Bryan Singer on X-Men: First Class and its characters.

IGN Movies has an excellent interview with X-MEN: FIRST CLASS producer Bryan Singer. The mastermind explains his ideas behind the films and explores the characters and their place in the film.

Why he chose the title X-MEN: FIRST CLASS…

“It was initially a title I liked. I knew that there was exploration of doing a movie based on the First Class comic book, but I thought that to earn that or to get there, it would be interesting to go back to the origin of the X-Men. The formation of the relationship and the schism between Xavier and Magneto. And yet I still liked the title First Class because it reflected that concept every bit as much as the comic it’s based on, so I just decided that I would pursue that story of young Xavier and young Magneto but retain the title First Class as a sort of beginning of the X-Men and they could go from there.”

How he picked the characters for the film.

“You first freak out because you assume that the good ones have already been picked. Then you just pick up the books and start reviewing and researching. I felt like I was back in the late ’90s again, going through all the character histories and biographies and the comic books and graphic novels, and trying not to violate the tableaux but at the same time trying to have mutants that service different aspects of your story. Where their powers move the story forward as opposed to just being there to be cool.”

On the Hellfire Club.

“The Hellfire Club is actually something that [producers] Lauren Shuler Donner and Simon Kinberg had mentioned to me early on. It’s something that we had discussed years ago, to incorporate them into an X-Men film, but we never quite found a way to do so. So Lauren brought it up again and I thought great, because it again plays into the idea of them being underground. Because the whole idea of the Hellfire Club is that they are an underground club, and that’s perfect because we’re dealing with a time when the world doesn’t know that mutants exist. What better villain element than one that exists under the surface of society? And to have the mutants intertwine with the geopolitical events of the time.”

How this film ties into the original trilogy.

“I think the chronology works – there are some liberties, but for the most part, it makes sense. The characters make sense. Which is why Beast and Mystique were the only two I could bring back because you don’t really know how old they are.”

Read more from the interviews at IGN.