“Where do you stand?”
FAITH talks to Ralph Winter, producer of X-Men 3
by Elizabeth Solsburg

Ralph Winter is the producer of X-Men 3, the third in a blockbuster trilogy of films based on the Marvel Comics series about mutants. FAITH spoke with him about his movies and about the way he lives his own Christian commitment through them.

FAITH: What can you tell me about the movie that is exciting and different, compared to X-Men 2? Are you going to be able to top that?

Ralph Winter: Absolutely, we’re going to top that. We have a better story. We have a new director, so we have a new chef in the kitchen with the same ingredients. All the cast is back. This is a capper to the first two movies, concluding these stories about the battle of values and action that Prof. Xavier and Magneto have back and forth. So this brings it to a climax, a culmination.

I know one of the themes in the movie is about a “cure” for the mutant gene. This seems to fit in with a number of current concerns held by disabilities awareness groups.

We address that in the movie. Curing mutants goes to a long-standing argument about one of the underlying themes of the movie regarding tolerance. Is being a mutant something that can be “cured”? Is being of a different color something that can be “cured”?

For example, Magneto was a survivor of the Nazi extermination camps. We did a flashback in the first movie to show that he was marked. He was scheduled for extermination, only because he was a Jew. Should he be cured of being Jewish?

It gets to be a very emotional, dramatic argument and you can fill in the blanks there with almost anything. I think that’s one of the reasons the first two movies have resonated with audiences. And this won’t disappoint in that same way.

Usually, comic books have a very defined good and evil. In the X-Men stories, the reader or viewer can feel sympathy for the position of the villain of the piece, Magneto, since he is striking back at those who would subjugate mutants.

Exactly! That’s what makes great drama. I think that’s what makes great movies – where you, as an audience member, struggle with the protagonist and the antagonist about what they believe in and what they value. You know, hopefully the resolution of that is clear, but still, we need to realize that our heroes need to make sacrifices to get to that resolution. And isn’t life that way? Life is not black and white.
That’s true of great literature and great lives. Speaking of which, that leads us into my next question – I understand you’re a very committed Christian.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you’ve lived out your faith through your career?

Well, first of all, I don’t see it as a dichotomy. I don’t see it as something I do Monday to Friday and there’s something else I live on Saturday and Sunday. I feel that storytelling – movies – are probably the most powerful form of communication and influence in our culture today. So I feel fortunate that I can be involved in that because I love it – I love telling stories, I love producing movies. I love seeing audiences react to a television show or a theater piece or a movie and get emotionally moved by it.

And, you know, as a Christian, I feel like I’ve been chosen – I don’t know why. I’ve been called – not sure why – into this business to help reflect God’s love in whatever that might be. Part of that is in the actual stories that get told and in the way they get told. That’s about being salt and light.

It’s also about being part of the process – showing that there’s a way to treat people with respect and pay a fair wage and make the process enjoyable and reflect God’s love along the way. That’s almost more important than the end product – the journey as Christians. It’s what it’s all about.

There does seem to be a religious theme running through a number of recent “comic book” movies, such as Spiderman and the X-Men series. But it doesn’t hit you over the head.

Yeah, I’ve made that mistake in the past. I made the first Left Behind movie and I wasn’t happy with the results. Because you can’t beat people over the head. Nobody wants to go to a movie with an agenda or where they’re preached at. That’s not what stories and movies do best. They do best at entertaining. And if there are values the hero has that you want to communicate, then you have to show that in an entertaining way and show it by what the hero does, not what the hero says. That’s what we strive to do.

What about Left Behind was a disappointment?

The people who were controlling the purse strings were more interested in it becoming an evangelical tool than they were in telling the story that I was attracted to, which was, “Hey, here’s what the Bible says about how the world’s going to end.” And if we can identify with our character and the potential struggle they go through at the end, maybe people will want to dig in, learn more and go to the original text to find out more about what the Bible actually says about how the world’s going to finish. Again, it points to the fact that the journey we’re on as Christians should be about relationship and process, not about trying to convert people through a movie.

I see that you’re making a movie about the book, The Purpose-Driven Life. How are you going to make that kind of book into a movie?

Yes, I’m pursuing that with Rick Warren, who’s a friend. The easy answer is that you make it like Crash; take a bunch of vignettes and put them together. There are other examples of that, like Grand Canyon. I think the trick is to make a narrative story out of the principles in the book. That allows even more creativity with the writers and directors. We’re in the process of putting together the basic agreements and we’ll move down that path.

As the producer of a movie, what exactly is your role and how does it differ from that of the executive producer or associate producer?

Somebody has to be responsible to pull everything together, somebody has to be the champion, somebody has to be where the buck stops, somebody has to wave the flag from front to back and get the movie made. That’s why the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences awards the best picture award to the producer – not the executive producer, not the co-producer, not the associate producer.

The definition of a producer is clear in motion pictures, but the definitions of the other roles are not clear and specific. It gets a little fuzzy. The producer may find the money, the material, the writer, the director, helping with the cast, supervising the budget and the day-to-day manufacturing of the movie, the marketing, the distribution – all of those things are what a producer does. An executive producer is someone who played a very significant role – maybe they brought funding, maybe they brought cast members to the party. They may have found the material. It’s a way to reward someone.

Sometimes I’ve come into a movie as a “hired gun” to handle some specific item, and then I have the title of executive producer.

How do you choose your projects?

A variety of things. It’s about the people – about who’s going to direct it. Who’s going to distribute the movie – is it a studio or is it independent? Is it financed? There are a lot of things that go into choosing a project.

I know you contribute to Act I. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah! Barbara Nicolosi runs that – she’s great. They’ve done a terrific job of trying to inform talented people of faith who want to work in Hollywood what the standards are, how to do that, how to integrate faith and skill in the marketplace. Barbara’s done a fantastic job of pulling together a faculty that helps students of all ages hear some real-world stories, as well as tools and tips – basics of how to navigate those waters if you’re a writer. I think she’s doing a phenomenal job of connecting working professionals with those who want to break in, but doing it in a way that says, “We’re going to come at this from a position of faith, because that’s going to inform the way we work and we want it to inform the stuff that we write.”

That’s a great approach – because you can’t just make biblical movies like the Passion over and over.

Right. That’s sort of the highest form of it. One of the reasons the Passion was so successful is that you have an Academy-Award-winning writer and director on it. I think, to me, that makes a lot of sense – rather than all of us trying to go back and tell the original story repeatedly.

And in a movie like X-Men 2, people saw a character like Nightcrawler, a person of faith who looked like a devil with a tail. But Brian (the director) did it in such a way so as not to denigrate Nightcrawler. His friends didn’t make fun of him; they respected him. He quoted psalms when he was in trouble – he prayed when he was in trouble. His faith was informing his choices along the way. And that’s a credible character in movies. It’s something we can do in comic books – that came right out of the comic book.

I understand you convinced Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart to change a plot line in X-Men.

Yes, that was in the first movie and it involved the violence of showing Magneto actually killing someone. It sort of upped the stakes – it’s a common technique in storytelling that if I kill someone, it shows that I’m serious about what I’m doing and that there are significant stakes.

And I had an opportunity with Patrick and Ian to say, “Do you really want your kid, your family, your friends to see a movie where the first thing Magneto does is to kill a cop? Isn’t there a better way to do this?” So I enlisted their support to challenge Brian Singer on it and Brian came up with an incredibly clever idea, which was to show Magneto, who can control metal, actually controlling the bullet. It was spinning right in front of the cop’s head. He achieved both – the stakes are high and I will fire the gun, but I don’t know how long I can hold off the bullet.

So, challenged with those limits which come from what we really want to say to the culture about who our character is, Brian came up with an even better idea.

Our response is to point out the consequences of those things and to ask questions. I felt good about the way that resolved.

So, who’s your favorite comic book character?

I like Wolverine. Maybe because I’m working on the movie right now, I feel like he’s a character that you’d want to be around. He knows when to fight, he knows when not to fight. There’s a sense of justice in what he does. There’s a softer, more tender side to him underneath the rough exterior. He does care about his fellow mutants on the journey. I like being with that character; I want to see what that character does next in more X-Men movies. I want to see what he does and I want to be in that world with that character.
That’s what draws me to Indiana Jones, James Bond, Captain Kirk. They are movie heroes who transport us to another world. I think when we do the best job of that, we want to go be with Maximus in Gladiator because he values the kinds of things that I want to value in my life.

Anything else you’d like to say about the movie?

We do feel as if it’s the best of the three in terms of the story we’ve created. All of our actors, by the third movie, know who their characters are. They now have a chance to go deeper and they’re not struggling to understand the motivation of their characters. We’re hitting on all cylinders, which is pretty exciting.

And you’ve got some new characters, too.

Yes, we do. Kelsey Grammer as Beast is phenomenal. Ben Foster plays Angel, Vinnie Jones joins Magneto’s brotherhood as one of the bad guys. We have lots of interesting new characters and a deepening of our existing characters.

One of the things we’re promoting on billboards and the sides of buses is, “Take a stand.” Where are you going to stand in this battle?

There’s action in this movie, but there’s also some serious thinking that you can engage in as an adult.

Anything else?

Just that my grandparents used to live in Lansing. They both worked for GM companies and I remember visiting them in the early ‘60s. It was cool – it was fun