LOGAN : Publicity and Promotion

[jo]

One of the key creatives is Makeup and Costume. In the case of LOGAN, it was important to maintain the almost-drab vibe that Mangold has worked out with his Production Design and Cinematography creatives.

With makeup, there were some key emphasis worked on by the Makeup Artist --

observer.com/2017/03/hollywoods-top-makeup-artist-joel-harlow-interivew-logan-xmen-hugh-jackman/

You may not be able to pick out Joel Harlow’s face from a line-up, but if I showed you the mugshots of some of Hollywood’s most recognizable superheroes and villains there’s a good chance you’d recognize Harlow’s handiwork from the big screen: X-Men‘s Wolverine, Star Trek‘s Spock, and Pirates of the Caribbean‘s Captain Jack Sparrow are just a few of the many characters he’s helped bring to life through the years. In 2010, Harlow won an Academy Award for his innovative makeup designs for J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot, and he’s been nominated for Oscars for his work on 2013’s The Lone Ranger and 2016’s Star Trek: Beyond. And Harlow’s monster work for the screen extends all the way back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the show just celebrated its 20th anniversary last week) for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy. Today, the artist is one of the most sought after for challenging special effects work, and his company Morphology FX has already been tapped to create looks for Pirates‘ next chapter, Dead Men Tell No Tales, and 2018’s Black Panther.


But most recently, Harlow lent his talents to X-Men‘s newest title, the critically acclaimed and aesthetically singular Logan, which tells the tale of an aging Wolverine and is set some years in the future. Logan, played one last time by Hugh Jackman, appears on screen grizzled and weathered by years of fighting, alcohol abuse and, as we come to find out, Adamantium poisoning. Also appearing on screen behind a few more years of wrinkles and stray hairs are Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Caliban (Stephen Merchant). Harlow tells me that while audiences may detect subtle changes in the characters’ appearances from past films, creating their looks for Logan was still a challenge.


I spoke with Harlow by phone about transforming Hugh Jackman into not one, but two (don’t forget x-24!), completely new and distinct Wolverine characters, the symbiotic relationship between a film’s makeup and digital departments and how the day-to-day realities of the makeup industry are only partially represented by Syfy’s hit show Face Off.


How did your career in film makeup begin?

It all goes back to being a fan of movies when I was a kid. I watched with my father King Kong—the original King Kong [in] black and white, stop-motion animation—and I was sort of floored by the animation process, of bringing something non-human to life through movie magic. That’s what led me towards initially studying a career in animation, but once The Thing came amount (John Carpenter’s version) I quickly shifted to makeup and special makeup effects. And that was it. Then I moved to New York from North Dakota and studied animation because at the time there were really no classes, no schools for makeup…While I was studying animation I got the opportunity to work on a film doing makeup effects. I dropped out of school and just pursued that. Then I wound up in California and started shopping a very rudimentary portfolio around to various make up effects studios.


How much more or less complicated is it to create subtle looks on film, like those we see in Logan, versus the more time consuming, non-human characters that appear in the Star Trek films?

Really every character in every film poses its own set of challenges. Sometimes the subtlest of makeups can be the most challenging because you have to fly under the radar otherwise you’re going to draw attention to the makeup rather than letting your actor or actress take the reins and make the performance. You don’t want to overpower a performance in certain films with makeup because it can be distracting. But then there are films, like I just did Star Trek: Beyond, and certainly some of the characters, almost all the characters we created for that film, were very visually striking. But that’s the world you’re playing in when it comes to a film [like Star Trek.] Dealing with a film like Logan, you don’t want to ever put your makeup before the performance; it’s got to work in unison with the performance. The same is true of very elaborate make up; it’s obvious that it has to work in unison with the performance, but in science fiction you can get away with more as opposed to Logan, which is basically like a Western. The challenges of Logan were keeping it subtle, keeping it subdued. It’s very different work because you are walking such a tightrope when it comes to giving just enough but not so much that it pulls the audience out of the film.


What kind of prep work did you do to create the perfect looks for Logan‘s characters?

There was a multitude of discussions with Jim (James Mangold). We knew what kind of movie we would make. Certainly I’d seen the other X-Men films, and this was unlike any of those. It’s got its own aesthetic. It’s a very clear departure from any X-Men film we’ve seen, and I’ve seen them all. It was discussions with Jim, and through those discussions it was understanding the tone of the movie that he was trying to make, and a little of that was trying to unlearn what I had seen as an audience member in the other X-Men films. We don’t have any multicolored mutants or brightly colored characters in this, everything is earthy, gritty and real. And then it takes a second to sort of rewire your creative ideas about what the film is going to be, and then you fall in line with what the film is. And then of course once Hugh (Jackman) came on we had discussions the three of us, and slowly-by-slowly each makeup test brought us closer to not just the Old Man Logan character but also the X-24 character.


I loved the juxtaposition of those two characters, Logan and X-24. How did you go about creating those opposing looks?

We start with Hugh as Hugh in the middle, and we push him older for Logan and we do some makeup tricks and make him younger as X-24. Obviously he’s a very handsome man and he doesn’t look old when you see him, so taking him to Old Man Logan required coloring his beard, required scar work on his face…extending wrinkles, adding some new ones. And with X-24, it’s basically smoothing all that out. Certainly the difference between Old Logan having the full beard and X-24 having the Wolverine mutton chops is a big differentiation between the two characters and it allows instant visual identification of who you’re looking at. That, combined with [the fact that] X-24’s got a buzz cut.


How much of a character’s creation happens in-person with the actor and how much happens digitally these days?

Typically what you want to do before you ever get an actor into your makeup chair is you want to do some photoshop work. You want to do some conceptual design work whether its two dimensional illustration or Zbrush rendering…You want to get at least a direction because inevitably any design on paper or anything you do is going to change, and then the real world becomes part of your actor. But you don’t want to go into that cold, you don’t want to not have a direction…We did a multitude of photoshop designs, a bunch of illustrations, paintings, a lot of sketches, so we had a direction we were drawing from, as well as my conversation with Jim for what he wanted to see as Old Man Logan. And then when Hugh got in we started playing around with the makeup techniques to get us to that place, and of course on that road there are many avenues you could veer off to see what works. The scar placement: you want to have depth, the type of scar, weathering, sun burn, dirt, how bushy is the beard, how gray is it, contact lenses—he wore contact lenses throughout the entire film to take some of the light out of his eyes. He looks drunk in the film, so we gave him bloodshot. And for the Adamantium poisoning we added jaundice to his eyes.


How much of a character’s look is created, or finalized, during the editing process?

You want to do everything you can in camera. In the morning half your job is putting the makeup together, getting the makeup applied and the other half is watching, doing touch-ups throughout the day so that everything stays constant and is looking good. You want to get as much of those real time, real world, real life scenarios as possible. In this film certainly some of the trauma that’s sustained, some of the brutality that’s afflicted from the blades that come out of Logan’s hands, for some of that there’s a marriage between what we did and what the digital department did. Every time a blade enters the body that’s typically a digital effect. We do the aftermath, the blood work after the initial impact.


How has the rise of CGI and digital animation impacted your industry?

Maybe six, seven, or eight years ago there was a fear that digital was going to take over….Sometimes we need digital help after the film’s done, but a lot of times digital needs assistance on set. Every digital department I’ve worked with wants to see as much of it in camera as possible, and wants us to be there on set doing our in-camera work. And then whatever augmentations need to be made they’ll take care of it after the fact. It’s always discussed. I think that the relationship between digital and craft makeup is sort of solidified now. It’s comfortable for both parties because ultimately we’re all working towards the same goal, and that’s to make this experience for the audience. But certainly as digital has progressed there are things that we normally would have done in the practical world that are now being done entirely digital; a lot of that creature work stuff. Typically the way that I like to see things happen is if it’s a humanoid figure, basically human proportions, let’s try to get it all as a makeup—at least the additions can be a makeup. And anything subtracted typically does to digital, because it’s hard to take away parts of a human being without a lot of prep work and a lot of testing.


How do you feel about Syfy’s show Face Off? How much of what we see on the show is true to what happens on set?

None of it—I mean none of it. I’m not a big fan of Face Off, because…the artists on Face Off, they’re put in a situation where they can’t win. Any one the things I’ve seen on Face Off—and sure there’s a lot of creativity, there’s a lot of imagination in some of them—but to do something in three days that you say is going to play in a film is impractical. And unfortunately what it does is it sets up expectations to young producers, young directors, that are equally as impractical. You’re not going to get something film quality in three days. If you want something good, it’s going to take time, it’s going to take experience, it’s going to take the right materials and the right artist.


What does a typical day on set look like for you?

Tomorrow, for example, I’ve got a 3:30 a.m. call doing hair and makeup, and I’m there all day until the end. And then we take the makeup off, and we all go home and begin the next day. You can get on films where the makeups are long and complicated and intense, like the ones in Star Trek: Beyond, or in Logan they were complicated and intense as well. It all depends on what the day calls for. That’s the thing about this industry. In this business no two days are going to be the same because even if you’re doing the same makeup multiple days in a row the scenes are not going to be the same, the environment’s not going to be the same.
Tell me about a specific character you’ve worked on that was challenging both to create and to maintain throughout filming.

Bootstrap Bill was a complicated one, for Pirates 2. That was a complicated makeup to not only build but then apply and chart over six transformational stages, because every day at the end of the day I had to take all the barnacles off [as well as the] shells, clean those, organize them. When it was at its most extreme state that was basically a 250-piece makeup. The silicon pieces went on, the skin holds went on, and each one of those barnacles went into a separate socket and was both numbered and lettered. At the end of the day I had to take all those out, put them in their corresponding slots in this piece of foam core that was basically a big diagram of his face, so that the next day I could put them on in exactly the same order. Not that you could tell, when you watch the film, if I mixed up a few of them you’d never know—but I’d know.

[jo]

Did the actual film the concept art related to the key characters in LOGAN ?


screenrant.com/logan-concept-art-wolverine-x-23/


Check out the link to the photo gallery for various artistic concepts of the characters.

Here's one for LOGAN --




Hmmm....

It doesn't work with the dystopian air in the movie, including the image of a tired, disillusioned, and ailing Wolverine. It would also not be a good reference point in distinguishing X-24 from Old Man Logan himself! Plus this man looks more like a Wolverine than a Logan -- with the wild man look!

[jo]

Remember this Instagram upload by Hugh -- when they were about to wrap filming in New Mexico ?

http://instagram.com/p/BI8bXRij9jI

There you are -- X-24!!

[jo]

I remember this from the Berlinale premiere for LOGAN --




I was so surprised when Dafne readily hoisted herself up the metal bar ( without giving Hugh a chance to give her a helping hand) ...until I remembered she is a gymnast...and it is just like how gymnasts hoist themselves up the beams.

[jo]

Cute!

[jo]

Three claws ??!!

[jo]

Long read -- but very insightful profile of JAMES MANGOLD, the filmmaker!

theringer.com/james-mangold-man-who-tamed-wolverine-logan-60a528adc251#.d8gcmd26j

Sean FennesseyFollow
Editor-in-Chief, The Ringer
Mar 4


The Man Who Tamed Wolverine


Director James Mangold, like the hero of his new movie, ‘Logan,’ is a Hollywood survivor. Now he’s reinvented the superhero genre with an R-rated, post-Trump, Western-inspired bloodbath.




“I couldn’t get hired in Hollywood.”

This is a strange thing to hear from the director James Mangold, who makes movies with the unflagging consistency of a worker bee. But it’s true.


“I’ve always been a fan of Hollywood movies. But the reality is I came up first and foremost through independent films. My first movie, [1995’s] Heavy, was a Sundance film, and my second film, Cop Land, was essentially [an] independent film for Miramax,” Mangold says. “Walk the Line was passed on by every single studio in town before Fox agreed to make it. I’ve had many films that have been a struggle to get made, and you wait and you push and you push and you wait, and sometimes, [you get] Walk the Line. … But it’s hard. I try not to focus on the people saying no to me.”


Somehow, Mangold has made it look easy, directing actors to Oscars (Angelina Jolie in 1999’s Girl, Interrupted; Reese Witherspoon in 2005’s Walk the Line) and career comebacks (Sylvester Stallone in 1997’s Cop Land). He’s tackled time-travel rom-coms (2001’s Kate & Leopold), Agatha Christie-esque whodunits (2003’s Identity), and Western remakes (2007’s 3:10 to Yuma). He even wrote an animated movie for Disney about a talking cat, 1988’s Oliver & Company, that doubles as a Dickens reimagining — when he was just 24 years old. His CV is varied and odd for a studio filmmaker, betraying the quirks of a roving mind — but he works at a steady clip, and produces a new picture every two or so years. Yet he rarely gets credit for the kind of fungibility that defines peers like Steven Soderbergh or Danny Boyle. Mangold has been hiding in plain sight, a craftsman bobbing and weaving his way through the machine. His new film — anticipated, brutal, R-rated, and melancholy — may change that once and for all.


Logan is the final chapter in a superhero story that explains the movie industry’s angst in this century as clearly as any. It’s a valuable piece of intellectual property about an iconoclastic and rage-filled loner, straining to transcend what makes it so popular in the first place while bound by the system that supports it. Who better to capture that than a Hollywood lifer?

Mangold, who is 53, subverts the notions of a superhero movie, even though it’s entirely built around its biggest star, the ever game (deeply grizzled) Hugh Jackman, playing its most important character, Wolverine. The director says he’s done it the same way he has throughout his entire career.
“You’re getting people to spend millions of dollars on your vision,” he says, “and whether you’re making an independent film or a studio film, the struggle remains the same for people in my position, which is: become an evangelist for your story and your work to try to get it made.”

That, of course, is the trick. After many years of genre-hopping and Trojan horseplay, Logan represents the boldest gamble of Mangold’s career: selling a global entity like 20th Century Fox on a vicious, unforgiving, politically-charged vision of their billion-dollar property. That should, theoretically, be difficult. Mangold says no.

“Well, it’s not like [studio executives are] just like Simpsons villains,” he says. “The executives are also troubled, I think, as well as anyone might be, by the fact that these movies are costing more and more and delivering less and less. And that they’re becoming a cliché, with the stakes every time being that the world will end if we don’t stop this or that malevolent force, and that more and more heroes are involved in every film, and the effects budgets are ballooning and there’s a kind of CG arms race going on between the studios. At some point, all we did was say, ‘Can we try the less-is-more philosophy, instead of more is more?’”
Mangold makes this sound easy. It’s not. Even an unvarnished vision requires compromise.

“Part of that was getting permission to make a rated-R film from the beginning — Hugh and I made concessions in the cost of the movie right from the start,” he says. “And I wrote it, along with my partners, tailoring it to pull off the movie for less money. Really building it much more on character development than on some kind of supervillain flying down from the skies or the bowels of the earth and threatening our existence.”
Because of these choices, Logan is the lowest-stakes superhero movie ever made. It might also be the best.


Mangold is a product of artistic roots. He has been surrounded by creative ingenuity throughout his life. His parents, Robert Mangold and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, are accomplished painters. His mother’s work favors haze-like visions of nature — shaded landscapes, day-break vistas, and dying trees. His father is an Ellsworth Kellyesque minimalist whose geometric work focuses on primary colors and the illusions of texture. Taken together, you can make out the influence in Mangold’s movies: the rigor and the expanse in equal measure.
“They’re still around, still painting,” Mangold says of his parents. “I kind of thought they had figured life out. Making a living going into an old barn and painting all day seems like a hell of a lot of fun. The only thing I thought they were missing out on, that I somehow wanted, was it seemed very solitary.”

Directors are often portrayed as mad scientists cooking up a potion that captures the imagination, but more often they are organizers and leaders. People who can effectively communicate their vision and marshal a squad. Mangold, who speaks directly and with a clarity that would be effective being barked across a massive set, has figured out how to work within and without the system.

“I love performing and the act of working together and collaborating, and that was kind of the one rebellion, was not wanting to spend [time] if not in an old barn, in some kind of solitary confinement,” he says. “But nonetheless, the act of working with people and evangelizing an idea and moving it through a system is really interesting to me. I find that the more you have to do it and the more you have to defend your ideas, the sharper your ideas become.”


It shows. As a filmmaker, Mangold is both an auteur and a shepherd of big-budget exercises in commerce — an increasingly unlikely combination. He’s a modern animal, too. He shoots elegant still photos on his sets, and revels in filmmaking minutiae. He tweets about scoring his projects. He shares fan art and notes obvious inspiration. He teases fanboys and the media about empty hype. All the while, his movies pursue many of the things that serious filmgoers complain have evaporated from theaters — personal stories, character development, nods at film history. Sometimes he just happens to do so with a protagonist who launches adamantium claws from his knuckles. Mangold’s origins are perhaps not so different from the character Jackman has played in nine films since 2000 (two of which, including 2013’s The Wolverine, have now been directed by Mangold). Wolverine miraculously heals with great speed, is adaptable to all environments, and seems out of time; he’s a unique delivery system for a director, and also a fitting surrogate. Mangold knows what it’s like to wander — like his mutant protagonist, he adapts and moves forward. He’s made flops, hits, and the movies that fall in that wide chasm in between. His new movie is a step forward, a not-so-subtle metaphor for the displacement many people in America are feeling.


“The X-Men films and the characters are traditionally viewed through the prism of ‘the other’ — particularly the early, and I think most successful and most personal, ones were an exploration of a kind of bigotry against mutants that could also be viewed through a prism of [race and sexuality],” he says. “In this particular movie, it seemed to me, at the moment I was even working on the story two years ago, that the issues of borders and identity and refugees and people without a home seemed really interesting. Viewing our characters through that prism seemed like it could be really fruitful.”



Logan is essentially one big, fight-filled, blood-splattering comment on the refugee crisis that has been amplified by the policymaking of Donald Trump’s administration. In the movie, which takes place in a sort of X-Men universe meta-future loosely inspired by the Old Man Logan comics series, Logan transports an aging and weakened Professor X (Patrick Stewart, agog and exceptional) and a mysterious young Mexican girl known as X-23 (a glaring, tenacious Dafne Keen) to the Canadian border in an effort to outrun a militaristic force. This is heady stuff, even for the intellectually pliable X-Men characters.


“I try to remove the sense of victimization that’s built into [the] question [of] how do you get it past these evil overlords who are holding the gates closed? The fact is that: tell them the story,” Mangold says. “If I went in and pitched … the ideas of borders and refugees, of course no one’s going to be interested in making the movie. But that’s not what I’m pitching them. What I’m pitching them is the story about Logan on the run with a Charles Xavier who’s got a degenerative brain disease and he’s protecting him because something horrible has happened in the past and up on their doorstep comes [this girl]. And to get her to safety, they’re going to have to travel across the United States and get across the border to Canada. That’s the story I’m pitching.”
But selling that idea is not an option — it must be spring-loaded inside a more commodifiable, relatable idea. One that those not-so-evil overlords can feel connected to and inspired to pay for.

“If you ever walk into a session and start talking about the political ramifications and importance of your movie, no one responds to that because it sounds the same as a bad social studies class when you were in eighth grade — you feel like you’re being taught or preached to, and no one wants that.”

He already has his supporters. “In a way it was very much the Logan film I’ve been waiting for,” Chris Claremont, a foundational X-Men writer, recently said of Logan. “It was what I’d actually hoped The Wolverine should’ve been.”


Mangold’s first Wolverine movie — and second collaboration with Jackman, after the decidedly different Kate & Leopold — was a mishmash of, as the director described it, “a Japanese noir picture, a Hong Kong-style crime film, with touches of samurai and swordplay.” It also featured a conclusion in which Wolverine battles a giant robot controlled by a venal, evil old Japanese man. It’s deeply imperfect, which Mangold acknowledges. That movie ended with a convoluted tease that ultimately led to X-Men: Days of Future Past. Even in the standalone Wolverine movie universe, it was slave to the broader storytelling implications of the decades-spanning X-Men story. Logan is not bound by franchise obligations — it’s the opposite, a kind of era-closing denouement for Mangold and Jackman, who says he’s hanging up his claws for good. The director appears to have learned a lot having moved through the superhero machine once before. And after the massive success of Deadpool — which was released as Logan was going into production — superhero movies entered a kind of New Hollywood phase, where studios support riskier, unattached, or more unlikely versions of their precious IP.


“When you populate a film that is still going to be around 120 minutes with 10 characters, that means that each character only has 12 minutes, and that’s assuming there’s no action set piece or titles. In reality, in a lot of these movies, you end up with characters who may end up with three or four minutes of actual character work in the entire movie,” Mangold says. “So it’s no wonder that people feel like they’re coming up short.”


Mangold claims no strategy or philosophy for his career path.
“I’ve been very lucky. The first few films I made — and I can’t say this was something I set out to do with some kind of intellectual purpose — [were] very different kinds of movies. I feel like I’m always the same filmmaker, telling stories about the same kinds of characters, but the genre of the different films were different enough from the outside, that I was very lucky in establishing for myself early on the ability to make different kinds of movies. So there’s a lot more avenues open to me.”

Many of Mangold’s movies share a common theme — outsider rebels discovering a sort of stand-in family unit. Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted; the shy cook Victor in Heavy; Johnny Cash and his union with June Carter; certainly Wolverine. It’s a consistency that belies the surface of his filmography, which looks like a Bingo card, dotting genres all over the place.


“Honestly, when I first started, I felt a little jealous of filmmakers who either set themselves up as the auteur voice of current independent cinema or postmodern cinema or they were the new king of horror or the new king of the Southwest or the Northeast, or whatever world they managed to offer,” he says a bit wistfully. “They gave critics and fans and studios a defined box with which to brand themselves as filmmakers and a box that allowed people to understand very quickly what it is they made. But in the long run, as the world has changed and different kinds of movies go in and out, it’s like having a truck driver’s license as well as a motorcycle driver’s license as well as a car driver’s license. I feel mobile. And as the world changes, I feel like I’m able to keep skating around and finding a place to keep doing the thing I love.”


“I don’t think I am roaming, I just think I’m denying — and this is said with all due respect — these obvious ways to box me in. If you just look a little deeper, I think you’ll see that these movies are much more unified — they all come from the same crazy mind, and the interest in them, from a character perspective, is very consistent.”
The inspiration to keep moving, keep changing course, he says, is inspired by all his filmmaking heroes. Mangold studied in the graduate film program at Columbia University under the great Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus) and with the late Alexander MacKendrick before that as an undergrad at CalArts. MacKendrick directed 1957’s classic Sweet Smell of Success, before his career took a major downturn — he’s something of a tragic figure in Hollywood history, criticized and eventually cast aside for his perfectionism and struggles to compromise. There is some irony in Mangold emerging as one of his most accomplished students.
“I learn a lot, making different kinds of movies. And my heroes, you talk about Mike Nichols or Sydney Pollack or Sidney Lumet or Howard Hawks or Michael Curtiz or I can go on and on. Billy Wilder didn’t make a comedy until his 16th movie. I’m on my 10th. And he’s known as one of the great comedic directors of all time. The reality is that the opposite is sad, which is that people get branded and boxed in and confined by the first thing they do, in a way that doesn’t allow us to grow.”


“I can’t explain it, but making Kate & Leopold really helped me make Walk the Line, and making Identity really helped me make 3:10 to Yuma,” he says. “Sometimes making movies of different genres really teaches you things that you could never learn if you never kind of get out of the same sandbox.”

It is very likely we all enjoyed KATE AND LEOPOLD, not just because it further introduced us to Hugh Jackman in a non-XMen movie, as a romantic leading man! But instead of sometimes hackneyed time travel romances, what probably created indelible footprints in our movie-going minds was how the character of this 19th century duke impressed us with his elegant and impressive bearing, whose etiquette rules of living practically put to shame how we live in modern times. That he was very well-portrayed by a young Hugh Jackman is both a testament to the actor's acting talent and charisma ... but also to the ability of the director/screenwriter (Mangold did write the screenplay) to delineate a character distinctly and let him drive the story. That is not to say that the other characters in the story did not also create strong and distinctive impressions ( also likely due ot the combination of the character development by the screenwriter, the acting abilities of the actors, and how the director guided the whole movie).

One other touch which I thought was impressive -- having Sting compose the beautiful musical theme of the movie! It impressed that the director did not leave anything untouched in creating a memorable movie that is usually scorned by many as it belongs to time travel fiction

And btw, he also helped Hugh Jackman earn a Golden Globe nomination for that role


Of course his creative partnership with Hugh on the two Wolverine spinoff movies has eventually led to the dramatic impact of the story of LOGAN! But much has already been written about how much that movie has accomplished in reshaping the genre and in letting Hugh Jackman leave his career-defining role with the utmost pride and unforgettable memories!


PS: I have been unofficially following James Mangold's twitter account -- and his original posts always surprise because of the many film classics and filmmaking inspirations he cites! His artistic inheritance from his parents shows in his fascination with photography, other than of course the creative vision that guides his movies... On the other hand, I laugh a lot because he does sound a bit snarky when he does not like to suffer fanboy fools gladly - LOL! He can also be very gracious in acknowledging fanboy tweets that sound sincere! He is quite a character -- and maybe that is what makes him a relatively under-appreciated but impressive filmmaker!

Jo

[jo]

[jo]

While Dafne played around with Wolverine/Logan's claws on the set

[jo]

http://instagram.com/p/BSguE6GD_hR

The movie makes its last stop in June when it opens in Japan.

[jo]

Interesting about audience tastes in Japan and China.

Japan does not usually give a very strong reception to action-oriented or superhero movies...but they do love musicals!

On the other hand, Chinese reception to action and superhero movies go through the roof ...while they are not normally keen about musicals (but supposedly already starting to warm up)!

South Korean audiences like both genres!


But the supposed next big market is India ... and Hollywood is now beginning to court the sub-continent for their potential growth for foreign films.


Btw, there was an article which mentioned the supposed rule of thumb for net box office return --

to focus on net box office returns, using a widely-accepted shorthand that assigns studios roughly 50% of a film’s North American box office gross, an average of 40% from overseas territories excluding China, and 25% from China.)

Maybe Hugh can also mention about his forthcoming movie musical THE GREATEST SHOWMAN while in Japan promoting LOGAN - they are both FOX films, so there will be no conflict of interest


Jo

[JH4HJ]

Hugh Jackman sends a warm greeting to fans ahead of Logan's Japanese premiere

His latest film in the X-Men universe has been doing massive business since its US release last month.

And now actor Hugh Jackman is taking the Logan roadshow to Japan and has sent a warm message to fans ahead of the film's Japanese premier in May.

Posting to Instagram on Thursday, Hugh, one of Australia's favourite triple threats, told Japanese fans just how excited he was to be bringing the film to the next month.

Video and full article here.

[jo]

This was part of the promotional activities involving Wolverine fans who came all the way to NYC!

One of them was a former WAAPA classmate...and here's his account of that experience --

www.ryanintheus.com/the-real-hugh-jackman-from-waapa-to-logan/?utm_content=buffer0f33c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

[jo]

Will the Japanese present a Wolverine Rose to Hugh Jackman when he visits Japan for the LOGAN promotion?

en.rocketnews24.com/2014/06/08/tomonoura-where-ponyo-and-wolverine-crossed-paths/


Excerpts from the article on TOMONOURA --

The neighborhood even caught the eye of Hollywood, serving as one of the locations for the Hugh Jackman action film The Wolverine. Known in Japan as Wolverine: Samurai, the 2013 picture sees the titular superhero traveling first to Tokyo to visit a dying friend, then fleeing with the man’s granddaughter, named Mariko, when she’s targeted by assassins. When Wolverine and Mariko go on the run, they get off the Shinkansen at Fukuyama Station, passing by some of the city’s famed roses. In appreciation of the honor, local botanists developed a new breed of the flower which they dubbed the Wolverine Fukuyama.

▼ Quite possibly the most badass bouquet of roses you could give to your girlfriend.

[jo]

themarvelreport.com/2017/04/wondercon-interview-with-logan-production-designer-francois-audouy/

April 10, 2017

WonderCon Interview with Logan Production Designer Francois Audouy

Author: Carolyn Poddig No Comments Share:


Thanks to Halcyon Productions and 20th Century Fox Studios, we were able to sit down with Logan’s production designer Francois Audouy at Wondercon 2017. Audouy was born in France and raised in California.  He is an Art Director’s Guild-nominated production designer who has worked on everything from Wild Wild West to Men in Black to Minority Report. In this one-on-one interview, Audouy shares just what it took to give Logan’s distinctive look and feel.


First, can you tell us about being a production designer?

A production designer creates the world and designs a look for the film. They’re involved in choosing the locations and the look of the film.


That’s amazing! Can you tell us about the best parts of your job?

I’ve got the best job.  They pay me to travel and find all these exotic locations.  Wolverine [Jackman’s second stand-alone X-Men film] was so much fun, traveling and going to Japan.  [On Logan] he [Director James Mangold] wanted to make a very American film.  Jim talked about wanting to make character islands for these characters to land on. He also talked about wanting to make these islands feel very very different from each other.
Logan was a bit scary to embark on so I knew that this would be a good project to work on.  I love projects where you learn and get to create things that you’ve never gotten to create before.  Hugh Jackman is such a great actor, so hardworking.


How did you prepare for working on Logan?

You end up learning something different on every project and as a designer you get to draw and create different things.  I basically dropped out of college and started working when I was 20 and started as a graphic design/concept illustrator working on the Men in Black films and Wild Wild West. I worked on Minority Report as well, for me, it was the ability to work with mentors who I became very close with.  My first movie that I worked on as a production designer was Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.


Can you tell us what started Old Man Logan for you and Mr. Mangold?

Old Man Logan the comic was the spark.  The title, quite frankly, Old Man Logan, and Hugh wanting to do his final send off as this character.  It really came together to create this new book.


I think one of the things that stood out for me was the coloring on Logan. It has the look and feel of a 1970s film, much like Come Back Shane. Can you talk about the color palette you guys used in the film to give it that “retro” look?

You know, the coloring was really a reflection of the environment that they went through.  At the beginning of the film, it’s really inspired by the desert colors of Mexico.  You get a lot of rust colors and burned tones.  I wanted to give it a sort of classic ’70s look – slightly desaturated look.

It was a conscious choice to create the look of one of those old cowboy films. The color palate is like one of those faded films.  In prepping for the film Jim Mangold had us watch a lot of those old cowboy movies — The Gauntlet, Come Back Shane — those are Jim’s favorite films and he wanted to bring that to the work of Logan.


The Cowboy influence was very clear.   One of the key components of those old cowboy films was the use of foreshadowing.  Much like in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly the fates of the characters are hinted at.  For instance – Tuco meets his end by hanging and the hangman’s noose follows him throughout the film.  Is that something you brought to Logan?

I think that there’s a sort of dread that follows Logan.  Logan is really hurting.  It’s the first time that we’ve seen him hurt and feel in a very relatable way.  Charles is hurting, you get the sense that that’s where this is heading.


The older characters have seen a lot, but for the younger characters, their journey is just beginning. Can you talk about the production design that you brought to the children (the younger mutants) and how you helped bring them to life?

We’re introduced to the kids in two scenes. One is on a telephone playback in this laboratory in Mexico City.  Then in the 3rd act, we see these kids in a fire lookout tower.  Jim, at the end of the day, wanted these kids to be real characters.  That note really helped me create settings that were very grounded and real.  They were fully practical spaces that had no CGI whatsoever.  TransiGen Labs was completely dressed as you see it in the movie.  The kids really felt like they were trapped in this lab.  All of the cell doors were real, the security thing was real.


Woah. What else did you guys do to bring that “real” effect to the movie?


Logan was pulled up the side of the cliff, that’s real.  It created a very believable experience with the audience for these characters.  The camp was very remote in Northern New Mexico.  They were camped out at that campfire. There were no Star Wagons [location trailers] for our actors. Jim wanted it to be very real and for these kids to be very authentic.  They weren’t Disney-fied or fake.  They were very real.


My favorite character (after Logan) was Laura.  Can you talk about some of the design choices you made for her?

Laura really came from the costume designer.  We really tried to create a character, but it was more the costume department. We created that iconic T-Shirt design and screen printed it.  That was our contribution.


Wow. That shirt was amazing. A very iconic piece, much like the film’s vehicles.  From the limo to the battle trucks to the blue truck that Laura drives to help get Logan to safety, the film’s cars were a big focal point for me.  What can you say about the cars?


That truck actually, all the vehicles in the movie kept changing quite a bit.  For awhile we were trying to do just futuristic vehicles.  We were trying to build things from the ground up.  The limo was just a custom job, we had to build that from the ground up.  We had to build those cars from the ground up.  That blue truck was a product of my vehicle coordinator, we found two of them down in New Orleans and I really liked it.  Hugh actually ended up taking one home as a wrap gift, a beach truck if you will.


Awesome. One last question. For fans that might be looking for films with a similar look to Logan, what sorts of films would you recommend they watch?  What sorts of film influenced that particular story?


The Gauntlet with Clint Eastwood, that’s sort of a road trip where Eastwood is trying to take this woman to a court house.  Little Miss Sunshine, The Cowboys, that’s a movie where John Wayne dies in the second act and these kids have to become the heroes to finish the movie.

From cowboys to iconic character looks, Audouy and the team at Halcyon Productions crafted a beautiful swan song that paid an homage to a character we’ve known for decades.  This was a closing of a book on one of our favorite characters and an opening of a new book with Laura and her team.  It’s clear the entire project was a labor of love from everyone who worked on the film.


Stay tuned for our interview with Clint Regan, pre-visualization specialist for Logan and Halcyon Productions.  Did this answer your questions about the look of the film?  Are you as intrigued as we are about the nature of the film? Planning on checking out The Gauntlet? Share with us in the comments below.

Logan is currently in theaters.

[jo]

I was waiting for this promo billboard on Times Square -- I thought it never happened

[jo]

That would be around May 24 ?


The Wolverine Fukuyama Rose--







PS:That left eyebrow lift has become a Jackman trademark


Jo

[jo]

A belated interview for LOGAN and MONTBLANC --

www.gqindia.com/content/hugh-jackman-reveals-the-best-fitness-advice-hes-received/

[jo]

Btw, this is the scene of the postcard I got from the Limited Edition set given by FOX for the LOGAN publicity campaign (# ONE LAST TIME). Mine though was from a distance...while this one is when the vehicles are much closer to their destination.

My postcard is #515 of 1974!



Did anyone else join the FOX contest


Jo

[jo]

Logan and Laura ( aka Hugh and Dafne) reunited once again !

[jo]

Hugh and Dafne attended the LONDON NOIR premiere screening in London!

[jo]

[hughmanity]

http://instagram.com/p/BVX4BBRhEDj

[jo]

Was their presence unannounced ?

[jo]