Director Singer Almost Dozed Off Watching His Own Movie

Filmmaker Bryan Singer almost fell asleep when he watched the initial cut of his first X-Men movie because it was "terrible" and too long.

The director was surprised by his own reaction to the movie when he showed an early cut to a test audience, and he was galvanised into trimming it down to 100 minutes.

And he is grateful for a scathing online review of the initial version - because it provided him with the perfect opening to the movie.

Singer tells Total Film magazine, "The first cut we showed to a bunch of people was so languid and terrible, I almost fell asleep during it, my own movie. I didn't mean for it to be screened that early, and then someone posted a review on the internet...

"I never told anyone this, but this horrible, mean, awful, terrible review of the slow, miserable first cut of X-Men inspired one thing. It was something the reviewer said, like, 'We don't even know what these mutants are!' And that gave me an idea for a preamble, Xavier's preamble... I thought, this'll become our thing, like the gun barrel at the start of James Bond, and we'll have it in front of every movie. So as much as I hate those evil internet reviews, it actually helped me come up with that!" Meanwhile in related news X-Men actor Taylor Kitsch has been inspired to take photography seriously after portraying renowned combat snapper Kevin Carter in hard-hitting new movie The Bang Bang Club.

Kitsch admits playing the risk-taking South African photographer gave him a deep appreciation of the art and now he's hoping to exhibit the shots he took on set.

The X-Men Origins: Wolverine star says, "I definitely got caught up with it all. I don't think I'm that good yet, maybe farther down the road. I still have the camera I used to shoot the photos in the film.

"There's a scene where a guy is throwing a Molotov cocktail (bomb) at one of the trucks, so I was taking real photos there and I blew those up and have them on my wall at home with the recreation of the cover of the book The Life and Death of Kevin Carter.

"Hopefully we'll see the photos in an exhibit or I can put a photography book together."

Carter lost his battle with depression and committed suicide in 1994, aged 33.

Kitsch hopes his new film, which also stars Ryan Phillippe, will honour the work of war photographers and combat photojournalists, like Carter and Brit Tim Hetherington, who was killed by a bomb blast while filming the ongoing unrest in Libya on Wednesday (20Apr11).

The actor adds, "I think it's a great time for this film. It just makes it that much more relevant. Any attention you can bring to these cats, what they sacrificed, is good. We all take for granted what these guys do out there and what they put out every day.

"It (filming) was pretty much a wake-up call for me because we can all be quite selfish sometimes and these guys are risking their lives. The camera is really their gun and their way of making a difference. You never hear about the journalist that rescued someone or did something to prevent something worse from happening... It's a sacrifice that these photographers are making to expose this."