They have become synonymous with the X-Men movies, appearing on every poster, box cover, promotional tie-in, and collectable toy. By the third movie in the series, X-Men: The Last Stand, they joined the X-Men logo, blocking out the “X” itself. Wolverine’s Claws, those three razor-sharp retractable blades on each of his hands are as now as iconic today as Superman’s “S”, Batman’s “Bat Signal”, and Spider-Man’s red and blue mask. It can be argued that Wolverine is the only super hero created within the last 35 years to have reached the same status as the classic heroes of the 1940’s and 50’s.

When Twentieth Century Fox decided in 1991 to create the very first movie based on the X-Men comic books, they turned to Canadian special effects artist James Gawley, now affectionately known as “Jimmy Claws”, to bring the adamantium blades to a physical reality.

"I love solving technical puzzles,” Jimmy explains. “My background is a machinist, I’m a certified machinist, and I just got tired of a regular job, so I decided to get into film. I don’t have any relatives in the film business to open doors for me, I went in cold. I was fortunate that I got around with some people who could recognize my ability and help me move along and gain freedom.”

As the mechanical partner to Canadian make-up effects wizard Gord Smith, Jimmy has provided effects for a long list of movies including “Jacob’s Ladder”, “JFK”, “Johnny Mnemonic”, and “I, Robot”.

Director Bryan Singer and the producers insisted on creating a physical prop that could be filmed rather than using computerized effects. Jimmy was asked to create two props. The first would be an artificial arm, an exact duplicate of actor Hugh Jackman’s that would feature a set of mechanical claws that would spring out of the back of the hands, just like in the comics, and a second set of fake claws that he could simply slip over his hands like gloves.

As with all Super Hero powers and gadgets, they seem fairly straight forward until you actually sit down and think them through.

In the Marvel comics Wolverine is a temperamental, violent anti-hero born with the instincts and retractable claws of his animal namesake. The claws sit inside his forearms and at his mental command come shooting out through the spaces in between his knuckles on the back of his hand. The claws themselves are extremely long blades reinforced with Adamantium, a fictional metal alloy that described as being unbreakable, practically indestructable.

The Artificial Arm

Jimmy quickly spotted the first obstacle. The blades had to pass through the wrist, a gap smaller than the width of Wolverine’s knuckles. How could three, very long blades, made of the strongest steel in the world, somehow pass through a tiny wrist to immediately surface through the wider set of exit holes between the knuckles?

Did Wolverine have unusually wide wrists? One thing’s for sure, Hugh Jackman didn’t and it would be his wrists that Jimmy had to use.

In his shop in Scarborough, Ontario he discovered the exact geometry. “I figured I’d work it out on my arm, because my arm’s big, it’s roomy, and then I’ll figure it out as time goes on.” Jimmy explained. “When the blades are inside the arm, they sit tight next to each other in order to go through the wrist, but once they are past the wrist they splay out to match the knuckles.”

Creating the exact system of guides and runners for the blades proved to be crucial. Getting them to shoot through the wrist and out the artificial hand was one trick, having them do so at two tenths of a second is another.

The speed of Wolverine’s claws is essential. One of the traits of his personality is his quick change of moods, his aggressive ability to turn immediately towards the offensive and the visual way that is expressed is through the instantaneous appearance of his claws. Quick, hostile, deadly, that’s what the character is known for.

“So I made a set, had the air cylinder rigged up to it, had the gang come over. It was Bryan Singer and the producers, there was about ten of them, and I had it mounted in a vice. I had the arm pointing sideways and Bryan says ‘Okay, I want to see it’ and I told him ‘Don’t stand in front of it, instead stand to the side’, and I fired it and it scared him. ‘Thwkkk! Whoa!’”

‘He was really excited about it, I fired it a few more times and everything was great.’

Satisfied with the mechanics, Jimmy and make-up wizard Gord Smith used silicone rubber to transform the mechanical arm to look like an exact copy of Hugh Jackman’s.

“We start off with the actor’s arm. We cast the arm, then what they would do is make a positive from that, and then they would make a negative from that, and they would then make a fiberglass core which would become the mold. The people making the rubber arm and me are working to the same piece. Now, I start cutting it apart and fitting my mechanics into it. I make the blades work within the core, then they come back to putting the skin onto the core.”

The “skin” is an eerie, creepy, silicone rubber reproduction of Hugh Jackman’s arm that is exact in detail right down to the individual pore and includes a convincing amount of human arm hair. Because the camera would be shooting the hand in close-up, it had to look as convincing as possible. This also meant that the silicone skin could not be designed with holes in it for the blades. The solution was to simply slide the skin over the fiberglass arm and let the blades cut their way through the skin naturally.

“The claws are pretty fast. I run the air compressor at about 70 lbs, not a lot. Enough to make it forceful and it’s never misfired. There’s never been a problem of having the blades spaced apart or pushing through the skin. That’s why they are so sharp, otherwise they won’t cut and they have to cut. If they don’t cut clean then the skin balloons out and looks stupid.”

As is always the case in making a motion picture, multiple takes of the claws in action would be needed, requiring the make-up team to create a supply of silicone skins to be used, take after take.

“The material’s expensive, but what’s more expensive is the labour involved, because they come out of the mold with a little bit of flash on them, so you have to clean that up, but then punching the hair, that’s all planted, every hair, every strand is punched in.”

Before taking on the task of planting the hair, the make-up team has to first make sure they were using hair that matches the actor’s.

“You know, the density of the hair, the colour, and the length. If you take an arm like mine, I practically have nothing and Hugh is sort of in the middle. I had to do the same for Will Smith’s arm in I, Robot only his hair is really curly and it’s really sparse. That’s a look that somebody has to do. I don’t. I make the tool that punches hair, but, to do each hair, oh man, I couldn’t do that. Punching the hair on one arm would take a day. “

The Different Blade Styles

With the illusion now complete, Associate Producer and Co-Writer Tom DeSanto sat down with Jimmy and began to explore a number of different styles for the blade edges of the claws themselves.

As with all comic book heroes, Wolverine has been drawn by several generations of artists, from his first appearance in 1974 by Herb Trimpe and Jack Abel to John Byrne in 1979 to Frank Millar in the 80’s. Over a dozen official Marvel artists, each putting their own personal touches to his costume, physique, and claws.

In some versions Wolverine’s claws are rounded, curved needles like the animal wolverine’s, others have drawn them to look like long, straight, manufactured knives with angled points, and later variations show an almost Japanese Katana-like quality to the blades with a refined curve.

For his first prototype, to make it easier for the blades to cut through the silicone skin, Jimmy had used a set that looked like standard knives, with the tips tapered up.

“Quarter by one inch aluminum, no magic here” Jimmy said while showing off the very first blade design.

De Santo first requested that Jimmy make a version with the tips of the blades tapered down.

“So I made a second blade design for them, I didn’t put much effort into it, I just cut a bit of metal and cut a little point at the end and put a little bit of a curve on it. Gave it to them, said ‘What do you think?’ ‘Okay, we like that’.”

“But then they came back and said ‘We need more business, we need more of a cutting edge’ so I came up with a second version with a sharper edge on it. “

“I guess it was a couple of weeks that went by before someone asked ‘What if the whole blade was curved?’. I thought ‘Oh god’ because firing the metal blades out of the prosthetic arm, in a straight line, with a little bit of a splay…. I didn’t know how to do it.”

After hours spent working out the geometry in his workshop again, Jimmy hit upon a unique solution. I true curve wouldn’t work.

“Three blades, double pivot, that’s how I got around the curve,” he explains. “A rigid pivot wouldn’t work, you can’t have a rigid pivot with two points. This has to float, and then as the blades advance, they just splay out.”

“If you take this curve and you continue around so that it becomes a full circle, it’s ten feet in diameter. It’s curved, but its not huge and they look more curved then they are because they start off with the ten foot diameter curve, but then the blade comes into a sharper curve towards the end, so it looks more curved then it really is. It’s a bit of an illusion. “

Happy with the final, working prototype, the movie’s producers asked Jimmy to add one final detail.

In the first X-Men movie there is a sequence where the villain Magneto uses his magnetic powers to lift Wolverine up into the air by the metal in his body and then pull his claws out through his hands, past the point of their normal length.

For this scene the claws needed to have a design etched into the beginning to the blades to hint as to how they were attached to Wolverine inside his body.

“When the blades are pulled farther out of his hands, you suddenly see the engraved circuitry symbols and it’s like ‘What’s that stuff?’ It’s beyond normal. It’s like a jack-in-the-box that’s yanked out too far, y'know, you start to see the spring?"

“It was just gak. I was told to ‘Come up with something that makes no sense. My thinking on it, the detail at the bottom, this row of boxes, would be indicative of a rack and pinion thing. it would look something like that. The other circular business with the line through it, that would just be some kind of mounting of a muscle tendon. I mean, there’s no rules. I tried a couple of different designs, I sent them off, they liked this one. ‘Okay, we’re going with that’. “

Using The Arm In The Movie

In addition to shooting the arm for close-ups of Wolverine’s claws, there was a special scene in the first film written specifically around the use of the prop as a way of introducing Wolverine to the audience.

“They wanted them to go through a tray. The deal was that Wolverine was in a bar and this guy comes out and pokes at him and Wolverines throws a punch at him. The guy picks up a serving tray and blocks the punch, right? So the gag was that you’d see the tray get impacted with his hand, like it would go ‘bumpf’, and then all-of-a-sudden the blades would go ‘snikt’ right through the tray and into the camera’s face.”

“The trays they gave us were stainless steel, and there’s no way I could punch through that, so what I did was I lined them with lead and then I cut a big hole in the back and took a sheet of lead and I burnished it all into place. I then aged it so it looked like the stainless and we practiced this whole move where the blades come through – it was great! I still have the tray sitting on my shelf in the shop. I mean what they did was good, but I thought the through-the-tray gag would have been way better. “

As they came closer to shooting, however, Bryan Singer chose to go for a different sequence that required a new version of the arm, one with the air-compressor removed so that the blades could be pushed out by hand.

“It was Kevin Rushton, a local stuntguy, pinned against the wall with two blades, one on either side of his neck. Then the middle one appears, it comes up and slowly touches his adam’s apple. Gord Smith was holding the arm, John, my associate, was operating the two blades on either side, and I was on the centre blade. We shot in reverse. Nice and safe. Because in reality, the two blades on the outside of buddy’s neck, they are actually squeezing his neck, they‘re set so tight. There’s actually no way would could shoot them at his neck and get them that tight. So we started with them squeezing his neck and then pulled them away. We shot it in reverse so it actually looks like they are shooting up to squeeze his neck. And of course when you see the middle blade move up to his neck, it’s just me pulling it back in reverse. “

Once shooting began, Jimmy had completed three different versions of the artificial arm.

“Every time I went to set I brought a set of the fiberglass arms with me, a left and a right arm, and the valvage and the air tank and everything to make it happen. Plus there was an extra right, because the one where we pinned buddy up against the wall was a manual version, instead of an air supply it had sliding levers, so there’s three arms.

End of Part One. In Part Two Jimmy describes the creation of a set of wearable claws for Hugh Jackman