LOGAN : Publicity and Promotion

[jo]

variety.com/2023/film/news/indiana-jones-5-james-mangold-harrison-ford-1235650894/


James Mangold is interviewed by Variety on his approach as a filmmaker and his now more storied-career. Inevitably, there is a question on whether he is interested in film franchises.



Excerpts;

When I ask how Mangold approached making the film his own, however, he corrects me. “I wasn’t looking to make the movie my own,” he says. “I would say I was looking to have a voice.” More than practically any other film franchise in cinema history, “Indiana Jones” is inextricably associated with one filmmaker, and Mangold had no interest in changing that.

“You don’t want me doing a knockoff Steven, but I want to be playing from the same hymnal, using the same tools,” he says. “I mean, I’m pinch-hitting for Babe Ruth. I at least have to use my own swing some of the time. But the reality is, every day I’m thinking of what he would do, how he would do it. In any way I could, I wanted to do the movie in his style. It didn’t feel threatening to me at all.”

Mangold knew comparisons were inevitable, so he wasn’t exactly shocked when the premiere of “The Dial of Destiny” at the Cannes Film Festival in May drew a muted reaction from critics. “When you’re in franchise land, it’s very hard for critical thinkers” — meaning journalists — “to overlook what I’m sure their editors want, which is this business prism of how does it rate to the other ones?” he says. “I always thought if I were second or third best to one of the greatest films of all time, I’d be good. I mean, it all vaporizes later. Either the movie will live or it won’t.”

Mangold talks about this with the kind of good-natured forbearance built up over decades in the studio trenches, so I’m surprised by how animated he gets when I bring up the future of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character, Helena Shaw, Indy’s goddaughter. Mangold and the Butterworths wrote Helena specifically for Waller-Bridge, seeing in her the same kind of pluck and resourcefulness that made Karen Allen’s Marion Ravenwood a perfect foil for Indy in “Raiders.” I ask if he has talked with Disney and Lucasfilm about the potential for Waller-Bridge to carry on the franchise. Mangold smiles and waves his hand dismissively.

“I’m not interested,” he says. “I refuse. I just can’t do it.” He gestures to the rules hovering just over his shoulder. “The amount of lore and Easter eggs and fan service starts to become antithetical to any of this stuff at a certain point. It isn’t storytelling anymore. It’s large-scale advertising.” (For her part, Kennedy says that while it’s “entirely possible” that a Helena Shaw movie could happen, “we’re not having any of those conversations right now. We’re just focused on finishing this with Harrison.”)



At the same time, Mangold seems resigned to the inevitability of the franchise economy. For instance, Hugh Jackman will return in 2024 as Wolverine in a Marvel Studios film with Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool, seven years after Jackman retired the character in “Logan” — the film that earned Mangold his first Oscar nomination (for adapted screenplay). “I can’t say that there’s a part of me that doesn’t wish that we’d let it be,” he says. “But there was always going to be another Wolverine. There could be a baby Wolverine and a cartoon Wolverine. As much liquid as they can squeeze out of that rag, they’re going to try to. I don’t measure my success on a movie like ‘Logan’ with whether we ended the conversation. I ended my conversation.”

[jo]

comicbook.com/marvel/news/james-mangold-comments-on-hugh-jackman-returning-as-wolverine-after-logan/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Excerpts ;

James Mangold Comments on Hugh Jackman Returning as Wolverine After Logan
By JAMIE JIRAK - June 21, 2023 04:55 pm EDT


Last year, it was announced that Hugh Jackman would be playing Wolverine once again in Deadpool 3. The actor will be joining his longtime frenemy, Ryan Reynolds, and the duo has promised that the threequel won't mess with the powerful ending of Logan. Since the news dropped, Logan director James Mangold has commented on Wolverine's return, and he recently admitted to Variety that a part of him does wish Logan had remained Jackman's final performance as the beloved superhero.

"I can't say that there's a part of me that doesn't wish that we'd let it be," Mangold shared. "But there was always going to be another Wolverine. There could be a baby Wolverine and a cartoon Wolverine. As much liquid as they can squeeze out of that rag, they're going to try to. I don't measure my success on a movie like Logan with whether we ended the conversation. I ended my conversation."



While Mangold may have mixed feelings about Jackman's return, the director did recently tell ComicBook.com about his hopes for the upcoming Deadpool threequel.

"A really fun 48 Hours style buddy picture with those two," Mangold explained in our interview for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which you can check out above. "To me, that was always... We discussed this way back in the day, Ryan, Hugh and I, and it was always this idea that you could do some kind of Walter Hill, gritty, or Midnight Run. These two, somehow on a road trip together would be magical."

[jo]

Excerpts :

From Wolverine to Indiana Jones: Mangold on heroes in their twilight years

By: Rito P. Asilo - Entertainment EditorPhilippine Daily Inquirer / 12:15 AM July 04, 2023
From Wolverine to Indiana Jones: Mangold on heroes in their twilight years
Icons in a single frame: (From left) John Williams, George Lucas, James Mangold, Harrison Ford, Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall at the US premiere of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” —PHOTOS COURTESY OF DISNEY STUDIOS PHILIPPINES

At our recent roundtable interview with Harrison Ford and director James Mangold for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the 59-year-old filmmaker was asked about his penchant for heroes who are in their twilight years—like Indiana Jones (played by Ford) in “Dial of Destiny” and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in “Logan.”

“That’s an interesting observation, although that’s only two of my films you’re bringing up. But in order to make a good story, your protagonist has to be facing something [challenging]. We all face aging… and death. We all face the world changing around us and having to adapt to it.

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“In Logan’s case, he was about 250 years old when he passed on, so there’s a question of how long his sunset was (laughs). But the reality is that I do find these questions interesting because frankly, I’m bored with movies just being about beautiful people who are indestructible. I think that’s just a snooze!

“Honestly, I have no connection to it. I’m not beautiful and I’m not indestructible. So the reality is, we’ve gotten to where the characters in these movies who are just like Teflon, and we just watch them go through explosions and smashing and crashing, coupled with some smart lines and dialogue. Then, the whole thing ends. But, really, I don’t know what was ever at stake for these characters.

“For me then, what is always a fascinating solution when you’re stepping onto a movie that people perceive as being about a hero—which is true for both Wolverine and Indiana Jones—is to try to position that hero at the first act of your story in a place where it’s not so easy for him to be that person anymore… because it automatically puts him in a kind of crisis that makes the story more dramatic.

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[jo]

[jo]

[jo]

Dafne Keen is now 18 years old!

[njr]

Quite a beautiful girl!

Nancy

[jo]

A Filipina journalist meets Hugh Jackman for the second time.

*the first one was when she gave Hugh an art work of Wolverine painted by her incapacitated brother ( who had since passed away) -- and Hugh posted their first time meeting on his Instagram account. This was for the media tour for PAN

*this second time is for the media tour for LOGAN. Hugh remembers the first meeting.




Jo

[jo]

[jo]

[jo]

The big secret of LOGAN is "X-23".

We did not know that it would also be Hugh Jackman.

We saw the first set photos and they showed an older man with a gray beard - which was Hugh Jackman.

But then I saw accidentally the photo of someone who was supposed to be Hugh Jackman but could not recognized him immediately because he had a buzz cut. He was having breakfast at a famous New Orleans place called APOLLINE.


jO

[jo]

JoAB
@joab46466753
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1m
Based on the first photos from the set, I did not think Hugh Jackman would appear without the gray wig and beard. I did not recognize him at first when spotted at a New Orleans dining place called Apolline. It turned out he was already looking like X-24 in that photo 😂

[jo]

There is specualtion that Henry Cavill replace Hugh Jacakman as Wolvrine, as the MCU Wolverine?

Could be true, if there is truth to the major tiff with Iger and Feige?

Jo

[jo]

I must have missed this NYTimes full article on Hugh Jackman in 2017 --


www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/movies/hugh-jackman-x-men-logan-wolverine.html

Hugh Jackman on Nearing the End of Logan’s Run



Mr. Jackman, who has played Wolverine in X-Men films since 2000, considers life after he retracts his adamantium claws for the final time.

By Dave Itzkoff
Feb. 15, 2017



The last time Hugh Jackman played Wolverine, the comic-book superhero he has portrayed onscreen for 17 years, was not an especially decorous occasion. In the midst of his work on a coming movie musical, he had to return for two days of reshoots on “Logan,” the 10th film in Fox’s X-Men franchise, to inflict some beatings and take some beatings, and he ended up shouting his voice hoarse.

“I yelled and screamed so much, and then I had to go back to the musical the next day,” a more restored Mr. Jackman recalled recently with a laugh. “I actually said to someone, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’”

His claw-popping alter ego fares no better in “Logan,” which opens March 3. Set in 2029, it finds the title character weary and weakened, unable to heal as rapidly as he used to. The X-Men are long gone, and he’s reduced to driving a limousine while he tends an aged Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), whose psychic powers have become a dangerous liability.

From the moment Mr. Jackman became a movie star, with the original “X-Men” in 2000, he has been synonymous with Wolverine, a feral mutant with a metal skeleton and a tormented, decades-long past lived under the name Logan. It is his most visible and successful role, and one that, as recently as late January, he still wasn’t finished with. Because there was always one more dialogue rerecording session or conversation to have with his director, “I’m uncomfortable saying goodbye,” he said.

And surely, it can’t be easy for Mr. Jackman to pull away from a role that he has inhabited longer than almost any other actor has been associated with a comic-book character or fantasy franchise — a span when genre mainstays like Batman, Spider-Man and Superman were each rebooted twice, and even his “X-Men” co-stars had to share custody of their parts with a younger class of actors.



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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Logan’

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static01.nyt.com/images/2017/02/15/arts/19LOGAN-web/19LOGAN-web-superJumbo-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp



James Mangold narrates a sequence from "Logan" featuring Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart.CreditCredit...Ben Rothstein/20th Century Fox

But asked if he envisions “Logan” as his final outing as Wolverine, he answered, “When I had the script, I was like, ‘Yes,’” he said. “And when I was shooting the movie, yes. As I sit here today, yes.”

“God knows how I’ll feel in three years,” he continued. “But right now, absolutely.”

Not that Mr. Jackman seemed all that devastated. Over breakfast at a boutique hotel in SoHo, this Australian-born performer, 48, was upbeat, convivial, crisply attired and almost too charming for an actor pitching a dystopian action movie. (Even with his announcement, made via Twitter on Monday, that he had been treated for another basal cell carcinoma, he tries to find positivity and humor: Along with a photo of himself, with a treatment on his nose, he wrote, “Looks worse w the dressing on then off!”) He’s not big on career retrospectives, and not inclined to ask, as his Jean Valjean memorably did in “Les Misérables,” who am I?



But what happens if and when he bids farewell to the one constant in his film career; who’s left behind when you subtract this X-factor?



“Let’s be clear — I’m not retiring,” Mr. Jackman said. Yet for as many times as he has played the character, in the “X-Men” series and solo “Wolverine” movies, he said, “there’s been a gnawing turmoil that I hadn’t really nailed it, fully — either story or performance or whatever.”

It’s not just the X-movies, he said: “Every film I’ve ever done, I’ve had that gnawing doubt. But I have it way less in this one.”

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Mr. Jackman in the original “X-Men” (2000).Credit...20th Century Fox




Mr. Jackman was hardly an unknown when he was first considered for Wolverine, having already performed on Australian TV and onstage, and having received wide acclaim for playing Curly in a 1998 West End revival of “Oklahoma!”




It was after a matinee of that show that Mr. Jackman whipped off his leather chaps and rushed out, his hair in a perm, to a London casting office to put himself on tape for an “X-Men” audition. (When he was tapped for a callback, Mr. Jackman said, “They were like, ‘O.K., lose the perm and the Southern cowboy accent.’ It was the only American accent I could do at the time.”)

Only after Dougray Scott had been hired to play Logan — and then dropped out over a scheduling conflict with “Mission: Impossible 2” — was Mr. Jackman brought to the “X-Men” set to screen-test, and to gawk at potential cast mates like Mr. Stewart and Ian McKellen, his acting idols.



Mr. Stewart remembered Mr. Jackman for his modesty on that visit. Following the screen test, Mr. Stewart said, “Hugh came back about 45 minutes later, and the first thing he said was, ‘Well, you guys are never going to see me again.’”

Instead, Mr. Jackman has starred in the first three “X-Men” movies, two previous “Wolverine” films and the 2014 entry, “X-Men: Days of Future Past.” (Combined worldwide gross: $2.7 billion.) He won a Tony for “The Boy From Oz” in 2004 and received a special Tony in 2012 for contributions to the Broadway community; he has hosted the Tonys four times, won an Emmy for hosting the Tonys and hosted the Academy Awards.




From left, Dafne Keen, Mr. Jackman and Patrick Stewart in “Logan.”Credit...Ben Rothstein/20th Century Fox
Aside from a brief, bloody cameo in “X-Men: Apocalypse” last year, Mr. Jackman did not necessarily see himself returning to the franchise. That changed during a publicity tour for the science-fiction film “Chappie,” whose director, Neill Blomkamp, asked if he could do only one more film in the series, what story would he tell?

“I’d had a few wines,” Mr. Jackman recalled. “I said, ‘I think I’ve only got one more film, if I do it.’ And I just blurted out something. I went home and went to sleep, and I woke up at 4 in the morning, picked up my phone, and recorded a voice memo.”

In that memo, Mr. Jackman laid out the framework for “Logan,” with a story that would take its influences from “Unforgiven,” “The Wrestler” and “Shane” (a portion of which appears in “Logan”), and tell the story of “the fallen hero, trying to escape his past, find some peace and deal with disappointment and regret,” he said.



James Mangold, who directed “Logan” and wrote the screenplay with Michael Green and Scott Frank, said the film was a natural reaction to the “exhaustion that’s setting in with the formula that’s been used for the last couple decades” of comic-book movies.

“There’s cities exploding and super evil villains flying in from the planet Yahoo,” said Mr. Mangold, who directed Mr. Jackman in “The Wolverine” in 2013 (and before that, in the 2001 romantic time-travel comedy “Kate & Leopold”). “There’s enough circus and spectacle. When you start to strip a lot of that out, you go: ‘Is this enough? Can we function on this?’”


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In “X-Men: Days of Future Past” (2014).Credit...Alan Markfield/20th Century Fox
If anything, Mr. Mangold was more sure than Mr. Jackman was that “Logan” could be his last time as the character.

“I don’t think he ever viewed it as ‘could be,’” Mr. Mangold said. “I think he approached it as, it was.”

He added: “By thinking of this as his curtain call, he arrived every day on set electric. I don’t think anyone can see this film and call it a paycheck film for him.”



Mr. Jackman said it was only a matter of time before another actor took over Wolverine. “The character will go on,” he said. “Someone else will play it, for sure.” He insisted he was at peace with that, “unless Daniel Day-Lewis plays him and wins the Oscar — then I might have a little problem.”

Mr. Stewart, who already shares the Charles Xavier role with James McAvoy (who plays the character’s younger incarnation), said that as a classically trained Shakespearean actor, he believed performers invariably developed an attachment to their best-known roles.






Mr. Jackman in the musical “The Boy From Oz” at the Imperial Theater in 2003.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
“Occasionally, you feel, hang on a minute — that’s my role!” he said. “Macbeth is what I played! Shylock is what I played! What are they doing?”

Beneath Mr. Jackman’s sanguine exterior, Mr. Stewart said, he probably recognized the significance of giving up the character. “I think he very much senses the weight of that,” he said. “But I have to tell you, Hugh Jackman carries that weight very lightly.”

Mr. Jackman had now spent several weeks in New York filming “The Greatest Showman,” his Barnum musical, which is planned for a Christmas release, and which casts him as the showboating, larger-than-life impresario who is worlds away from the inward, beaten-down Logan.

“The Greatest Showman” is not a film that Mr. Jackman specifically planned as a pivot from Wolverine. But it’s one that he spent several years helping to develop — “I probably thought there was a 50-50 chance of it being made,” he said — and seeing it take shape has made him enthusiastic about what a possible post-X-Men future might look like for him.

“I’m a little addicted to movies feeling personal, if not life or death, so that there’s really something at stake, and win or lose, it feels right,” he said.

And when “The Greatest Showman” is done, Mr. Jackman said, his schedule will be clear. “I’m actually freer than I’ve ever been,” he said. “I don’t have anything actually planned for after this movie, which is really exciting for me.”

He laughed and then added: “That may be naïveté. Like: ‘Dude, there’s a reason.’”



A correction was made on Feb. 26, 2017: A picture caption last Sunday with an article about Hugh Jackman, using information provided by 20th Century Fox, misspelled the first name of an actor in “Logan.” She is Dafne Keen, not Daphne.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [e-mail] more

Some hint in the past that Hugh never felt categorical about not reprising the role in the future. It was more James Mangold who viewed it as the farewell movie. So, his statements today on how he feels about coming back in Deadpool&Wolverine seems to reflect what he said in the past (in this article) about a feeling of uncertainty. Maybe that was what pushed him ( while he was driving to the Hamptons in August 2022) to define the gnawing feeling that not every story of Wolverine has been told.


Interesting to know that Hugh Jackman actually drew the literary framework on which LOGAN is based, from which Mangold and co-writers wrote the screenplay ( which incidentally was nominated for an Oscar for Adapted Screenplay). Somehow, it would have been right if Hugh Jackman was included in the list of screenwriters as he had worked on the original idea for the storyline. But AMPAS rules require only 2 names can be included in the list of screenwriters.

[jo]

If Hugh himself felt even a little unsure that LOGAN would be the definitive end to the saga of Wolverine ( and even more surreal that he actually outlined the basic story of the film adaptation on which Mangold & et wrote the screenplay) -- then Kevin Feige was all wrong that he (wants to) believes Hugh should not come back as Wolverine. Feige had more self-serving motives ( he likely wanted to recast the role, which he could keep doing for the next decade or so).bej

It seems that Hugh Jackman's creative juices ( borne from his journalism & dramatic theatre background) must have been flowing at its best in 2017 -- between LOGAN & GREATEST SHOWMAN! And they were two very diverse film subjects -- showing his immense range!

Jo

[jo]

The Hollywood Reporter published an article on how AI is now being used widely but not admitted publicly ( see OFF-Topic: Understanding the Film Business) --

Interesting quote :

Deploying AI to allow actors to play younger or older versions of themselves could entrench A-list talent because they’re now suddenly eligible to play roles of all ages

So, no more complaining that Wolverine should now be recast because Hugh Jackman is already 55 years old. AI can allow him to play the role even longer than he probably thought


Jo