Exclusive: The Marvel chief on Matthew Vaughn, Dark Phoenix and more

The ink may have barely dried on the contract that confirmed Matthew Vaughn - Empire’s very own recently-anointed Best British Director for Layer Cake, don’t forget - as the new director in charge of X-Men 3, but that hasn’t stopped fanboys, fangirls and fanblueskinnedwotsits everywhere from trying to fathom the plot details of the third instalment of Fox/Marvel’s mighty mutant franchise, which begins filming in August.

Well, partially worry no more, folks, for Empire just happened to be in LA this week. And inbetween running into the wonderful Mark Steven Johnson (and his lovely wife) in a Santa Monica toy shop (the Daredevil director assuring anonymity by, um, wearing a Daredevil baseball cap), and being attacked by bees, we took time out to visit the fine folks at Marvel, including the head honcho himself, Avi Arad. And we didn’t waste time in mentioning X.

“We are incredibly excited about Matthew,” said Avi. “We love his sensibilities. I thought Layer Cake was incredibly stylish, with a lot of characters. In some ways he had stylistically the look of X-Men, it was very crisp.”

The fanboy doubters - and let’s face it, if God himself was directing X3 with Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain doing the soundtrack, the whingeing beardies still wouldn’t be happy - have used Vaughn’s inexperience as a director as grist to their moaning mill. But Avi is confident that he’s got the right man. “It’s no less a leap than it was for Bryan [Singer, previous X-director, now shooting Superman Returns]. With movies of this size, it’s hard to wing it. He’s very confident, that’s what I like about him. ‘Yeah, I can do that!’

“Just when he had started,” continued Avi, by way of example, “we had some conversation about one of the characters and he says ‘I know how to introduce him’ and I said ‘let’s hear it’ and it was a really smart thing that’s going to be in the movie. It’s a love-fest.”

Glad to hear it, for we’re pretty damn psyched about Vaughn’s involvement, too. But the mention of a new character leads us onto internet tittle-tattle about the likes of Gambit (Cajun cad who charges cards kinetically, which is really handy if you’re an alliteration freak), Beast (big hairy ape-like bloke with more brains than Dr. Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and that bloke off The Late Review put together) and Angel (flying mutant, not TV’s David Boreanaz) all making their bows this time around, alongside the already-established mutants.

Avi, however, was tight-lipped on all but Angel. “It won’t be a female Angel. I don’t know where that came from, maybe because he looks angelic,” he laughed. “There will be interesting characters that will be introduced. It just has to move forward. Obviously we have Wolverine, and Magneto, Professor X, Storm, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Rogue, all these characters, but then you need to freshen up the story and make it new.”

Still, we’d bet 20p that the character Vaughn was talking about introducing was Gambit. However, we’ll be perfectly happy if we’re surprised in a major way. And with X3, that seems to be the order of the day. For example, most seasoned X-perts would have reckoned that X3 would focus on the return and conversion to the dark side of Jean Grey’s now ultra-powerful and back from the dead Phoenix, also known as The Dark Phoenix Saga. Well, maybe. But then again...

“It should never be this one story. The main characters are more important than Jean Grey,” admitted Avi, which should please Famke Janssen no end. “This is a bigger story. Everybody’s expecting Dark Phoenix, but Dark Phoenix would never be the main show. She’ll be one of the characters, that’s it. There are a lot of stories to tell.”

And which story, pray tell, are we to expect here, given that Zak Penn is still working on the script for the movie?

“We needed something that is very big,” said Avi. “In movie two, it was mutants against humans. In movie one, it was trying to understand. In movie three, it is probably philosophically the most interesting and provocative for all of us.”

Does that mean the introduction of the mutant-killing Sentinels, we ventured, only to be met by Avi’s very own mutant power - the ability to stonewall. Ouch. “It’s funny because when we sat with Tom Rothman [Fox bigwig], he said ‘this has to be an action drama’ and it was music to my ears, because that’s what X-Men is. That opens the door for a concept for this movie that will be disturbing and fascinating and controversial. It will be an interesting debate - should we or shouldn’t we?” Hmm... sounds like mutant genocide could be on the cards. “All I can say is it’s going to be a very interesting dilemma. It’s a very intelligent movie. I think it’s contextually going to be the best. We are so excited.”

And, frankly after gleaning all that from Avi, so are we. For more on the forthcoming Marvel line-up, including Mark Steven Johnson’s Ghost Rider, Tim Story’s Fantastic Four, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 and much, much more, stay tuned to Empire for a special feature beginning from next week.