Back in 2013, director Bryan Singer and his crew worked to put together arguably the best scene so far in the X-Men franchise: Quicksilver’s race around the kitchen in the Pentagon in X-Men: Days of Future Past. The sequence got such a huge response that the filmmakers immediately promised something even bigger and better with the character in the sequel, X-Men: Apocalypse, and that’s what they delivered. What’s really impressive, though, is that the scene took about three weeks to shoot by itself.
The press junket for X-Men: Apocalypse was held in London, England earlier this month, and during my day speaking with the cast and filmmakers behind the blockbuster, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Evan Peters to talk about his return as Peter Maximoff a.k.a. Quicksilver in the new movie. Without getting into any spoilery details, I asked about the experience filming the scene, and the actor explained that it took a long time to do, but that it was very much worth it in the end. Said Peters,
It took like 20-something days. Yeah – ‘Whoa.’ It was insane. It was a lot. But it was very fun, and we just basically tried to top the last one, right? Make it bigger, better, longer, more interesting, funnier… It was cool – and the song is great too!
That’s pretty incredible when you think about it. Just to give that some frame of reference, Kevin Smith was forced to film the entirety of Clerks in just 20 days – and here we are just talking about one scene that winds up being maybe three-to-five minutes long within X-Men: Apocalypse’s runtime. Hell, the fact that the sequence took nearly a quarter of the blockbuster’s entire production schedule is pretty amazing – and even more so when you think about the intense lighting needed to make the ultra-high speed photography function properly.
You can watch Evan Peters talk about the special Quicksilver sequence in X-Men: Apocalypse in the video below (the actor seated beside his lovely co-stars, Sophie Turner, and Olivia Munn):
For the sake of spoilers, we won’t give away exactly what happens in X-Men: Apocalypse’s Quicksilver sequence or what song is played over it, but you can find out yourself when you go see the movie in theaters this Friday, May 27th.
