By TRexx / 00:09, 24 February 2006 / General Genre/SciFi

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John Bruno, writer and director for several episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, was the visual effects supervisor for some high-profile feature films -- including AVP: Alien Vs. Predator, Titanic, Batman Returns, Terminator 2: 3D, and The Abyss. Now Bruno has turned his considerable VFX talent toward Marvel's upcoming X-Men 3: The Last Stand.

On a recent visit to the movie set, Comic Book Resources had the opportunity to ask Bruno about what fans can look forward to in X3...

CBR: Were there things in the first two [X-Men] films that maybe didn't meet your standards and you thought you could improve upon?

John Bruno: Our approach is to start with whatever everybody knows, and see if we can enhance it a little bit. We're not altering things entirely. For example, we're going to try to make the rays from Cyclops' visor a little more visceral, a little more realistic looking. But we do have all these new characters too. We have Beast, who, in the books, is supposed to be very agile. So we have Kelsey Grammer out there -- who's freezing [laughs] -- so we'll be adding some moves based on some style that's described in the books of what he has to do, and that'll be digital. But we have done visual digital scans of every member of the cast, in case they have to do something that's impossible. We don't even know what that is yet, but we're ready.

What about Beast? Was there ever any thought of going all-CG with the character?

Doing CG with Beast is basically only when we can't get physical stunts to do what he needs to do. There's some specific things that he does -- he has some trademark "moves" that he does in the comic. Well, that will have to be CG, because it would hurt somebody if we had to do that. We try to get as much practical as possible, so we'll start something, take it over in CG, and finish it in reality.

How are you creating the acrobatics of Beast?

We have a guide that was sent to us from Marvel. For Beast, it's some patented "move" that he does. He stands on his hands and spins his legs. They just sent us a reference to that from the animated series. There's so much reference material; we're trying to incorporate that into what we can do. We don't want it to be a cartoon, so we basically have to judge as we shoot things live-action -- "Can we get in and out of those with some interesting animated CG action?"

We've been told that the opening of the movie contains a "groundbreaking" effect. Can you tell us about it?

The opening scene of the movie takes place in 1985 with Magneto -- Dr. Lensherr -- and Charles Xavier going to meet Jean Grey, so they have to be twenty years younger. So we just filmed them normally, and we have a company that has come up with this [special visual effects] technique. We've already seen the first scene -- we actually took them back [in appearance of their age] five years, ten years and thirty years -- thirty years was really creepy. [Laughs]

All the references as far as Xavier [Patrick Stewart] come from Star Trek: The Next Generation. We studied what he looked like twenty years ago, and Ian McKellen gave us some photographs of him as an actor in England twenty years ago as well. And what we've gotten back is absolutely spectacular, and hasn't been seen in a film previous to this.

See the complete Q&A with John Bruno at Comic Book Resources News.

Also, IESB has a multi-part report from their time on the X3 lot. Set Visit Part 1 is online, with a new gallery of hi-res production stills.