grilled by their mother or father in front of a mirror and you’re just — most of what you see is so horrible. I would say that tape of Dafne arrived and on that day I knew we had a movie. I hadn’t even gotten to the end of the script with Scott [Frank] yet but I knew we had a movie. Because to me, Patrick and Hugh were give-ins, the missing point on the triangle — and in a way the special effect of the movie — was gonna be the credibility of this young woman and her ability to push and pull on Hugh, not just to be cute but to be this mini-me of his angst and depression and darkness and all that.

The only other times I’ve been that sure in my career of an actor — one was Angelina Jolie for Girl, Interrupted. I was like the guy in the old Maxell ad with the wind, I was just like, what the fuck, that was just insane. She ended up in that session just reading with me every scene she had in the script all the way to the ending. She just played her arc in one afternoon in Culver City in an audition room and nailed it. My greatest worry was just getting her on camera, to the degree that there were much bigger stars at the time who wanted the same role. The amazing thing about that tape we made that day there was absolutely no hesitation by the studio about using her even though there were bigger names who wanted that part. It was just phenomenal power. Ben Foster in (3:10 to) Yuma, he came in and he was just out of water, he sat down and he was scary and amazing and sexy and askew and had a crush on his boss, and it was all so interesting and just done. Done and done. And then Dafne. And I never had a problem with the studio, meaning it was just so clear that this was the person. There was some contingent in the marketing executive ranks, you know, like, couldn’t we go a little older? But I think that got quickly put down.



Priscilla: What’s her understanding of the movie? Is she gonna be allowed to see it?

Mangold: Well, she lived it.



Priscilla: But play-acting it is a little different.

Mangold: That’s true. It’s up to her parents whether she sees it, being that she’s under 17 and it’s their decision, but I have a feeling they’re gonna let her see it. It doesn’t ever change, like for me I’ve been there, I’m standing by the camera for every shot. It never is quite the movie to you. It always looks like the assemblage of all the pieces, you need a lot of distance to see the thing as just a piece of storytelling purely. But she’s a remarkable kid and extremely aware, growing up in a house with a mom and dad who are both actors and extremely savvy about what’s going on, and I don’t think anything will change the fact that everyone on the screen was like her family for the last year. For her I wouldn’t be so nervous about her seeing it. She’s also seen so much of it in the sense of doing any dialogue replacement. I’ve let her see clips of things as we’re cutting them together. To get a grownup or a naturalistic performance out of a kid, you have to connect with them the same way you would an adult. You have to share with them, obviously within the confines of what they can understand or how much they can take in, but the most important thing is that they understand — for Daf, 90% of it was just me laying out how she’s feeling in the scene. And then she would just generally nail it, just an incredible kid. When you see more of her in interviews when they finally start letting her do that, you’ll see that this is a very world-wise kid.


Priscilla: When I included Logan in my best-movies-of-2016 list I mentioned that I’d cried watching the first 42 minutes. As a woman who loves action movies I always feel like an outsider, and so to see, like even a little girl, having that…

Mangold: Power.



Priscilla: Yeah, it’s the moment where she rolls the guy’s head…

Mangold: And then slaughters them all?



Priscilla: Yeah. I got a little teary.

Mangold: It’s really empowering. People have two reactions. One is like horror, like what exactly are you doing, doing this with a little girl? I don’t know, having two kids myself, I think I’m also saying something about — anyone who’s had kids or been around them knows they can be pretty terrifying. The action movie and the fantasy film and the comic-book film and the Western and all these forms are all ways to examine ourselves in a slightly exaggerated form. I think it’s really moving. I actually was amazed that people had such a powerful reaction to her after seeing the first 42 minutes because her best, by far her most amazing work, is ahead. I mean by a multiple of five. She’s astounding in the movie. Where she goes in the movie and the journey she takes — that is just a preamble. I can say that, I don’t know what everyone’s gonna think about the movie but I do know there’s breathtaking stuff for her, acting-wise, action-wise, every which way wise.



Priscilla: I’m excited to see the rest. When else did I cry…

Mangold: Charles? …no.




Priscilla: Well…that was upsetting but… for some reason I cry when action is really good. It can be overwhelming.

Mangold: It’s like a musical sequence or something. Action can be really beautiful, if you see it as a kind of beauty, which I do. It’s complicated.



Priscilla: Oh, the first scene with Logan defending his car.

Mangold: He’s incredible. I’m a big believer in, in the first five minutes, you have a very short time with modern audiences and it’s very important that you grab your skeptics by the nuts in some way. Obviously metaphorically. It’s really important that as a filmmaker you understand what people are nervous your film will or won’t be and that in some way you get right in the audience’s face, and you go, “No, you can’t make the assumption about this movie.” In Walk the Line, I felt like guys were gonna be dragged to the movie, and that there was some level that they were gonna be like, “ugh Coal Miner’s Daughter ugh whatever,” and I love Coal Miner’s Daughter but I just felt like in a modern sense, we needed to come off the bricks in some way that we grabbed people hard. 3:10 to Yuma was a similar thing, like the Western and finding a way to get on the track very quickly and in a sense remind an audience that there can be something very modern… there’s a great level of skepticism about anything that is period, anything that is too genre-y, and these are all my favorite things.

In the opening of this film, I was really conscious about just breaking down the preconceptions of, this is not your daddy’s X-Men movie. It has nothing to do with timelines and rules, it has to do with tone, it has to do with point of view. Why aren’t more movies like this, where, instead of us worrying all day about everything being this seamless world-building, isn’t it better to have directors coming on and exerting their voices and making everything feel new? Even though it is similar or same or there’s connections, but that you also get to actually experience what a movie director does, because you get to see what one doing a similar story versus another doing a similar story. Neither being worse or better, just being like, wow, that’s what movie directing is, that’s why it’s not just a product line that is homogeneously made the same every time out no matter who’s doing it, but actually something where there are voices pushing and pulling. And we’re keeping some of the libretto the same, which even makes it easier to see the creative forces. And that’s the attraction in some ways to me. It makes it even easier for someone to understand a different style or a different take because some elements of the material have stayed exactly the same.




Priscilla: Well, and it’s just good to see Wolverine’s beautiful berserker rage, just to start off the movie.

Mangold: I think Hugh has never looked more handsome in the role.



Priscilla: The hair is better.

Mangold: Well, the hair. The whole need to do that is just…I call it the Flock of Seagulls look.



Priscilla: They feathered his bangs in at least one of the movies.

Mangold: He’s in a wig for a lot of them, too. A lot of them they had him in terrible wigs.



Priscilla: I don’t actually want to have to think about…

Mangold: Hugh Jackman in a wig? No. Hugh looks great to me in kind of noir lighting, directional lighting. The tendency with movie stars most often is to hit them with a big soft pillow of light in the face, and I think you’ll see some X-Men movies where that’s what they’re doing. But I’m a big fan, where I can get away with it, with a face like his in kind noir lighting style, he looks incredible.



Priscilla: Remember when people were concerned about him because they saw him in his old man makeup? People thought he was ill.

Mangold: You mean in the early images that came out? Well, it’s great makeup people, it’s Pirates of the Caribbean makeup people. It’s really incredible stuff and really naturalistic. But also, he lost a lot of weight. There is stuff we did with the hair where we gave him a widow’s peak and took his hairline back a little, all little things. And scars. We took the simple proposition that actually Darren [Aronofsky] had started raising when he was working on The Wolverine that never really got into that movie but he had raised the idea to Hugh when they were talking about the last one, and Hugh had raised it to me, and I thought it was a really good point which is, when we get cut we heal, but we have a scar, why does Wolverine get cut and heal and has no scar? I thought it was a very good question and, well, it makes doing visual effects much easier because you don’t have this continuous accruing of scars over 7 movies, but given we were jumping forward and this idea that his healing powers were diminished, I didn’t have to necessarily attend to all the scars he’s had since birth. But at least in the context of our movie, the idea became just that he is a little bit of a pincushion, and he is acquiring marks as things go on. Even though they may heal, there’s still something remaining, which even seems kind of sexy and cool.



Priscilla: He looks really cool. This is the Logan I want to see. I don’t want to see him in… black-and-yellow spandex.

Mangold: All the aspects I talked about that I love about Wolverine, what is most important to me and I love about him, is that he does not want to be famous, he does not want credit, he does not want a limelight, his ego is not in the game of superhero-ing. I realize there’s a currency in comic books for these costumes and this branding and these logos. I understand how it plays on the page, but then in real life when you have a human being invested in branding every good deed they do, and making sure that they wore an outfit that gets them credit for what they did, I have a hard time writing that character because he is innately narcissistic. It becomes about me: “I need you to know I did that, and I want you to know I did that.” And sometimes people invent reasons like, “because then the criminals will be scared,” and it’s like, nah, I don’t think so, I think it’s so that you can own it and get your name on it and get in the papers and that essentially at some point with the Justice League branding and Avengers branding and Spider-Man branding and Superman branding and Batman shining his light in the clouds, I’m like, this character I do not think wants to play that game. And that would also involve putting on a special outfit to do good deeds so that somehow, why? So that you knew it was the Wolverine? The basic, gimmick-less nature of Wolverine is what’s most appealing. He’s just this guy with these blades who heals and is really strong. There’s no gimmicks, there’s no laboratory where he’s developing new powers, there’s no special copyrighted insignia that everyone’s now wearing. I like the absence of all that stuff. At least within the world of me making these movies. I don’t put it past someone else figuring out a way to thread the needle.



Priscilla: I have no idea how you make someone look cool in those outfits. Plus, you have an actor who is recognizably that character.

Mangold: It’s another need people have. They want to see that in the movie but all I can say is, I’m not sure you do if I really did. And there’s no way back. I’m not sure I’m the man to pull it off. I’m imagining Hugh, the guy in our movie, taking a moment out to put on…it would be humorous.



Priscilla: I remember seeing some people complain about the unleashed extended edition of The Wolverine because they thought Wolverine is supposed to open a box at the end with his costume in it.

Mangold: I shot a scene where Yukio gave him a box with the costume in it. It’s in the extra scenes. It’s on the disc. It was the one thing I did trying to appease fans.
Priscilla: Did Wolverine throw it out the window?



Mangold: He gives her a look, like, what the fuck is this. But it took the whole end of the movie emotionally off. It’s like this other interesting thing you just can’t explain to people.

But when that was on the end of the movie, suddenly the movie seemed like this joke at the end, like there was a kind of button, like the whole movie was a gag and then this was like wah-wah. So I tried but it didn’t make it in.
Priscilla: Man, The Wolverine was so good. The first one, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is …life-ruiningly bad.
Mangold: There was too much ambition to be honest on the studio’s side, more than I even understand what happened with the filmmakers. I think Hugh can address it. There was suddenly this ambition to make it into an X-Men movie. I also think they didn’t find a tone. Tone is everything in a movie. The opening 10 minutes is everything. There is no recovering from a movie being flabby or insecure in its tone, and if it doesn’t know what it is, and you don’t know what it is and you’re 15 minutes in, it’s never gonna figure out what it is. It may have a snappy ending, it may have some cool scenes. Tone is everything.



Priscilla: How do you feel saying goodbye to this character? Or do you not think about it like that?

Mangold: I don’t even think about it. It would be like saying, how do you feel saying goodbye to Johnny Cash or Freddy Heflin? I’m very moved by the film. I think the answers to how I feel will be in the movie. I feel like I love him, but I feel really happy because I think, and I hope people will agree, but I think we made something really out of the box in tribute for this character. You know, Hugh has this whole idea about going out on a strong note, and that’s not an easy thing to do in show business. I believe that one thing I think we succeeded in is being very bold about how he’s making his exit. How I feel is proud. I just feel good we brought him in for a landing, this character, that was really risky, and I think we might have gotten it.



Priscilla: I want to know if you’d ever consider doing another superhero movie — a different superhero, or even another comic book property you’d be interested in?

Mangold: One is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. It’s been mired in one byzantine Warner Bros. entanglement after another. It’s a great, great property and really interesting, and I’ve spent a lot of time talking about it with Neil [Gaiman], for over 10 years off and on, when it seems like something that might be possible. That’s one I’d be very interested in. I wouldn’t rule out an X-23 movie — when you see what Dafne’s done in this role, it’s really magical. Beyond that, I never make a rule about it. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Star Wars fan from when I was 13 years old, but at the same time I want to make dramas and other movies. But I thank God that I can survive in the tentpole world because right now the movie world has contracted into almost only tentpoles, so in a way I’m also kind of taking cover until the creative economy changes a little, and people figure out that there’s also room for a political film or a drama…those movies are really few and far between.



Priscilla: You’ve done so many different genres, is there one you haven’t done that you’d like to do, or even just a dream project?

Mangold: Real science fiction. Science fiction or a fantasy film. A musical. I’m open. Each movie teaches me, each genre teaches me about the other. There were things I learned making Kate & Leopold that helped me make Walk the Line. There were things I learned making Identity that helped me make 3:10 to Yuma. One of them is that when you make a movie for instance when there are no Oscar aspirations, you have no sense or no delusion that you’ll be feted at some awards ceremony for this effort, you relax, and you make it a way better movie. You’re freer. You don’t arrive on set so tight every day: “must be great, must be brilliant.” And then when you go back to making a movie that is serious, you actually bring that relaxation with you. Like you learn, oh, I do better if I stop trying so hard. There are all these inexplicable lessons you learn. You learn about dance choreography, choreographing fight sequences, you learn about music. I feel like I have this super lucky career. Most directors have a really hard time moving horizontally between genre. Somehow early on, the early moves I made, I was always just trying to make something different from the last thing. There was an early point in my career where I felt bad because I felt like no one’s noticing. In a way I felt invisible as a director, at least in the press and in the critical world. A lot of that I think had to do with the fact that I’m harder to get a handle on.


Priscilla: You’re not interested in branding. Like Logan.

Mangold: Right. I started wondering whether I’d made a big mistake by not just landing in one place and doing cop movies over and over again. Because it would make it a lot easier for people like yourself to frame me and support it. And also to build fans, meaning that you’d be servicing the same audience in repetition. But I feel really gratified now. More than anything else it’s about my own life experience, I mean like I really look forward to the next thing. I mean, one thing I’m trying to get going again is the Travis McGee script that Scott [Frank] and I wrote that fell apart when Christian [Bale] got hurt a year and a half ago. And I’m hoping to make that this summer.



Priscilla: That first [McGee] book, [John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-by] is one of my favorite books, it’s so beautiful.

Mangold: They’re great. The writing, his observations — the toughest thing is how to get all that in the movie.



Priscilla: How do you make it modern?

Mangold: It’s easier in the Trump era. The idea of wanting to live on a boat and get the fuck away and disconnect and make a little bit of money when you need it to put groceries and a couple beers in the fridge and then unplug is more appealing to me than ever. The sense of moral twilight of the Floridian peninsula couldn’t be any greater than it is right now. I think there are plenty of ways to make it modern. I played with the idea of doing it period but I feel like, A) it’s really hard in that world, and B) I think there’s a way to do it.


Priscilla: I just love period mysteries.

Mangold: I do, too. But having made Cop Land and I look at it now, it looks like a period mystery. It’s amazing, you make a contemporary movie and 10 years later…



Priscilla: It’s still relevant. It really holds up.

Mangold: That’s true. My only point is that when they made all those Bogart films, they weren’t making them period, they were making them in their time and they look period now. There’s a level where I’m always aware of, am I simulating or emulating? Am I trying to make something sound old because I’m trying to tap into some affection you have for another movie, or am I just taking the lessons that I can learn from those movies and making something modern? But they’re interesting questions. I love making period films as well. But Travis we’re trying to do modern day. We’ll see. We’ll see if we succeed. Questions abound.

Get your tickets here!

[jo]

Interestingly, she is also the film critic for LOGAN --

birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/02/17/logan-review-farewell-my-lovely

[njr]

Oct 16, 2019 14:34:09 GMT -5 jo said:

Look who is growing up so fast!

I’m watching her show “His Dark Materials” on HBO Mondays at 9pm. First episode was Nov. 4th.

Nancy

[jo]

The wisdom of James Mangold - as he addresses the issues recently brought up by Martin Scorsese on superhero filmmaking!


heroichollywood.com/james-mangold-martin-scorsese-marvel-logan/

[jo]

Whatever happened to Laura ( aka Dafne Keen)

She got the lead role in the new BBC TV series HIS DARK MATERIALS!

www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a29893890/dafne-keen-his-dark-materials-lyra/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflowTWMH&utm_medium=social-media

Here’s Where You’ve Seen Dafne Keen from His Dark Materials Before
Hint: she was decapitating hitmen with Hugh Jackman.

By Josh St. Clair
Nov 26, 2019

Dafne Keen stars as Lyra in the HBO fantasy series, His Dark Materials.

She also starred alongside Hugh Jackman in Logan.
Here’s what to know about HBO’s newest lead actress.


The last time you saw Dafne Keen on screen she was doing everything Hugh Jackman couldn’t. The pair starred together in the film Logan, which found Jackman’s Wolverine old, dying, and requiring an entire needle full of special mutant steroids to kick ass in one final moment of claw-stabbing glory. (One final moment … we’re not crying, you’re crying). Anyway, Keen played Wolverine’s daughter/clone, a smaller, feistier version of the X-Man. And she kicked ass.
In HBO’s newest fantasy series His Dark Materials, based on author Phillip Pullman’s trilogy, Keen takes lead as Lyra, her biggest role since the X-Men stand-alone.

The series has already been renewed for a second season, as production had been concerned that Keen (14) might too quickly age out of her 12-year-old role. Here's what else to know about the young star


Had the absolute best time at comic con!!! Thank u all for the support and love u give us...❤️🔥
A post shared by Dafne Keen (@dafnekeen) on Jul 18, 2019 at 6:39pm PDT



Dafne has been acting since age nine.

Born in Spain, Keen grew up between Madrid and London. She was an actor before she was a middle schooler, making her on-screen debut in the Spanish drama series, The Refugees, alongside her dad, British actor Will Keen (who also appears in His Dark Materials as Father MacPhail).

She knew Spanish and martial arts before her role in Logan.

Dafne already spoke Spanish and was trained in martial arts by the time she auditioned for James Mangold’s Logan—where her character employs both these skills. Keen sent in an audition tape and won the role, beating out almost 500 other actresses for the part opposite Jackman. She was 11.


View this post on Instagram

What a page turner... in awe. @philippullmanofficial #bookofdust #hisdarkmaterials

A post shared by Dafne Keen (@dafnekeen) on Oct 5, 2019 at 3:38pm PDT




She didn't think she would get the role as Lyra on His Dark Materials.

Despite her skills and prior roles, Keen thought she might not get the part of Lyra for the BBC/HBO production. “I showed up to the audition only having read half the book,” she told British Vogue. “I thought, ‘I’m not going to get it anyway.’” When she was asked to send in another tape, Keen was on vacation in Puerto Rico and got stung by a jellyfish, causing her face to swell and turn red. She joked that her audition was “with a jelly-face”

Jelly-face did its trick and soon Keen was called to audition in person. And then she got the role. And now the 14-year-old is holding down the most expensive TV production in BBC history. Call the jellyfish face a bit of good luck.

Josh St. Clair
Joshua St Clair is an editorial assistant at Men's Health Magazine.

I did not think I would ever get to see the show...but I stumbled on a cable show which featured the opening show!

Dafne is growing up and looking every inch the promise of a beautiful woman when she comes of age. The innate charm is still there - she is just a little (bit) less feistier compared to X-23

Jo

[njr]

I posted that she was on that show on Nov. 10th (see above)

Nancy

[jo]

Not about the movie but the enduring relationship and cooperation between film auteur and actor!

[jo]

[jo]

Only remotely related news to LOGAN --

but if this happens - great news for James Mangold's career! JM may take over Spielberg's "whip" in the next installment of the INDIANA JONES franchise movies!



variety.com/2020/film/news/steven-spielberg-indiana-jones-5-james-mangold-harrison-ford-1203515698/


Harrison Ford is attached...but could there be a role for Hugh in the movie? Quite a few have tweeted such a wish - even as a main villain

Indiana Jones 5 is expected to hit theaters on July 9, 2021.

Except The Music Man may be in the way

Unless he could join them while he is free ?

I know - wishful thinking -- but Hugh himself has said that INDIANA JONES was one of the, if not the, favorite movies of his youth!


Jo

[jo]

The Hollywood Reporter thinks James Mangold is the right choice to continue the adventures of Indiana Jones, which suffered in the not-so-well-received Crystal Skull episode... if Mangold re-energizes it the same way he did full justice to LOGAN ( the finale story which evolved what happened to Wolverine and the Professor) --

www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/how-indiana-jones-5-director-james-mangold-can-bring-edge-back-1281413

[jo]

From James Mangold's Twitter --