X3: Enter the Danger Room
Where the X-Men sharpen their skills.
by Steve Head
April 13, 2006 - They thought about using it in the original X-Men. They tried to go with it in X-Men 2. And now, in X-Men: The Last Stand, you'll finally get to see it: the Danger Room. "This time, it's actually going to be in the movie," says production designer Ed Verreaux. "There's actually going to be a Danger Room sequence. We were able to put it all together, and you get to see it work."
As many of you know, the Danger Room is a high-tech training facility, where the X-Men brush up on their fighting skills. wikipedia.org describes it as being filled with traps, projectile firing devices, and mechanical dangers such as presses and collapsing walls intended to challenge the trainee.
During pre-production on X2, director Bryan Singer envisioned a training sequence for Wolverine. "I worked with Bryan for about five months on the first one, and they had a Danger Room designed then," says Verreaux. "But it wasn't completely built. It kind of came together. We'd built part of the Danger Room inside of the Mansion." But due to budgetary constraints, the sequence was removed from the shooting schedule, and the small Danger Room set was put into storage. "Bryan really wanted to add it, but we just couldn't. There's only so much money."
Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) tries to come to terms with the sudden appearance of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen)
For X3, however, the filmmakers made the Danger Room a top priority. "It was pretty important," says Verreaux. "This time, when we went in to the studio, we said 'We really want to have this! This is an X-Men thing!'"
Considering how important the Danger Room was, the filmmakers realized they needed to take it in a whole new direction. "There was a moment when we pulled the old set out of storage where we were like, that's the Danger Room?," says Verreaux. "It's a very small set. And if we used this, you'd never believe the scene. So we didn't use it. We built another Danger Room."
Verreaux describes the new set as "a big round room," with its key feature being that it will allow more than one X-Men to train within it. "We changed it a little bit because we wanted to open it up, otherwise you don't see as much of the room as you would have seen. The first set, it was really just sort of 'a space.' Not much room. But now [the actors] are doing a bunch of stuff and they're actually all in the space."
That being said, what can Wolverine and the X-Men expect to confront in the Danger Room? "A giant robot," says Verreaux. As the silver robot appears in production paintings, it's seen only from its foot to just below its knee joint. "We're going to see a bit of him. Not a whole lot. But we will see him in the Danger Room sequence, and the X-Men will be fighting against him."
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