Hey folks, Harry here with another on set report from the X-MEN film shooting up in Toronto. Tis a bit funny really. He's describing this exactly as I remember it from the screenplay. And frankly, that's a good sign. The film was almost where it needed to be in the draft I read... It needed some character touchups here and there... and it would be fantastic. Now, like I said... everyone seems a bit down on this project, but ya know... I'm going to calm and cool till we see the costumes... and if the production has good costumes... and the guys and gals look good in them... It'd make one helluva good WIZARD cover soon. Immediately getting a bunch of the fans back on the love love side of this project. Sounds like everything is going pretty smoothly at this point. Here's Sunfire...
On Monday, September 27th I went to the first of two days of filming on the set of the X-MEN in Toronto. This e-mail is my experience, and what I saw on the set. Feel free to post any part of it on your web site.
The scene I was involved with was a flashback scene of a Nazi concentration camp in which the Ian McKellan character of Magneto was introduced (played by a child actor).
The set was right in downtown Toronto. Among some old industrial buildings. It was strategically filmed, because the CN Tower and other landmarks of Toronto's skyline were clearly visible.
The set consisted primararly of a corridor between two of these buildings, and a corridor/courtyard. Both these areas were covered with dumped mud and barbed wire fences.
Playing a Jew (as an extra) we had to walk from one end of this mud-covered corridor to the other, the whole while being drenched by rain machines. The idea was that we had just gotten off from a train, so there was also a smoke machine to give that illusion, at the one end of the corridor.
On the outside of the barb wire were several guards, some with dogs, who yelled at us in German, smoked cigarrettes, and generally just stared at us.
They filmed us with a zoom lense from the end of this corridor, then they built a track outside the fence and filmed a profile shot of us walking by, then they used a Steadicam and they came right into our barb wire walkway and filmed us close-up walking toward the camera.
All of these multiple takes were done in the rain. The mud, however is disguising the asphalt below it, so after several hours, the sucking mud became many large muddy lakes. This will be a point of continuity to watch for in the final edit.
We were dressed in old clothing circa. Poland 1942, however, other extras had to wear striped clothing and have their heads shaved. These guys played the camp's prisoners, that we saw upon exiting the train.
The principal child actor had to have close-up and reaction shots watching these laborourers pulling wheelbarrows and being shouted at.
Near the end of the day, they was a big traumatic scene being filmed where the Jews actually got to the end of the corridor and the old men, women and children were focibly seperated from the young men.
Young men had to go right, all others to the left. They had three cameras going simultaneously on this scene because the X-Men kid (Ian McKellan's character) has his father taken away here.
Anyway, they did a few rehearsals first to get things moving. Things didn't work out well at first. The guards weren't asserting themselves enough, and the 'Jews'were generally too rebellious for the director's liking. He wanted everyone to look scared and apprehensive, and the guards to completely block people who tried to sneak by.
For the first two takes I had a little girl in my arms and just walked around the guards and matrons who were busy with someone else. On the third and last take, the director gave some more instructions to the guards and they grabbed this little girl from me as I walked by and pushed me along.
It is this scene where the Ian McKellan-kid is seperated from his father.
In the middle of this filming the cameras stopped! They thought the director had said 'CUT' but he had actually said something like 'CUT TO ME' or something. When he realized they had stopped filming in the middle of this scene, that had been going flawlessly, he freaked. To his credit, he only freaked for a couple of seconds, the cameraman apologised, then they backed up 15 to 20 of the last people to go past the Nazi checkpoint and re-filmed it again.
I did not attend the second day of filming (having come down with a severe cold thanks to all the rain!) however, on this day apparantly is where the kid shows or discovers his superpowers for the first time. It sounds like a special fx scene: he was supposed to wrap some Nazis up with barb wire, as Magneto controls metal objects with his mind. But, like I said, I wasn't there for it, so I can't confirm it.
Hope you find this interesting.
Sunfire.
