DEADPOOL Filmmakers Talk Breaking The Fourth Wall, Gratuitous Gore, and More

It's hard to believe fans will be able to actually watch a live-action Deadpool film in theaters in less than two months, but the wait is finally almost over. 20th Century Fox released a pair of new trailers on Christmas Day, and director Tim Miller and producer Simon Kinberg spoke with Empire Magazine to talk a little more about the characters in the film. They revealed something interesting: the fact that they released those trailers on Christmas Day isn't the only Christmas-related aspect of the movie.

Kinberg: I guess I would say - without ruining anything - it’s Christmas for [Deadpool]. But his character isn’t necessarily connected to all of the reality of our world. But we did plan the film to be a heartwarming holiday classic - we had to work Christmas in there!

It’s a part of the plot, I don’t think we should ruin it, but there’s so many people that are on his naughty list that he is hunting down for reasons we can keep mysterious and then you can discover when you watch the movie. But yeah, it’s the equivalent of a serial killer or FBI agent’s wall of targets and we watch him go after them.

Sounds cool to me. Next up, we've all seen superhero suit-up montages countless times, but Miller wanted this one to stand out:

Well you know, honestly the suit-up sequence wasn’t something we had in the original plan and there was just so much pressure. I kind of felt like, ‘fuck I’ve seen the suit-up sequence a thousand times, I don’t want to do another suit-up sequence’. But then, we found this way to make it different and more Deadpool and you see him, in the movie you’ll see him during this little montage we have, it’ll kind of progress from the beginning to the end of his evolution and costume design. And it makes it very Deadpool and fucking cool. But yeah, he’s a self-made man, it’s not like he had money and he can go and hire the best superhero tailors out there. He’s got to do it himself.

The director mentioned one element of the character we definitely won't see in the feature film (Deadpool's schizophrenia) and spoke about how he dealt with depicting the character breaking the fourth wall:

I didn’t have any trouble with it at all. I guess if you didn’t know the character and feel like that was the right way to handle him, it could be a little difficult to figure out where and when to deploy it, but because I knew Deadpool did that and I was comfortable with it - it was one of the things I liked about him - we tried to do it. I mean, it was built in from the get-go, so it was kind of planned. We did go back when we did some additional photography. We liked it so much that we got even a little more. And we tried to use it more for an opportunity to just lay down exposition on people which I think is cool. Because you could use that as a crutch, but I don’t think we did at all. I'm sure I'm going to get skewered by fans for one thing or another. But he’s really complicated and there’s stuff we couldn’t - like the schizophrenia is a big thing in the comics, but you couldn't really explore that in the film. It was just too much to load into an origin story, an introduction.

Miller also spoke a bit about the gore we'll see in the movie:

Just on the note of 'gory', I’m not a fan of gratuitous gore. I think it’s appropriate, so we did more than I think the studio was comfortable with, even for an R, but I don’t think it’s going to really ruin the movie for people that are uncomfortable with it. Maybe a little bit if you have a low tolerance. But there’s a fight in the second act that I think we have a couple of shots for, where Deadpool and Ajax fight in this burning building that is one of my favourite moments. It’s a great action piece and it’s also a really amazing character moment both for the character of Deadpool but for Wade as well, in the movie. And it was a really terrible two days shooting it, but man, I fucking loved it. It’s just a great scene.

The whole piece is worth reading if you're a Deadpool fan, but if you'd like to read what the filmmaker had to say about Negasonic Teenage Warhead's character and her powers in the film, click here. Deadpool blasts into theaters on February 12th, 2016.