In true Hollywood style, director Gavin Hood is promoting X-Men Origins: Wolverine in “junket” manner. That is, its distributors have set up a series of quick-fire half-hour interviews, one after the other, at a plush location. There’s even poster material of the film, erected in a key position, for TV backdrops.
And South African Hood has certainly reached the Hollywood heights. After a small local picture, A Reasonable Man, in 1999, he went on to direct Tsotsi, which won an Oscar for best foreign film. On the back of that acclaim, he directed Rendition, a serious movie starring Hollywood royalty Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep. And now it’s a big blockbuster, fourth in a hit series and, the Hollywood suits doubtless hope, one of the year’s big money-spinners.
How does Hood feel about finding himself at the helm of a blockbuster and firmly lodged in the middle of the Hollywood machine?
“At first one can feel intimated by that,” he says, “but at the end of the day you’re still trying to tell the best story you can about a character that hopefully people connect with emotionally, and you’re packaging that story with what a blockbuster demands, which is spectacle and scope and action. But I don’t think people really go to the movies for visual effects. They go to connect with the character and the story. And if they don’t connect with that character then all your visual effects do nothing.”
At the same time, part of the appeal of doing Wolverine was that “I’ve always wanted to throw paint at a big canvas, and here you’ve got this huge screen to play with. That’s why I was so upset about the piracy, because I don’t want people to see it on a little computer screen.” (An unfinished version of the film appeared a few weeks ago on the internet.)
Hugh Jackman, who stars as Wolverine, is also one of the movie’s producers, so he had a say in who directed it. “I was surprised when Hugh asked me to do this movie,” says Hood. “He was a fan of Tsotsi and he said he was particularly a fan of the character’s emotional arc and the way people connected to a character who wasn’t necessarily fond of his inner self.”
Hood is deeply interested in the complexity he can bring to an ambiguous character such as Wolverine, and the way that could echo through the broader culture.
“As an artist you bring your own baggage to it,” he says. “And whatever film you put out is political. You are speaking to masses of people and the subtextual themes that come through will resonate, in a good or a bad way. When we were growing up, the main male heroic figure was either a Clint Eastwood or James Bond. Usually it was someone who was emotionally detached, didn’t fall in love, and always killed the bad guy. Maybe he slept with a woman but then he rode off into the sunset. That was our model of masculinity, of heroism. The endgame of that model is a very alienated, lonely, isolated male population that doesn’t connect very well, emotionally, either with women or with each other.
“So when you come across a character like Wolverine, there’s something interesting in a hero who is in conflict with his emotions, who does overreact at times then wish he could withdraw the claws, is looking for love and struggling to find it — and for me that as an iconic popcorn culture hero is a very interesting alternative to the cool, detached hero.”
He’s not interested in a simple good-versus-evil story. “I’ve never really subscribed to that, as you’d see from my other work. I’ve never felt the good-versus-evil dynamic is particularly helpful, either politically or dramatically. It’s a dangerous philosophy. We’ve seen what [George W] Bush did over eight years of thinking he was on the side of good and never questioning whether he himself had the capacity for evil. What drew me to Wolverine is that those tensions exist within the hero.”
He also brought fresh story developments to the character, having delved into Wolverine’s history in the comic books and found intriguing ideas to build on. “I started reading the comics, which I hadn’t read before. It was a hell of a new thing for me and at first I was sceptical.” But he discovered the story of young James Howlett, long before he becomes Logan / Wolverine, and a link to his rival Sabretooth, played by Liev Schreiber in the film:
“I latched on to that with both hands, because from a dramatic point of view it’s always more powerful if your protagonist and antagonist have something that connects them other than ‘I don’t like you’. Now they have a history. It gives me as a dramatist so much more to work with. There’s all this stuff going on, and that gives you something that an actor like Liev can sink his teeth into.”
Fiddling about with the complex backgrounds to such characters, while trying to stay within the limits prescribed by the franchise and the comic book universe, and at the same time not to disappoint the fanbase, doesn’t worry Hood particularly:
“I’m offering a version of the Wolverine myth inspired by my stuff. There are many writers who have tackled the Wolverine story over decades, with different illustrators — one minute he’s in leather, then he’s in yellow spandex, now he’s in jeans and a T-shirt. So the holy grail of the perfect Wolverine story does not exist, cannot exist. He’s mythic.”