Jim Croce – Time in a Bottle
2014 · Directed by Bryan Singer
908K Likes
Best comments
1.“I like how he's so insanely fast that he had time to think, 'Is that everything...? OH RIGHT, the bullets!'”
More comments
- 2.“Logan – the only one who wouldn't have died there, thanks to his healing – is also the only one who bothers to thank him.”
- 3.“Quicksilver could be one of the most dangerous mutants... but he plays Pac-Man in his mom's basement.”
The story
The scene everybody walks out of X-Men: Days of Future Past talking about has nothing to do with saving the world. Evan Peters' Quicksilver, a teenage speedster, is helping spring Magneto from a heavily guarded cell in the Pentagon, and when the guards storm the kitchen with guns up, time basically stops. Water, pots and bullets hang in the air while he strolls around rearranging the room to Jim Croce's Time in a Bottle. Then the clock restarts.
It almost didn't happen. Early drafts had Juggernaut doing the jailbreak, and Bryan Singer swapped in Quicksilver late in the game. The song wasn't the plan either – a previs artist dropped it in as a placeholder and everybody liked it too much to cut. The frozen material was shot on the last two days of the entire production with 3D Phantom cameras at 3,600 frames per second, while Peters was filmed separately on a treadmill and wires. Adelaide's Rising Sun Pictures had five and a half months to stitch it together. The soup is CGI.
The song has its own story. Croce wrote it after his wife told him she was pregnant, and it sat as a forgotten album cut until he died in a plane crash in September 1973. Radio picked it up, and it hit number one that December. A song about wishing for more time, turned into a gag about a kid who has all the time in the world. The film got an Oscar nomination for visual effects, and its effects supervisor called this the most memorable sequence in the movie. Hard to argue.
