Fox’s X-Men franchise may be over now that Disney purchased the studio and plans to introduce the mutants in the MCU, but comic book franchise is set to have one final hurrah in April when New Mutants finally releases after a long delay. Originally rumored to be entering major reshoots, New Mutants went into limbo after the closure of Disney’s Fox acquisition and ended having its release delayed for two years.
Back during the movie’s production in August 2017, Screen Rant visited the New Mutants set and interviewed director Josh Boone to learn about his comic book horror film, which was originally going to play a much bigger role in the future of the now-defunct Fox X-Men franchise. Check it out below.
We spent a little time in the common room area and I might be crazy but it feels like it has a little bit of a Dream Warriors vibe.
I’d say biggest influences for this movie were [One Flew Over the] Cuckoo’s Nest, The Shining and Dream Warriors. Yeah, I do love Dream Warriors. I love the first one as well, but this is very much a rubber reality horror movie for the first 75% of the movie and then it becomes something else. But yeah, it really follows the logic of those early Wes Craven movies and all that.
Like nightmare logic and stuff.
Totally, yeah. I’m excited about it. And Stephen King-ey just in terms of, less in terms of the adaptations and more in terms of the books, it’s like the trick he always played that I thought made his stuff work so well is he keeps it so grounded and credible with the characters that when the supernatural starts is introduced you go with it because you care so much about the characters. And I still feel like when you watch most comic book movies, like your eyes sort of glaze over in the last 45 minutes like they’re going to fight for 45 minutes or whatever. We sort of tried to limit that stuff but make that stuff be like a really important and impactful what is not a lot of redundancies with all the visual effects and all the action stuff just to keep it moving quick and have time for as much character stuff as we can.
Was it a struggle at all for the studio?
It’s funny man, they’re so emboldened by Deadpool and Logan and stuff that they really let us - I can’t believe they’re letting us make this movie. If they knew all the stuff in this, I’m still like “do they know how fucked up this movie is?” It is, but we’re trying to make something that’ll make you scream as much as it’ll grab your heart or make you cry. Truly. I’ve shown a couple scenes to people where everyone who saw ’em cried and I was like “oh my God, are we going to make people cry?” So get excited because that’ll be something that hasn’t been done before for most types of horror movies.
I hoped we could talk about the setting, both in terms of the adult mental asylum kind of vibe, but also Charlie Heaton mentioned there were original thoughts to set it in the 80s and I’m curious about the decision to set it in present time.
You know, it was originally set, when we did the first couple drafts with Simon Kinberg, who’s our producer, he’s off now making his own X-Men movie, so like, he’s still the producer, but Karen’s here because Simon’s got to make that movie. But originally were in the 80s universe with Professor X in it, with Storm in it, and with a bunch of other stuff and, like, basically when they got to Apocalypse, they didn’t want anything set in the past anymore, [lowers voice] like that was the reason it was bad… It’s like, the one before that in the 70s was pretty awesome. And the 60s one was pretty great. They just wanted all this stuff moved up to the present day including the X-Men eventually in some way shape or form. I imagine these will all connect, but it didn’t really matter because they’re in such an isolated location without any Wi-Fi or phones or anything that it might as well be the 80s in terms of the setting. It didn’t change our story very much. It limited who we could use character-wise, but in some ways it made it better because it freed us from, uh - it’s really able to be its own thing. Which I appreciate more now than I did when had to make that decision. But yeah, we’re really excited about it. Dream Warriors was a good call, who called out Dream Warriors? That was always like Darabont wrote that, while Wes Craven wrote the first draft then Darabont andChuck Russell came in. Yeah, I love that one, and that was very much kids in a psych ward who were trapped in there with Freddy
And have superhero powers.
In the dreams yeah.
The bummer of that movie as great as it is as you don’t really get them really kicking ass, though.
Yeah, they all get shot down so fast, the wizard kid died and I was like “aw, I wanted him to do some magic when Freddy stabbed him." Yeah, that’s a lot of what we talked about, I don’t know, I made a lot of movie references and things like that. Little homages to other horror movies because the interesting thing about this movie is it’s built upon every character having like a nightmare sequence, so it’s like you get kind of a different flavor in a little mini movie with all those different characters, I don’t know, you sort of flow through different horror things which I think is fun.
So would you say that the horror is more psychological rather than physical?
It’s a supernatural horror movie, oh yeah, I’d say this is pushed as far as you can push a PG-13 movie. Like, as far as Dark Knight was pushed or whatever with Joker’s putting someone’s head through with a pencil and stuff like that, or two face’s face. We push stuff as far as we could push it, but at the same time, like, I just wanted this to be, like, you know when kids go see a comic book movie they’re seeing a movie about a 50-year-old Iron Man or 40-year-old Captain America. The new Spider-Man came out, I loved the new Spider-Man because it actually had kids in it. We really wanted this to be a movie for the misfits and outcasts, I want to sort of, every teenager whether they are that or not, because they feel that way inside. So, yeah, so like a movie for the rebels and kids who are troubled and all that stuff. Cuz they deal with problems in this that are, uh, never been touched in comic book movies before, ever. And the main reason we came to this location and wanted a real location in general is, like, again, like I said, when I see comic movies in general, they have sort of a CGI sheen over the entire movie where they made the movie look a certain way to hide visual effects, and we really wanted to go shoot as much of this and real locations as possible and challenge them to figure out how to make the visual effects work in the real world oh, so yeah, we’re hoping it’s very different and, like I said, very performance-driven, emotionally driven, with lots of horror stuff and like some superhero stuff, like I call it New Mutants Begins. By the end of the movie they are the New Mutants.
We saw the animatic that was the demon bear a few months back.
Yeah, see we made that because we have a storyboard artist that works for my company that, we boarded Revival together the Stephen King one that they put together we’re boarding the stand together now, the Stephen King One that were doing, so she boards for me all the time, and that was when we did before we ever started production which we re-boarded afterward and all that. It was sort of an early thing. But yeah, that was a real, that was definitely some of the stuff we’ve been shooting out here where Illyana fights the bear and all that.
Can you tell me that all about your conception of the Demon Bear when he represents for the characters as far as the fear element and all that?
Oh yeah, you know, we’ve changed stuff, we’ve really taken the characters we love from the comics and put them into our version of the movie because, if you just did it, it’d just be another X-Men movie, truly, I mean it’s not until issue 18 when Bill [Sienkiewicz] took over their art that it sort of became more surreal and horror driven and all that. I just knew we always wanted to do the Demon Bear story, Knate [Lee] and I, my co-writer, I knew him since the day I was born, our moms are best friends, we had a comic book company when we were kids and we only did like 50 issues of one thing, and they’re terrible, but they’re awesome. And we Xeroxed them at my Grandma’s office and then we’d sell them to our family members or whatever. And when we went to go tell Fox we wanted to do this movie, we made them a comic book, it was like a PDF that pitched them kind of a trilogy of films, each one’s its own unique kind of horror movie, the first one’s a supernatural horror movie, I won’t say what the other two are, but they’re horror movies but different horror movie each time. So yeah, we’ve loved comics our whole life, and we love more than anything Marvel Comics, especially X-Men stuff and Spider-Man stuff and stuff like that. We like DC, but only like when Dark Knight Returns came out we read the graphic novel, we read Watchmen, we loved all the Vertigo comics, But we weren’t big into DC, we were Marvel fans.
You connected because of the grounded Nature, you think?
I just saw those kids not in costumes, and there was something about that villain Chris [Claremont] did, when they go fight that Demon Bear, there’s a couple levels of reality going on at the same time and I was like, “they haven’t done this,” and I don’t know, we wanted to do something different, and it felt different. It felt, uh, I have a Philip K. Dick book I have the rights to as well, and it’s felt very much like that in terms of the way it very easily switches between different realities and different things that are-
Which book?
We’re doing Divine Invasion with James Franco and Willem Dafoe And some other people. It’s one of the crazy religious ones, and I was raised by crazy Evangelical Christians, so I read The Stand in my bed when I was 12 and I cut a hole in the box springs in my bed and instead of pornographyup there I’d put Clive Barker books up there and Stephen King books and Guns N Roses CDs my parents didn’t know about, and they found my stash and burned The Stand in the fireplace. So, I’m going to go make The Stand after that and it’s so weird to think “oh, yeah, I’m going to make that one that my mom burned.” I was trying to tell her that, like, “you didn’t realize it back then but it’s the most Christian horror novel ever written.”
How’s that personally affected your relationship with the character Rahne?
You know, we dealt more with Christian iconography in this than was even in the comics because that stuff was of interest to us because we grew up so much in it. I’m an atheist on my best day, but I still think all that stuff is interesting and I still feel it in me whether I believe any of it or not. I still have Christian guilt if I do anything I’m like “oh God.” So, yeah, it kind of tried at all the things we grew up with and we just got such a great cast and we had Maisie and Anya like a year-and-a-half before we even got greenlit, so they had like 20 draft as Knate and I went through draft after draft. And we’ll introduce new characters in the next one, like Warlock and Cypher and Karma’ll be in later movies and all that. We just could only deal with so many in the first movie and wanted the time to build all the characters.
Mental health is obviously a huge theme now in movies and media dealing with young adults and this is at a mental hospital, obviously they’re dealing with all sorts of superpowers, how do you kind of combine those things?
That stuff is more loosey-goosey for me, I’m not that… they’re very much in a place that’s like a psych hold mutants who are too dangerous to be at the Mansion. I’d tell you more but there’s twists and turns and all that. But, yeah, there’s a doctor there who helps them and they do therapy with her and all that stuff. Like I said, A Little Girl Interrupted and Cuckoo’s Nest meets a horror movie.
They share the same universe?
Oh yeah, we share the same universe and there will be things that fans are really excited about they will have repercussions in other movies and other parts of the X-Men world and all that. So it should be really cool! I’m excited!
- New Mutants Release Date: 2020-08-28
