Date: February 23, 2006

Source: IESB

Author: Stephanie Sanchez

Set Visit Part 1: X-Men: The Last Stand

After two successful trips to the box office and over $700 million in box office receipts, the X-Men are ready for a third outing. This time new faces including the Beast, Angel, Director Brett Ratner and many others join them.

The trailer release has the movie community buzzing. Glimpses of explosions, cars being thrown, and doors flying off their hinges are enough to get anyone going. When I saw it on set along with a few other journalists and Wolverine himself, there was a round of applause and a second showing due to our overwhelming excitement.

Although previous X-Men director Bryan Singer could not return, luckily Brett Ratner is behind the wheel. Showing his true ability to deal with action (Rush Hour) and human emotion (Family Man) he is the perfect candidate to put behind this third episode of the X-Men films.

X-Men was brought to the screen through Bryan Singer's vision. He made us empathize and relate to each character through their trials and tribulations. He laid a solid foundation for Ratner to build upon.

Ratner has gone on record stating that he is completely respectful of the back-story and vision that Singer achieved. Like Singer, Ratner has a great amount of respect for the source material. He plans to build upon that foundation and bring those characters even closer to our hearts, while still kicking some ass!

Singer is equally respectful of Ratner. In an interview with the IESB he told us that although he misses everyone from the mutant family he is quite comfortable that the third film is in the hands of a good friend. See the video interview here.

Also in recent interviews with the IESB (click on links to see interviews) , Avi Arad, Simon Kinberg and Tom Rothman shared a common opinion. They are in agreement that this is the biggest and best of the X-Men films. It has the biggest action along with the biggest heart.

Now that I am able to release the details of my visit to the set of X-Men: The Last Stand late last year in Vancouver I can tell you that the work being done is nothing short of "Astonishing."

I will be breaking this report up into 3 parts. This first part will include the Q&A held with Brett Ratner, Sir Ian McKellan, Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry on the set on a freezing cold snowy Vancouver evening where we talked about X-Men thus far.

Part two we visit Kelsey Grammar in the make-up trailer while he goes through the tedious process of Beast transformation. He talks to us about how he approached this part and how he feels about playing the most endearing mutant ever created.

In the last part, I will tell you about the scene we saw being shot with Magneto and Wolverine and also our conversation with visual effects supervisor John Bruno who gives us an interesting insight into how certain scenes were shot and other cool tidbits.

Talk about a really cool evening. Imagine Ratner, McKellan, Jackman and Berry sitting down on the set to tell us all about their experiences and thoughts on The Last Stand. Even though our brains were frozen, we still got a few good questions in for these guys. Read on!

Continue to page 2

X-Men Set Visit Part 1: Page 1) Page 2) Page 3) Page 4) Page 5) Page 6) Page 7)

X-Men 3 Set Visit part 2: Coming Soon

X-Men 3 Set Visit part 3: Coming Soon

X-Men 3 Production Stills: Click Here

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