James Mangold Explains How Richard Donner's SUPERMAN Influenced LOGAN
If you've seen Logan, then you know that director James Mangold and Hugh Jackman put their hearts and souls into telling this story. Logan might actually go down as one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. It's just such a beautiful yet brutal story that touches the soul.
I know there are a lot of other films that influenced Mangold in the development of it including westerns like Shane. But in a recent interview with Empire, Mangold revealed another surprising film that inspired him... Richard Donner's classic film Superman. The director explained why that is:
"Richard Donner’s Superman was extremely human to me – a different tone to Logan by far, but still. Those beautifully-written scenes by Robert Benton between him and Lois Lane on the terrace, the beautiful humanity and simplicity of those scenes, and the lyrical joy of being swept in the air by a god who also happens to have a crush on [her], the contradictions in all of that are beautiful to me.”
I can see how he might have translated the beautiful humanity aspects of the film in Logan, especially those wonderful scenes between Jackman and Patrick Stewart. He went on to talk about how another film he was working on with Christian Bale that was canceled drove him to making Logan. He said:
"After I finished The Wolverine, I was going to make a detective film called The Deep Blue Goodbye with Christian Bale. I had spent the previous two years in Marvel mode and I was really looking forward to escape. Fourteen days before we started shooting, Christian tore the ACL in his knee and could not perform, so the movie got cancelled. That was a dark film and a journey into the abyss. I was broken-hearted over that film not happening, and I think I brought a lot of that inward ambition from that movie to this.”
It's interesting to hear what led Mangold to creating this comic book movie masterpiece and learn about what films influenced him, like Superman.