James Mangold is one of those directors who's not afraid of a good tweet. Like The Amazing Spider-Man's Marc Webb, Ron Howard (of Ron Howard fame) and co. he's more than happy to share on-set pictures with the world, as his time on **The Wolverine **has proved. Recently, however, he's gone into Twitpic overdrive...
The last three there are ones we've seen before, but now that we've seen the trailer, they hold a lot more interest... But anyway, the new stuff. The first one is of the Bullet Train sequence, the second a shot of the Yakuza attack on the temple, the third a snap of Tao Okamoto (Mariko) at the Yashida research facility and the fourth an alternate angle of the funeral scene.
Of course, a lot more detail is in the trailer - and also in our persnickety trailer breakdown - but it's just plain nice of Mangold to give up these extra-added titbits where many others wouldn't.
As well as these backstage shots, he also released some special photoshoot images for the cast, all in moody black and white. Give them a squizz below if you haven't done so already.
{Wolverine Cast Snaps}
As for the plot, that's best explained by X-producer Hutch Parker, who told us the following in a previous issue of Empire: "We pick up Logan in a very isolated state, full of self-loathing. He is sought out by a young Asian woman (Yukio) for reasons he doesn't fully understand, who is asking him to follow her to Japan where he is meant to reconnect with someone from his past."
"And what you'll come to find is that this is someone he spent prison-time with in Nagasaki. And the legacy of that experience - effectively Logan saved him - is that this man is on his deathbed, and is looking to give him a gift, to thank him for the life he's had."
"But this gift draws Logan into a very complex and very unexpected world within both contemporary Japan and, to some extent, the feudal history of Japan. He's so in isolation, so out of his element. It's a much more powerful distillation of his character than you've seen before."
{The Wolverine}
The Wolverine is out in the UK on July 25, 2013.