You know I love watching DVD’s, on my system I can get better quality than the cinema in picture and sound, and no idiots making rustling sounds, slurping drinks and issuing popcorn farts throughout the cinema, it’s fab. Not only that, but there’s the extras to entice you once you’ve seen the movie.
Me, I’m a big fan of outtakes, deleted scenes, and the most amazing of inventions, the audio commentary. Get a good team of actors, or a great director, and you have a stunning commentary, like that of Dog Soldiers. Get a bad one and you have a long drawn out ironing session…well…that’s what I do!
So bit of a surprise for me after watching the superb X2 to listen to the audio commentary of Bryan Singer and Newton Thomas Sigel. It wasn’t that great. Sure there were some interesting insights, but nothing to what I thought I was going to learn about the whole process of making the movie.
Then there was the second commentary of the writers including David Hayter and Lauren Shuler Donner. It too was a little disappointing but provided some interesting points as well, and contradicted some of Singers comments.
There were four things that were really interesting:
1. Jean Grey’s ending was not scripted, and not decided upon until late on in the movie, although the outcome was, the physical end wasn’t. The writers, in their commentary, talk about the various different drafts of what would happen and how, and it’s interesting to hear the different endings that were written.
Throughout the movie there seem to be some key scenes and sequences that just sprang up out of their heads and the process of filming. As Singer says at one point he truly believes that there are three stages of creating the movie, the script writing, the filming and the editing.
2. The continual comments on scenes that happened because of budget concerns. For such an effects rich movie it was surprising how many times they had to cut back, or use existing shots, so as not to use too much budget.
One comment which was particularly telling was when Singer retold a showing of some footage to the Studio Chairman. He showed Wolverine walking down this really long corridor.
Chairman: “Where was that filmed?”
Singer: “We built it”
Chairman: “Oh god”
3. The desire to film X-Men 3 as a musical, complete with line dance. No, although that was there, that wasn’t meant to be point three. The possibility of filming X-Men 3 completely digital.
4. Beast was supposed to be in each of the movies so far, but just never managed to pull through, and the writers and producer sit at the end and talk about what they would like in the next movie, and who. Beast scored big, Gambit, Juggernaut, and Angel – who interestingly featured in the X-rays in the background of Strykers lab.
See, interesting stuff you can get from commentaries! Has anyone got any particularly good commentaries, or commentary insights to suggest? Or other such surprising insights? Can anyone just not abide this type of thing at all and rather they weren’t made? Why not?
