Josh Boone Interview: Director Talks 'The New Mutants' And More
The New Mutants director Josh Boone sits down with CinemaBlend Events Editor Eric Eisenberg to discuss his thought process of portraying each character, culturally accurate casting, and so much more.
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00:00 - Absolutely love it, sir.
00:00 That's fantastic.
00:02 Love a fellow collector.
00:03 - We can be friends.
00:03 You have a bunch of Omni-Busters,
00:04 I've got a bunch of those.
00:06 Even that, see that X-Men box behind your head there?
00:09 I've got that.
00:10 - Nice.
00:11 (laughing)
00:12 - You mutants are dangerous.
00:14 That's why you're here.
00:15 - This past Sunday was actually the three year anniversary
00:22 of me being at the Medfield State Hospital
00:25 where I got to visit.
00:27 - I was just thinking, I got a thing on my phone
00:28 the other day that was like three years ago
00:30 and I was on set and I was like,
00:31 okay, that's how long it's been.
00:34 - And I mean, the movie that you described back then,
00:36 I was so, I'm so excited for it.
00:39 It has me so excited.
00:40 I'm curious just how much the movie has changed since then.
00:43 - Well, I mean, it really hasn't changed much at all
00:46 because we never were able to go do any reshoots
00:48 or any sort of pickups or anything like that.
00:50 So the story never changed.
00:52 We had about a year plus of limbo
00:54 where the Fox Disney merger was happening
00:56 where literally nothing happened with the movie at all.
00:59 The visual effects, the work on that was stopped.
01:02 So they never, I never saw finished visual effects
01:04 until this past year.
01:05 And it's why you see more of that stuff in the trailers now
01:08 and not earlier because you were seeing just stuff
01:10 with practical effects for the most part.
01:12 So I don't know, I mean, it's been a long process,
01:15 but for me, it was a happy ending
01:16 because once the merger was done,
01:18 Disney really came back and let us go finish the movie
01:21 without anybody bothering us really.
01:23 So it was sort of great.
01:24 And we're really getting to release
01:26 what we went and shot and set out to make,
01:28 which is a strange, it's a strange brew,
01:32 but I think it's a really cool brew
01:33 that hasn't been done before.
01:35 And I think it's, you know,
01:36 one of the very few superhero movies
01:39 that doesn't just feature an adult cast.
01:41 It really is made for teenagers, about teenagers.
01:44 And the way John Hughes movies were
01:46 that you don't really get in movie theaters nowadays.
01:48 So we sort of tried to smuggle that stuff
01:51 into a superhero movie to try to get away with it,
01:54 I guess is my way of saying it.
01:56 Same with like the gay love story in it
01:57 and things like that.
01:59 - You're not alone.
02:00 Not anymore.
02:01 - You mentioned the cast of characters
02:03 and I'm just so excited to see this group of characters
02:05 who I've known from the comics for years and years
02:07 to see them finally in live action.
02:09 And actually just, I want to kind of talk about them
02:11 one by one.
02:12 There you go. Beautiful.
02:13 Zinkovic, love it.
02:14 And I mean, and you mentioned the word limbo.
02:17 So I'm going to use that as a perfect transition
02:19 into talking about magic.
02:20 - It's magic.
02:21 - So am I.
02:23 This is a character who has a fairly complex origin story
02:27 and footage that we've seen of her,
02:28 I mean, she seems to be pretty trained with the soul sword.
02:31 She's obviously teleporting everywhere.
02:33 I'm curious just kind of how much the movie
02:35 is going to be diving into her origin story
02:37 and what fans can expect.
02:39 - You're not going to see like the demon Belasco
02:41 and it's like, you know, I'd say like every,
02:43 all the mythology from the comic book has been honored
02:47 but not the stuff that's a really difficult to explain
02:50 without a lot of crazy X-Men backstory.
02:52 Like for example, Lockheed came from outer space
02:56 and he belonged to Kitty Pryde first.
02:58 Then he eventually was sort of adopted by Illyana
03:01 in the New Mutants comics.
03:02 And it's like, we simplified that in ways
03:04 just to make it more grounded like the movie
03:06 and less connected to that sort of stuff.
03:09 But you still get Lockheed, I guess what I mean.
03:11 And in a very similar way that you do in the comic
03:14 but we've tied him much more into her powers
03:16 and into limbo.
03:17 So I'd say everything's about limbo is the same
03:20 except it's now tied so psychologically
03:22 into her backstory and has less to do
03:23 with the demon named Belasco
03:25 that nobody's going to really connect with or understand
03:29 and is going to clash so much with the tone of the movie.
03:31 You know? So it's more just fun.
03:32 - You don't want like a 20 minute segment
03:34 where you're just going off on a tangent.
03:36 - Yeah. It's why Magma would never be in one of our movies
03:38 because it's like, there's a Roman empire
03:40 in the Amazon somewhere.
03:42 It's just not going to translate well
03:44 to the kind of grounded character driven movie
03:46 that we're making.
03:47 - It's important we find out your power
03:49 so we can help you get better.
03:51 To move from there to Wolfsbane,
03:53 obviously cinema history is filled
03:55 with so many awesome werewolf transformations.
03:57 This is an interesting character
03:58 in that she's not really a werewolf
04:00 because she does the full transformation into a full wolf
04:03 and also has that kind of middle version.
04:05 And I'm just kind of hoping you can talk
04:06 about your philosophy
04:07 about the transformation process for her.
04:09 - Doing any sort of transformation costs a lot of money.
04:12 (laughing)
04:13 I didn't get to do as much as I probably wanted to
04:15 with it being a big fan of like an American werewolf
04:17 in London and all that.
04:18 Silver Bullets, one of my favorite Stephen King movies.
04:20 I fucking, I will swear by Silver Bullet.
04:22 I don't care what anybody says.
04:25 It's so good.
04:25 So I'm a big werewolf fan.
04:27 So it's like, we're not, it's not quite werewolf
04:29 but it's like, we used, you know, a real wolf.
04:31 Like when she's a wolf in it, she's a real wolf.
04:33 Went and got a wolf that was Maisie's wolf double.
04:36 I've got pictures of them together.
04:39 They got along quite well.
04:41 You know, there's a bit of an in-between state and all that.
04:43 But you know, for me, what was more interesting
04:46 about her character was really the character's
04:47 sort of oppressive religious upbringing
04:50 which felt personally, it allowed me
04:52 to get personally invested because I was raised
04:54 by evangelical Christians in the Bible belt in the 1980s.
04:59 So some of my childhood was a little dark
05:00 and scary in that respect, but like,
05:03 it gives you something to butt your head against
05:06 to get through life.
05:08 - We can get out of this together.
05:10 - So is it kind of a painful experience for her
05:13 when she's like, just because she's almost kind
05:15 of rejecting it just because of her background?
05:17 - Yeah, I mean, she clings to it as well in a great way
05:20 where it's like, it's funny, everything in this movie
05:22 is painful for everybody because everybody's there
05:24 because they're a killer, you know,
05:26 to either voluntarily or involuntarily
05:28 with Ileana being the most voluntary of them
05:31 who really was the most justified in doing what she did.
05:34 - I killed 18 men, one by one.
05:37 - And the others are accidents that happened
05:39 or just terrible things that happened.
05:41 - I just lost control.
05:43 - I've started panicking.
05:45 My girlfriend had a breakdown.
05:47 - So I guess it's about trauma and about PTSD in that way.
05:51 That sort of courses through it and through all
05:53 the characters and Dani's powers manifesting
05:56 or what sort of forced the characters
05:58 in a one flew over the cuckoo's nest,
06:00 girl interrupted kind of way to work through their problems.
06:03 And then they ultimately have to save Dani from herself.
06:06 You know? - Sure.
06:07 - What's the last thing you remember, Dani?
06:09 - The trailers, you have that great, like,
06:11 Freddie-esque effect where he's basically coming
06:13 in through the wall.
06:14 - I'm curious just how much ultimately was there
06:17 a reference for you from "Nightmare on Elm Street"
06:19 when approaching that character?
06:20 - I mean, a lot.
06:21 I mean, it's like, that's certainly
06:23 a foundational horror movie that Nate, my co-writer,
06:25 and I watched in the 1980s when we were kids
06:27 and we're so scared that we had to rush to his house
06:30 and watch "Better Off Dead" just to cleanse our palate
06:33 before we went to bed.
06:34 - Mercy buckets.
06:35 - But "Nightmare on Elm Street 3," for sure,
06:37 that's what gave us the location to put these characters in
06:41 to make it different from other X-Men movies
06:44 so that we could actually make a new mutants movie.
06:46 Trying to find a way to put it in one place
06:49 and make it budget-conscious enough
06:50 that we could get it made was sort of the key, you know?
06:54 So when we had that framework to put the story in,
06:56 everything started to come together.
06:58 - And actually, you do have one character
07:00 who has appeared in another movie, which is Sunspot,
07:02 had a very, very brief part in "Days of Future Past"
07:05 put back in the character. - Very brief.
07:07 - A, was that kind of nice for you not to have to, like,
07:10 just because his role was that small,
07:12 but also, like, was he at all a reference
07:14 just as far as, like, especially when he's in his,
07:15 like, solar-charged mode?
07:17 - I mean, no, we really did our own thing with it.
07:19 I really wanted more of the balls
07:21 that Bill Sinkovitz drew around him when he's moving,
07:25 so a lot of them are moving fast now.
07:26 We tried to get more of that stuff in
07:28 just 'cause it's like that stuff looks closer
07:30 to the comic, I think.
07:31 But, you know, we were lucky.
07:32 We just knew we really wanted to cast a real Brazilian,
07:34 we wanted to cast a real Native American,
07:36 we wanted people who were deeply connected to those places
07:40 and those tribes and could actually
07:42 help bring authenticity to it.
07:45 So, like, we probably looked at 300 people for "Blue,"
07:48 people trying out on reservations
07:49 across the country and Canada,
07:51 and saw so many Brazilians, I can't even tell you.
07:55 You know, people argue about lighter-skinned
07:57 or darker-skinned Roberto, and it's like,
07:59 I saw the very best actor I saw was Henry Zaga,
08:03 and he was Brazilian,
08:04 and that was more than good enough for me.
08:06 He also personified so many of the character traits
08:10 that I wanted that character to have
08:11 that I felt from the series, you know?
08:14 - That was so hot.
08:16 - And lastly, there's Cannonball,
08:18 which, I mean, that's a power that I feel like
08:21 if you make a mistake, it could kind of come across as goofy,
08:24 and we just actually earlier today
08:26 saw the first footage of him bouncing around,
08:29 and I'm just kind of hoping that you could talk about
08:30 the process of just building that effect.
08:33 - We just wanted him to be somebody who punished himself,
08:36 and we wanted him to be somebody that couldn't quite land,
08:39 had broken his arm, had broken a bunch of bones in his body,
08:42 isn't quite good with his powers.
08:45 If he's flying up without a chain on him,
08:47 there's a chance he'll die.
08:48 You know, we just wanted it to be sort of
08:51 actually scary the way powers are
08:53 in, like, "Carrier" or "Firestarter."
08:54 I guess when I say my Stephen King reference,
08:56 I really mean in regards to how he treats
08:59 what are called superhero powers in comic books.
09:02 You know, those are the things that, to me,
09:05 would be much more horrific and much more paralyzing
09:08 and terrifying than it would be cool.
09:11 So we wanted him to just be somebody
09:12 who was an embodiment of the sin
09:15 he'd committed in the past accidentally, but still, you know?
09:18 - You've been through a lot.
09:23 Get some rest.
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