Bryan Singer on: Chariots of the Gods, Valkyrie, Star Trek & the mythology of X-Men Apocalypse

Here’s my full interview with the very well-read Bryan Singer on X-Men Apocalypse. We talked the Bible, classic Star Trek, the 60s vogue for theories on space seeding aliens, and why the Holocaust is a presence in so many of his films. You can hear a 5 minute version here from Radio 4’s Front Row:

What would you say is new and to people who may never have seen an X-Men film before?

What’s great about it is that it’s an origin story for so many of the characters. So if you see this movie first, actually, it’ll set up characters in their earlier stages that end up showing up in the earlier films. I’ve actually talked to several people who’ve never seen an X-Men film – this was their first one. And they felt completely comfortable and teased into wanting to go back and visit the other ones. So it’s kind of ripe for that, actually.

This film has more of the Bible and epic mythology about it. I gather a big influence on you was Chariots of the Gods  – this 1968 book about aliens seeding early earth civilizations?

Yes, Chariots of the Gods I read when I was a kid. I rewatched the documentary recently. There’s always something fascinating about that. You know, 2001: A Space Odyssey also touches upon what seeded us. I don’t really address the alien element in the movie, but to me in my own heart there’s something about Apocalypse, who’s the villain of the story, tens of thousands of years ago, that hark back to those texts and those ideas.

 There’s a classic Star Trek episode – Who Mourns for Adonais? – which you throw in there, [seen playing on a TV set in Cairo] presumably for that reason?

Yes, that’s an in-joke between me and my editor/composer. We’re both huge old Star Trek fans and that story is about aliens believing they’re gods. And one character actually grows in size at the end. So if you recognize that, I’m very impressed you do, it’s a very inside piece of humour inside Storm’s apartment scene in Cairo.

 There’s a retro feel to the whole film. That’s partly the setting in the 80s, but partly a use of costume and makeup rather than CGI. It’s John Dykstra from the original Star Wars who’s worked on this with you. How did you want it to look and why?

I’ve always felt that if a villain or certain characters are CGI the humanity of those actors won’t be able to come out. Even if they are mutants, even if they are Apocalypse, they need to be persuasive, they need to be powerful and connective with the other characters. So to use the right kind of makeup in the right way and merge that with visual effects, to me was important, especially because I am working with such amazing actors.

Glenn Ford – Superman The Movie (1978)

 How far is it down to having actors who can do it very seriously. You have people of the calibre of Oscar Isaac, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence – a lot of whom have won a lot of awards – and they’re acting, in some cases, against stuff that isn’t yet there?

I’ve always said since I made the first X-Men film, that acting in these movies is one of the hardest, most challenging tasks in the world, because you are acting to things that aren’t there; you’re trying to take these characters that are so heightened and trying to make them real. And I have to credit Richard Donner for Superman: The Movie because he took a comic book film and cast Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Gene Hackman – great, great actors; Chris Reeve – a great theatre actor – and made a comic book come alive for me as a boy. So I just set about doing the same thing when I first cast Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in X-Men 1 years ago.

 It’s set in 1983 and it’s fascinating to see the way you play on a lot of the fears of the time; nuclear weapons going off, the Berlin Wall. And one of the most crowd-pleasing rescue sequences is set to the Eurythmics’ hit of that era, Sweet Dreams. Were you conscious of wanting to play with the decade that you clearly remember very well?

Yes, I was in high school in the 80s. It was a time of the cold war, a time of a lot of international upheaval, but at the same time a lot of complacency in America. So it was nice to take that era – the palate, the colours of that era – and kind of rough it up a bit and blow it out. And I know that era very well. It was my childhood. This was probably the most fun I’ve had with an era.

That rescue sequence [with Quicksilver] to Sweet Dreams – the most complex and sophisticated sequence in the film took a month and a half to shoot two minutes of film. Time around him stands still, which I based on an HG Wells story I had read many years ago. I set it to Sweet Dreams because the character, because he can move so fast, time stands still for him. It’s all a game, a joy for him.

 I gather you originally saw Xavier and Magneto as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X style archetypes. How did you develop that?

When I first joined the franchise and began making X-Men films I always drew the parallel between MLK who just preaches peace and turn the other cheek and Magneto says no, we have to fight, even use violence if necessary, as Malcolm X at times would preach. Those two opposing points of view make for great frenemies, I would call it, and it also grounds the film in its themes, that the X-Men have always had since the inception of the comic book in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement. It’s all about tolerance, it’s all about the different, and I never want to lose those themes and they make their way into this movie as well.

 There’s also a return to Auschwitz and the imagery of Nazism: Men in uniform coming to take parents away from children. The opening attempted assassination sequence reminded me of your film Valkyrie about the 1944 assassination plot against Hitler. Why is this theme so recurrent in your work?

I think for two reasons: One, I’m Jewish and so we’re made aware of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust at a very young age. But secondly I had a teacher, Miss Fiscarelli, who taught a class that went in great depth when I was in high school. And I found the Holocaust, the Shoah, very intriguing and horrific. And it stimulated my interest in the entire Second World War and then entire rise and fall of the Third Reich. And I’ve studied it tremendously. It’s touched upon many films I’ve made from X-Men 1 to this film, to films like Valkyrie or Apt Pupil I did with Ian McKellen and Brad Renfro about a Nazi war criminal living in a neighbourhood in southern California. It’s just something that will always intrigue me and is the stuff of a billion movies.

 Is there something about the team film that appeals to you, going back to one of your most successful films, The Usual Suspects, with its uncertainty about who is really a friend and who might be an enemy?

As with The Usual Suspects I cut my teeth on the ensemble film and I just got a little addicted to them. I like, first of all, no one being completely what they seem, because that’s just human nature. And also when you’re doing an ensemble film with very many characters to the audience it seems like there’s so much to juggle, but for the filmmaker there’s more for me to cut to. People are intertwined, there’s more story and I love story and I love character and they go first. So even though there’s a lot of action and spectacle in the movie, characters are first. Hence why we have so many great actors.

 A complaint that’s been made about some of the other recent superhero films is that they take themselves so seriously and that in fact, they’re not for young people any more. Your film has some very real visceral violence, up close, but it’s populated by a lot of teenagers. Are you aware and conscious of that dilemma, especially as your generation, born in the 60s, are the ones who grew up with comics and kind of won’t let go of them?

Well, I think today’s generation is very different. A lot of young people have the internet, they have access to different kinds of imagery, they show more on the news, more graphic stuff’s on cable and television. So younger people’s tolerance level is a little different than it was in earlier times, so you can put some of that stuff [on screen]. And a lot of kids are quite frankly, jaded to it. I have a son myself and I have to make those decisions about at what age I’ll let him watch what film and it’s going to be an interesting challenge for me. And even my own films. Which ones will I show him first?

 There are so many team superhero films out there. X Men started it off 16 years ago. Do you ever get annoyed that everyone else has jumped on the bandwagon and that it might create a saturation point?

Well, as long as they all know that they’ve jumped on the bandwagon, then I’m ok! To be honest, what differentiates X-Men from The Avengers or from Batman/Superman – those are all worlds that are populated by specific superheroes. The difference is that in the X-Men universe there’s tens, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of mutants living among us and they can always come up at any time with any measure of powers, and that’s how we cling on to our central theme. And it informs our characters and it informs the scope of our universe, which is every bit as large as the remaining Marvel or the DC universe. I’m very flattered and complimented by fact there are so many comic book films. I just want to make sure, well one, everyone sees this film, even if you’ve not seen an X-Men film, but also that they don’t clutter the [film] theatres where other films that I love to death, like Steve Jobs – I love this movie – or films like that don’t get the theatre play that they deserve. So that’s the yin and yang of the superhero genre. But they are our modern day mythologies. I said that sixteen years ago promoting X-Men 1. I say it today.