NEW MUTANTS
THE NEW MUTANTS I The X-Men are going to some seriously dark places. TF was on set for the film that seemed to be going a bit too well…
On set of Josh Boone’s long-delayed X-pic.
Like the working title?” laughs director Josh Boone, pointing to a sign that reads, ‘Growing Pains’. “Actually, everything’s been amazingly unpainful so far!” Almost three years later, it looks like he might have spoken a bit too soon.
In the time since Total Film visited the set, The New Mutants has lingered on to the extent that it isn’t exactly that new anymore – dragged through a post-development hell that made most worry if it was ever going to come out at all. Now given a release date, the growing pains are over at last – and the real horror can finally begin.
Back in July 2017, TF was somewhere in a dark corner of Medfield State
Hospital – a sprawling Victorian lunatic asylum outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Deserted in a hurry, the building (used a few years earlier by Scorsese for Shutter Island) is a cold mass of crumbling corridors, hidden tunnels and weird noises. It is, even in the middle of summer, utterly terrifying – and it’s also the perfect place to reboot the X-Men franchise into a misfit teen horror.
“We wanted to make a movie for outsiders. For kids who’ve had problems,” says Boone. “I had all these movies when I was a kid, like Monster Squad and Lost Boys, where all the characters were the same age as me. Most kids today are going to see comic-book movies about a bunch of 40-year-olds.”
Adapting a short run of comics (mostly Bill Sienkiewicz’s ‘Demon Bear’ series from the 1980s), New Mutants picks up the origin stories of five messed-up mutants who land themselves in a secret medical facility. There are no planets to save, no
MacGuffins to find and nothing to fight besides whatever monsters they find in their heads.
“You’ve seen the X-Mansion? Where everybody’s all happy and nice? This is where the kids go when they’re so fucked up that they can’t even get through the door,” says Boone. “In the same way Deadpool is a raunchy comedy and Logan is a western, this is a horror movie. It’s a haunted-house movie. It’s not big operatic science-fiction, like a typical X-Men film, this is much more grounded and character driven. It all goes back to Stephen King, really.”
Naming influences as diverse as
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Dream Warriors to The Breakfast Club and Scooby-Doo, it’s clear whose shadow is looming the largest over Boone’s take on the Marvel comics.
“I was raised by very strict evangelical Christians, and King was a towering figure in my life,” he says, pulling a battered copy of The Stand out of his pocket. “I read this under my bed when I was 12. My mum found my stash of King books and burned them all. After that I wrote King a letter and told him how much I wanted to make movies. I came home from school one day and my dad pulled me aside and said, ‘there’s a box here from Stephen King… I didn’t tell your mum’. He’d written me the most amazing letter, split into three parts, written on the inside covers of three new books. I’ve loved King my whole life and my pitch to the studio was basically to do a Stephen King X-Men movie.”
Casting five up-and-comers who have mostly all up-and-come in the years since the film was shot, Boone wanted his next-gen mutants to feel as fresh as possible.
First up there’s Charlie Heaton (hot off the first season of Stranger Things at the time), nervously chewing his nails as he keeps up a thick Kentucky accent to talk about his character. “Cannonball can fly, but he can’t land yet…” he says. “There’s a lot of anxiety with this guy.”
Then there’s Anya Taylor-Joy as Russian sorceress Illyana Rasputin (“She’s seen some things…”), Henry Zaga as “Brazilian hothead” Sunspot, Blu Hunt as the fear-projecting hypnotist, Mirage, and Maisie Williams as a Scottish-accented werewolf.
“I’ve always hated my own voice
– it makes me cringe!” jokes Williams, still somewhere in the middle of Game Of Thrones back in 2017. “We tried a lot of tests to try and figure out what looks best for the wolf stuff, but ultimately it’s a mix of practical effects and CG, along with a real wolf, who I absolutely adore.”
Boone chips in that he hired “the Tom Cruise of wolf actors”, going off on a tangent about how difficult it is to digitally remove a wolf’s penis, and everyone starts giggling. Nightmarish old asylum or not, New Mutants seemed like a hoot for everyone involved – with mutant mentor Alice Braga playing pranks during takes, Taylor-Joy pulling funny faces to throw the others off, and talk of Black Mirror viewing parties in Zaga’s hotel room. But then it all went wrong. Delayed first by reshoots (which may or may not have actually happened) apparently designed to make it less scary, and then more scary, the film was then caught up in Disney’s Fox takeover and shelved for an uncomfortably long time. Unlike whatever happened to Josh Trank’s disowned Fantastic Four, though, Boone is still confident the version being released is the one he wanted to make (telling fans on Instagram, “I wouldn’t be promoting it if it wasn’t”).
Changes and studio switches or not, New Mutants looks to be just as bold a new direction for the X-franchise now as it did back in 2017. It might have been a long time coming, but at least the wait is finally, almost, over. PB
ETA | 8 APRIL / THE NEW MUTANTS IS OUT NEXT MONTH.
‘IN THE SAME WAY DEADPOOL IS A COMEDY AND LOGAN IS A WESTERN, THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE’ JOSH BOONE