AS befits a director whose favourite films are westerns and samurai movies, James Mangold has a soft spot for troubled warriors.
Sometimes they do battle with songs, as in his Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, or a gun and shield, witness a never-better Sylvester Stallone in Cop Land. In his new movie, The Wolverine, the hero's weapons of choice are retractable claws and a burning sense of injustice.
Mangold says he was aiming for "a darker, more intense" Wolverine. For that to happen, some things had to go, such as the quipping that has become a staple of the comic book movie genre.
"I wanted the tone of a Clint Eastwood movie with Wolverine in it. Clint Eastwood doesn't exist in an episode of Friends, he can't make a (glib) remark every time something happens, so in this movie Wolverine didn't."
Mangold came to the franchise after the lukewarm reception afforded 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine. That gave him more freedom to take bold moves, such as locating the action in Japan and using Japanese dialogue and actors in supporting roles to Hugh Jackman's Logan, aka The Wolverine. "It's a world cinema now, I think we are all used to different languages being spoken, and there's a gigantic Asian market for movies. But I also think it makes it more of a movie, that you are dropping Logan into a world where he can't understand what everyone's saying, it forces the images to become more important." In any case, he adds: "I don't know how to make a movie that's actually more about selling lunchboxes than about being a movie."
Mangold worked with Jackman in the 2002 fantasy comedy Kate & Leopold. He hasn't changed since those days, says Mangold, despite the Oscar nomination (for Les Miserables) and the international telephone number salary.
"Hugh became successful and a star a little later in life than most and there is a great sense of gratitude in him. He feels like a lucky man and he brings that to set every day."
In Girl, Interrupted and Walk the Line, Mangold won a reputation as a director who could craft strong female roles and guide actresses towards Oscar-winning performances. Both Angelina Jolie (Girl) and Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line) won Academy Awards in Mangold's movies. In Wolverine, similarly, it is women who come to the aid of the male hero. That, too, bucks a trend.
"One of the reasons that women tend to be more shut out in the superhero game is that it's a lingering after effect of the male bias in comic books. Most of these comic book characters were created decades ago, so even though they have been modernised their sex hasn't changed, the male-centric nature of a lot of these worlds hasn't changed."
Mangold was born in New York in December 1963. He talks like a native New Yorker, much swagger, little hesitancy. But there is a strong Scottish connection there. When the young Mangold was studying at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in the 1980s his mentor was Alexander Mackendrick, the director of Whisky Galore!, The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success.
Though born in Boston in 1912, Mackendrick's parents were Scottish. At the age of seven, after his father died, "Sandy" was sent back to Scotland to be brought up. Among his almae maters were Hillhead High School and Glasgow School of Art.
Ask Mangold about Mackendrick, who died in 1993, and it is like rewinding a life and pressing play on a golden moment. "He was like a father to me," he says, visibly softening. "It was a huge relationship in my life. I have a huge debt to Sandy and love him as a man."
It is rare, says Mangold, that you go into a film school and meet a director who is the real deal. "It's not that teachers who haven't directed a picture don't have things to share, they do, but what Sandy demonstrated for me was the power of passion, the kind of effort required to both hold together and evangelise for a production, to create a north star that everyone will follow."
A gentle soul? "He was, a very sweet man, but a savage tongue. He was tough on your material but he was tough on his own. There wasn't a single film of his that he considered a success. He would describe most of his films as failures or middleweight ... he was equally tough on himself. He taught you how to argue for what you believed in. Sometimes I disregarded him and sometimes I realised five, 10 years later how wrong I was. There is never a day he isn't over my shoulder."
It was Mackendrick who told Mangold to study acting for a year, the better to know how to walk the walk and talk the talk when directing. It seems to have been invaluable, as the Oscars for Jolie and Witherspoon show. Then there was perhaps one of Mangold's biggest coups: directing Sylvester Stallone towards a picture stealing performance in 1997's Cop Land – no mean feat when your co-stars are Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel.
I'm expecting Mangold to say, in the way directors usually do, that he always knew Sly had it in him, that he fought to get him in the role.
"I didn't want him in my movie," he laughs. He told the agent he thought it was a terrible idea.
"He said why. I go, 'He's a joke, he's like a Planet Hollywood jacket-wearing, entourage-driving ... he hasn't made a good movie in years.' I love Sly by the way, he's a friend to this day, but I felt like I would be nothing but a mockery to my cool friends to be making a movie with Sly."
The agent told him to tell this to Stallone's face, so the two met over dinner in New York. What he found was "an incredibly intelligent man". Mangold changed his mind, but attached 13 conditions, including that Stallone would have to gain 40-50lbs, he couldn't change the script, and he could not leave the set early. Not one rule was broken.
Even at that dinner at the Four Seasons he felt Mackendrick's presence. "Being truthful is the greatest lesson that Sandy bequeathed me about acting. Just put it on the table. There is nothing I was saying to Sly at that dinner that he didn't know, hadn't read and didn't feel himself."
But not everyone would take such honesty well, I suggest. "No, but you'd be surprised. Not everyone needs their ring kissed."
Mangold went on from Cop Land to direct some of the biggest names working today, from Tom Cruise (Knight and Day) to Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in the western 3:10 to Yuma. His director's chair has been the best seat in the house, he says.
"If first row seats in the best theatre in London or Broadway puts you 20 feet away then I've been four feet away from some of the greatest actors of our time as they are snarling, ripping down scenery, tearfully confessing."
So all those troubled warriors are really good time guys after all.
The Wolverine opens today.
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