page_title: X-Men: First Class
section_title: Filming
hierarchical_section_title: X-Men: First Class / Production / Filming
caption_attribution_description: English: Englefield House, near to Englefield, West Berkshire, Great Britain. The Elizabethan home of the Englefield family was destroyed in a fire of 1886 - the handsome rebuilt house by Richard Armstrong of London is neo-Elizabethan
context_page_description: X-Men: First Class is a 2011 superhero film based on the X-Men characters appearing in Marvel Comics. The fifth installment in the X-Men film series and a prequel to X-Men, it was directed by Matthew Vaughn and produced by Bryan Singer, and stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, January Jones, Oliver Platt, and Kevin Bacon. The film is set primarily in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and focuses on the relationship between Professor Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto, and the origin of their groups—the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants, respectively, as they deal with the Hellfire Club led by Sebastian Shaw, a mutant supremacist bent on enacting nuclear war.
  Producer Lauren Shuler Donner first thought of a prequel based on the young X-Men during the production of X2; producer Simon Kinberg later suggested to 20th Century Fox an adaptation of the comic series X-Men: First Class, although the film does not follow the comic closely. Singer, who had directed both X-Men and X2, became involved with the project in 2009, but he could only produce and co-write First Class due to his work on other projects.
context_section_description: Principal photography began on August 31, 2010, in Oxford, England, which included St Aldate's street and some of the University of Oxford's buildings, and lasted for two days. Production then moved to Pinewood Studios in Iver, and to Georgia in October, including Tybee Island, Thunderbolt, and Savannah, after sites in Louisiana, North Carolina and West Michigan were considered. Jekyll Island was chosen over Tybee Island after a producer reviewed the locations on Google Earth and thought the water near Jekyll looked more blue. Palm trees were planted into the island's sand so that it would look more like a tropical beach, but the cold weather caused many of the palm trees to become brown or die only days into the shoot, necessitating significant digital color correction from the visual effects team. Additional location shooting took place in Russia. A section of the plot is set in the Argentine coastal city of Villa Gesell, but was filmed in another province of the country with no beach but with mountains instead. Washington, D.C., the Mojave Desert and Fox's soundstages in Los Angeles also served as locations. The Englefield House in Berkshire served as the X-Mansion, and had its interior decoration adapted to resemble the way the mansion looked in the previous films. Both the submarine and the X-Jet were built on hydraulic sets so that they could be rotated for the vehicles' movements.
  Principal photography ended in December, although just half of the climax had actually been filmed because producers realized the originally planned one was not going to work. Additional filming, primarily in California at Los Angeles and Long Beach soundstages, continued into April 2011, leaving only three-to-four weeks for post-production before the film's scheduled premiere in June. The tight schedule to meet the release date led Vaughn to declare that he had "never worked under such time pressure". The film cost approximately $160 million to produce without tax breaks, with the eventual cost around $140 million.
  The 1960s setting of X-Men: First Class, technologically inspired by the James Bond films of that era, also added to the international feel of the characters. Kinberg said the series was a major influence for the way they "did a cool job representing the period, in a way it still felt muscular and action-oriented", and Vaughn added that Magneto was his attempt to recreate Sean Connery's Bond in both style and the "badass, charming, ruthless and sweet" personality. The director said his goal was to "feel like a '60s Bond film, but with a little bit of reality it could be grounded in. I wanted there to be just a hint of this world of the mutants coming through. A mutant in this world having powers needed to be the equivalent of you or I sneezing, as normal as possible, at least until the humans start seeing it for the first time." At the same time, Vaughn tried to do the "bloody hard balancing" of modern and antique to recreate the 1960s in way it was "not so alien to the kids that it looked like a period piece." The director also tried to depict the era still in a realistic way, particularly "that '60s misogynist vibe" with women in skimpy suits, and McTaggert's reliability as a CIA agent being questioned. There is also a nod to the 1950s and 60s in the scenes set in "Oxford University", starting with the "heterochromia scene". These are set in a pub called "the Eagle", next to the famous "Bridge of Sighs" in Oxford, but there is no such pub. This seems to be a reference to the Eagle pub in Cambridge, where Crick and Watson infamously announced their solution to the structure of DNA (in 1953), very relevant to the themes of the film.
  Vaughn said he shot the film in a way which resembled the productions of the 1960s, with "very traditional framing, and camera movement when it needs to move, not just throwing it around and whizz-bang", and using the anamorphic format "to create a widescreen experience, which is emblematic of '60s movies, such as the James Bond films". The director had to hire five cinematographers – with sole cr
caption: The Englefield House served as the X-Mansion.
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