In this week's Empire Podcast, the star (Hugh Jackman) and director (James Mangold) of The Wolverine talked all about the new Japanese adventures of James "Logan" Howlett, but they didn't touch on the very exciting credit sting at the end of the movie. Fortunately, we saved a small snippet of our Mangold interview on that topic and saved it for today, now that you've had a chance to watch the film.
Below is the AudioBoo upload of the snippet - the full podcast is on SoundCloud, but for smaller files, AudioBoo is where it's at - and a transcription of about 80% of the audio file's contents. Needless to say, if you haven't seen the film, click away now. The spoiler horn has officially been sounded, ladies and gentlemen.
Where did the idea for The Wolverine’s credit sting come from?
"It came from an idea that we had. [We being] myself and Simon Kinberg, who is writing [X-Men: Days Of Future Past] and is a friend of mine from The University Of Columbia who I’ve known a long while. I liked the idea of doing an end piece, but as you may have read in interviews, I’m not a fan of all of them.
"Meaning, because I was trying to make a more serious film, I didn’t want to make an end sting or an Easter Egg in the tail that somehow took the piss out of the movie. Sometimes I think they border on being on the edge of outtake-y silly and something about that always seems wrong to me. You’ve worked for a year and a half creating a reality, and now you’re just going to do a Saturday Night Live sketch at the end of it?
"So what we came up with was something quite earnest, a kind of precursor thing for where things are going, and I had the added thrill of directing Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the scene along with Hugh Jackman."
Patrick Stewart does some pretty impressive wheelchair work…
"Sometimes as a director, you just assume things are going to work out. (laughs) I get to the set and I start arranging extras in these frozen positions, and I realise the best shot – it’s a good looking shot, I’d say – is this side tracking shot where I’m going to bring Patrick in through this forest of frozen airport patrons, but he’s got [a bit of] an Olympic slalom to do in that electric wheelchair, and there are no tracks, no special effects guy helping him – that’s just Patrick Stewart using his joystick. And by the way, doing lines as he came to a stop, after weaving his way through a bunch of extras – who aren’t insured for being run over by wheelchairs – so you’re not alone in thinking that Patrick Stewart should be playing video games in his free time."
**The Wolverine **is out now. **X-Men: Days Of Future Past **is out May 22, 2014, and you can find out more about it in the latest issue of **Empire **(also out now).