Set Visit: Interview with New Mutants director Josh Boone

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

A few miles outside of Boston, Massachusetts is the Medfield State Hospital, an insane asylum originally built in 1892. No longer used for its primary purposes for well over a decade, the creepy campus was repurposed to serve as the filming location for almost the entire 51-day shoot of the X-Men related comic adaptation, THE NEW MUTANTS.

The secluded defunct hospital definitely seems like an appropriate setting for the kind of movie that director Josh Boone set out to make. Although his breakthrough came from adapting the teen drama THE FAULT IN OUR STARS, Boone is a hardcore fan of horror movies, Marvel comics and Stephen King (he has adaptations of the author's work on his plate).

Those influences clearly informed this feature version of the superpowered teens, which Boone directed from a script by himself and writing partner (and lifelong friend) Knate Gwaltney.

(NOTE: This set visit took place in 2017, before Disney's acquisition of Fox and the movie's continued release delays.)

On the movie's horror influences:

Josh Boone: "I do love [A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3] DREAM WARRIORS. [NEW MUTANTS] is very much a "rubber reality" movie for the first 75% of the movie and then it becomes… something else. It sort of follows the logic of those early Wes Craven movies, and Stephen King, less in terms of the adaptations and more in terms of the books. The trick he always played that makes his stuff work so well is that he keeps his stuff grounded and credible with the characters so that when the supernatural stuff is introduced, you go with it because you care so much about the characters."

"With this movie, there's a lot of little nods and homages to other horror movies. A lot of it is built on every character having a 'nightmare sequence' so you'll get a different flavor and a little 'mini-movie' for all the characters."

On the development flexibility:

"[Fox] were so emboldened by DEADPOOL and LOGAN, but I also can't believe they're letting us make this! Like, do they know how fucked up this is? We're trying to make something that will make you scream as much as grab your heart. "

"When we went to tell Fox we wanted to do this movie, we made them a comic book PDF that pitched a trilogy of [NEW MUTANTS] films where each one was its own unique kind of horror movie. The first one is a supernatural horror movie — I won't say what the others are but they're all their own horror movie each time."

On using practical effects:

"I still feel like now when you watch a lot of comic book movies, your eyes glaze over because you're like 'okay, they're gonna fight for 40 minutes.'"

"We came to this location, we wanted to avoid that 'CGI sheen' and wanted to make visual effects in a real world."

On the time period:

"In the early drafts we were in the 80s universe with Professor X and Storm, but the decision after APOCALYPSE was not to set them in the past. They wanted to move it all up to present-day, but it didn't really matter because we're in such an isolated location without wi-fi or phones that it may as well be the 80s in terms of the setting. It didn't change our story much. In some ways it made it better because it's able to be its own thing. More like NEW MUTANTS BEGINS."

On the Demon Bear and the fear element:

"We really took the characters we loved from the comic and put them into our version [of the comic story] for the movie. The comics would just be another X-Men movie. It was when Bill [Sienciewicz] took over their art [in mid-80s New Mutants comics] that it became more surreal and horror-driven. I just knew we always wanted to do the Demon Bear story. "

"When the characters go fight that Demon Bear, there's a couple of different levels of reality going on at the same time. We wanted to do something that felt different."

On his religious past:

"I was raised by crazy evangelical Christians, I read The Stand when I was 12 and had to hide my copy in a hole under the box spring of my bed. My parents found my stash and burned them in the fireplace. I'm going to make The Stand after this and it's so weird to think that I'm gonna make the one my mom burned. I try to tell her that she didn't realize it's like the most Christian horror novel ever written [laughter]."

"We've dealt more with Christian iconography in this movie than was even in the comics [with Rahne] because we grew up in it. And I'm an atheist now on my best day but I still think all that stuff is interesting and I still feel it whether I believe in it now or not. So it kind of ties into all the things we grew up with."

On aiming at a certain demographic:

"Every time kids see a comic book movie, it's like they're seeing 50-year-old Iron Man or 40-year-old Captain America. I loved the new Spider-Man because it actually had kids in it!"

"We wanted this to be a movie for misfits and outcasts, which is sort of every teenager who feels that way inside. A movie for the rebels or troubled. They deal with problems in this that haven't been touched in comic book movies before."