Interview with Wolverine Screenwriter, David Benioff

The following is an extract of an interview "Coming Soon" conducted with David Benioff, screenwriter for X-Men Origins: Wolverine...

CS: I've read a couple pages of the "Wolverine" script which has to be about a year old. Have you stayed involved with that up until they started shooting?
Benioff: I haven't been working on "Wolverine" since... I mean, it's been a while since the last draft, but they brought on other writers starting in like September or something, so I haven't seen whatever the shooting draft is, so I don't know exactly what it is. I think they're supposed to start shooting in January in Australia, but I have not been really in the loop on that one anymore.

CS: I'm a comic book fan myself, so did you spend a lot of time reading comics and trying to distill his origin, which is not exactly the easiest one to adapt. You got "Kite Runner" down to two hours but Wolverine has had so many origins over the years. There's a lot of them out there.
Benioff: Yeah, it will be interesting, because I know that changes have been made, so I don't know how they're handling... I don't know what's exactly in the present draft of the script, so I'm curious to see it when it gets made, but yes, I grew up a huge comic book fan. Where I grew up on Yorkville and 86th on the East End, there was a comic store called Action Comics on like 84th and 2nd, and I was there every week. Wolverine was always my favorite character, because at that time at least, most of the superheroes were still these square-jawed righteous do-gooders, and then along comes this cigar-chomping, hard-drinking rowdy little Canadian guy and I just loved him from the beginning. It was the one comic book adaptation that I always wanted to do, and I really went after it. I went into Marvel and just really pursued it aggressively.

[POSSIBLE SPOILER] CS: I love the opening scene where he's a kid being getting picked on by the bigger kids…
Benioff: Yeah, me too. That's my scene and I don't know if it's in the present draft or not. That was mine, but I don't know if that will be in the actual movie. [SPOILER ENDS]