In part 1 of iF’s exclusive interview Kinberg dispels myths about Sentinels and wishes he could’ve used Gambit

Love it or hate it, call it a box office flop even though it broke records, X-MEN: THE LAST STAND has certainly made an impact at the box office and in the hearts of comic book fans everywhere. One of the men directly responsible for that is screenwriter Simon Kinberg who together with his writing partner Zak Penn were with the project from the beginning.

Kinberg chatted with iF to dispel rumors of an abandoned script, what it took to research the movie, and what X-MEN characters they want to include but didn’t have room.

iF MAGAZINE: Were you brought in after one whole version of the film had been rejected?

SIMON KINBERG: No. Actually, Zak [Penn] and I were brought in separately. Bryan Singer had left to do SUPERMAN and Bryan took his writers with him to work on SUPERMAN. They had talked with Fox about a general direction for X3, but they had never written an outline, and they had certainly never written a script. Fox hired me about a month after Bryan left to start to write the script. They wanted to start production in July of the following year. I had seven or eight months to go from start to finish to have the script ready to go into production. I started writing for a couple months, and Fox did what many studios do now especially on these big tent-pole films, which is they hired another writer to write a separate simultaneous draft. They had done that with FANTASTIC FOUR, and Warner Bros has done that on several of their superhero movies. What happens 99 out of 100 times, is different writers write different drafts, and then another writer is hired to create a Frankenstein draft that combines all of the different and best elements of each separate draft. That was the path we would have been on, but Zak and I, instead of competing and looking over our shoulders, contacted each other and decided to write the script together. Given the short time frame, and the fact that both of us are collaborative guys, we had the same sort of sensibilities about this movie. In January or February of last year Zak and I decided to join forces and become a proper writing team. We’d never met before, let alone worked together.

We started doing outlines and started writing a draft together and then in February of last year Matthew Vaughn was hired to be the director of the film. We worked incredibly close with Matthew, and wrote a very fast sort of structural draft so they could budget and start prepping the movie. The dialogue and nuances of it weren’t there yet, but certainly the structure of it was. We worked with him for three or four months, and then Matthew ended up leaving the movie for personal reasons in June or July. The movie was hurtling towards production, and they needed a director to come in with about six to eight weeks of prep, and make the it work.

Brett was one of the only directors that the cast felt strongly about, and who was willing to take on that very daunting challenge.

iF: There were rumors that there was a Sentinel script at the time, is that true?

KINBERG: There never was a Sentinel script that veered away from the story we ended up with. I have no idea where the rumors came from, but it may have something to do with the Sentinel in the danger room. It also might have something to do with the fact that there was an earlier draft of X-MEN 2 that had Sentinels in it.

iF: How much research did you do in the writing of the script?

KINBERG: I’m a huge X-MEN comic fan, and I grew up a huge X-MEN geek. So, I had read the vast majority of the comics that were in my lifetime, and I was certainly familiar with the Phoenix Saga. I went back and re-read the Phoenix comics in great detail. Not just the [Chris] Claremont saga, but also the other incarnations of the Phoenix over the X-MEN’s history. We did a lot of that type of research, and Zak and I photocopied pages that we felt were especially relevant and posted them all over our office. The walls were literally wallpapered with pages of comics.

iF: You also brought in elements of the most current X-MEN storylines like Joss Whedon’s ASTONISHING X-MEN as well correct?

KINBERG: One thing that I knew going in was that it was going to be the Dark Phoenix story since Bryan had laid the groundwork for that in X2, but what we didn’t know was what the other parallel stories would be. I think everyone felt that one of the strengths of the first two X-MEN movies was that they had a number of parallel stories. In many ways the Phoenix story is the emotional “A” plot of the film, but the political “A” plot of the film became about the cure. That was actually a studio executive’s idea. One of them had read Joss Whedon’s gifted run with the mutant cure in it and thought that would be an interesting quandary for the characters. One thing that you’ll find when you look online, is that whether fans do or don’t like this movie (and the opinions are pretty wildly diverse as you can imagine), they certainly acknowledge that there is a lot of the comics represented in this movie. I won’t claim credit for anything good in the movie except Zak and I are the biggest X-MEN geeks that were anywhere around this film with the exception of Avi Arad. Zak and I were certainly the ones on set everyday, who were fighting really hard to shoehorn everything into the movie that we loved about the books.

iF: Was Alan Cumming in the original script as Nightcrawler?

KINBERG: I don’t know if Alan backed out or whose decision that was. There was a draft of the script where Nightcrawler had a cameo but not a big part. I think the studio felt that either we should give Nightcrawler a major story since he was so well established in X2, or we would do sort of what the comics do, which is to move onto another story with a new set of characters knowing that Nightcrawler is out there in the X-Universe and can possibly return for some other X-MEN movie in the future. Bryan did such an excellent job with Nightcrawler in X2 both in terms of representing his powers and giving him an emotional arc, that there wasn’t much left to do with the character in X3. It also felt like he might tread a little bit on the terrain of Beast; in terms of similarities in the characters and their political standpoints in terms of dealing with their mutancy. We ended up jettisoning the character.

iF: Were there any other favorite characters that you wanted to use in X3 that you didn’t get to use?

KINBERG: I think the one character we really wanted to find a way to include in the movie, and ultimately just couldn’t find a way to do it, was Gambit. We wrote a cameo for him, and then really felt like it was better to save Gambit and give him a major role in a future X-MEN movie, rather than give him a cameo where fans would be saying "that’s all I get of Gambit?" The plot that we chose for the story, felt like it was so good at introducing Beast and Angel, because of the department of mutant affairs and Warren Worthington the first being the creator of the cure. It all felt very right and very resonate. Finding a place for Gambit where he wasn’t going to be just one of the team didn’t come to us. We didn’t want to introduce a fan favorite character and not be able to do him justice. There just wasn’t enough space in this movie.