"The grey in the hair is something I took from X-Men Days Of Future Past, it’s a look in the comic," director Bryan Singer told Empire exclusively today. "I liked it, even though he hasn’t really aged physically it’s something that shows how tough things have gotten in the future, and brought that out in him and given him a little more world-weariness."
"She's one of the last surviving X-Men in this post-apocalyptic world," says Bryan Singer about Halle Berry's Storm. "She’s part of that with Wolverine and Charles and Magneto, they’re some of the last folk standing from the original X-Men. They’re at the spearhead of this mission, this last chance at saving the world. This is their only hope, their mission into time. Can you actually go back and affect time? Can you go back and change things or will time correct itself? Will history fight you back and is your destiny pre-determined or can you change it?"
"They’re on the run," explains Singer. "There’s no organisation. It’s all been shattered. Most of them have been hunted down. Most of them are dead."
"They’re not really fresh recruits," says Singer of the new mutants pictured above; Bishop, Sunspot, Warpath and Blink. "They’re more refugees that are living day to day in this hideously ruined world. They don’t have much hope in the future. They’re on the run and they join forces with the remaining X-Men to try to do this one last attempt at fixing the world."
"There’s a line in the movie, ‘he’s always had a way with guns’," Bryan Singer says of Michael Fassbender's iteration of Magneto. "That’s how he crippled Xavier, and he’s such a powerful mutant but in this particular moment he’s holding a gun and I like that. He’s a product of the Second World War and he knows how to use a gun as much as he does his powers."
"He’s trying to access something deep in his mind," says Singer. "That’s what the line’s about, 'you’re going to need to do for me what I once did for you'. In X-Men 1, Logan was a lost, lonely person and Charles helped him find himself. Now the tables are turned and Logan is coming into the world from the future to find a man who’s at the end of his rope in the past."
"He may be his human form in that shot, I’m not sure. By that time in the sequence he may actually be metal but I have no visual effects done!" says Singer, laughing. "So for that shot you just get what’s on the set - a big, live, real explosion. No CGI yet. We’re in process on very elaborate effects but there’s really none of them done except for a couple of backdrops and a couple of shots I could slide in."
"Fassbender knew that he would be, well, not sharing the frame with Ian McKellen, but sharing the movie with Ian McKellen," exclaims Singer, "so where on First Class he tried to be as different as possible from McKellen, because that was a very different character, well now he knew as an actor he’d have to bring his performance slightly closer to Ian’s because he’s heading in that direction."
Bryan Singer confirms that Logan "doesn’t have his metal yet in 1973," as pictured (blurry) in the shot above. For Singer's full guide into the trailer, or 42 frames, make the jump over to Empire.
The ultimate X-Men ensemble fights a war for the survival of the species across two time periods in X-Men: Days of Future Past. The beloved characters from the original X-Men film trilogy join forces with their younger selves from X-Men: First Class, in an epic battle that must change the past -- to save our future. X-Men: Days of Future Past has wrapped filming, and stars Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Patrick Stewart, Michael Fassbender,, Ian McKellen, Nicholas Hoult, Omar Sy, Peter Dinklage, Halle Berry, Adan Canto, Fan Bingbing, Anna Paquin, Evan Peters, Daniel Cudmore, Ellen Page & Booboo Stewart. Bryan Singer directs the film in theaters May 23, 2014!