Yet it is entirely compelling.
Slowly, she becomes engrossed in a story of stark land and even starker heroes.
Theres good, theres evil, and there are the children caught in between.
In fact, if shed just squint, she could see echoes of the very movie shes living in.
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Its been an important movie to me all my life, Mangold enthusiastically says regardingShane.
Its visually beautiful, but its very naturalistic.
It doesnt have a cast of thousands, yet their world means everything to us.
And I think the thing we wanted most different was tone.
For Mangold, it was the aforementioned Westerns, as well as choices as eclectic asLittle Miss Sunshine.
After all, what else is the story of a dysfunctional family on the road?
And into his life, and Charles, comes this little girl.
And that would be almost the greatest set of challenges I could throw down at Logans feet.
Mangold has a long history of mixing genres and tones throughout his career.
He even adapted Susanna Kaysens memoir about a young woman forced into a 1968 mental institution withGirl, Interrupted.
Im a big fan of keeping the story clean.
A circumscribed universe, a very clear world, and not getting distracted by too much, Mangold asserts.
Suddenly you have characters with an arc of six minutes.
For actual dedicated screen time, its less than Elmer Fudd gets in a Warner Bros. cartoon.
Eventually, he contends, its only a taste of storytelling.
One of the things I did was get us out in the world, explains Mangold.
This is probably the first in many of these movies that hasnt been done predominantly on soundstage.
A lot of those Westerns have disappeared.
A lot of them were cheesy, but there were some great ones.
I think that time will perform the same weeding process.
Audiences will get their own chance to plug intoLoganwhen the movie opens on Friday, March 3.
