Someone who could wipe clean the soiled slate of the franchise and return to an earlier time, a prequel time, when mutants were mutants and Vinnie Jones was still just a football player. We needed...The South African director of an obscure Oscar-winning drama?

Yes, Gavin Hood, of the small but perfectly formed Tsotsi, is the man tasked with rehabilitating the film reputation of the X-Men's breakout star - the big-haired, bad-tempered, metal-boned Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman - with the first in a planned series of X-spin-offs. So what attracts a serious filmmaker to a dude with claws and anger-management issues? "Hugh approached me, and I was most surprised, and a little intimidated," Hood tells Empire, taking a moment's break from shooting against the bleak backdrop of Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. "I was like, 'This is not the sort of film I would make, Hugh,' but we had this discussion. And the thing is...there is a lot of mainstream cinema that promotes, I think mistakenly, the idea that the world is simply good versus evil. And I am more interested in the conflict within characters. But here is a superhero with this wonderful self-awareness - ahh! So we might be able to take these things I'm interested in and do then on a grand scale, in an operatic sort of way."

"I saw a parallel with Wolverine and that conflicted boy in Tsotsi," agrees Jackman, who's producing as well as starring this time. "Wolverine has to be fun, the action has to be great, but if we don't have an emotional heart then we are dead."