DOUGHERTY TALKS MONSTERS
FANGORIA caught up with Mike Dougherty, who co-wrote the X2 screenplay with his sometimes-writing partner Dan Harris, and we asked him about the ‘horror’ aspects of X2 as well as his own upcoming horror projects.
‘That’s one of the best things about [X2],’ enthuses Dougherty. ‘I’m still a big FANGO lover. I think that’s what we brought to it. It has a very dark edge. It’s a very creepy movie. I didn’t jump in thinking we were going to go in that direction, but I’m just a horror nut, so I think a lot of those things just kind of came in almost unconsciously. We have the ‘creepy little girl,’ we added Deathstrike.’
Lady Deathstrike, as played by Kelly Hu, is one of the darker mutants in the film with her long claws (and equally long silencesonly one line of dialogue in the entire film). Such a nemesis, Dougherty feels, was necessary to the movie.
‘That was one of the first things we decided had to be in the film,’ explains Dougherty. ‘We wanted to create this femme fatale and we wanted Wolverine to have somebody to fight. There was a moment where we realized Wolverine just needed a good adversary in the third act and we didn’t have anybody. We knew that he needed to fight somebody who also represented everything he could’ve become if he hadn’t escaped from Weapon X. I threw out Deathstrike and [director] Bryan [Singer] was like, ‘The chick with the claws? Can we make sure she heals like Wolverine?’ Yeah, absolutely! She didn’t just become the woman that he fights in the movie, she became this philosophical alter ego. The more advanced version of Wolverine.’
Dougherty also has an upcoming horror project called TRICK OR TREAT, partially based on his animation work that was in development as a horror series for MTV (you can see some of this work at his website). As for whether or not Stan Winston, who is attached to produce and direct TRICK OR TREAT, will tackle it after WRONG TURN comes out, Dougherty isn’t certain.
‘They have a slew of things on their plate and TRICK OR TREAT is just one of them,’ Dougherty admits. ‘I’ve always told myself I just want to do one classic horror movie before I die. I just want to be careful about what it is. After a film like this, you want to be careful and choosy about what you do. [I] don’t want to be the writer who grabs every single project after making their big debut and spreads himself too thin and [has people] thinking, ‘Well, maybe we over-estimated him.’ ‘
X2 opens super-ultra-wide this Friday, May 2.
Courtesy of Fangoria
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