Finally, years after his career nosedived following his sacking from a “Star Wars” spin-off and the failure of the disastrous “Fantastic Four” reboot, filmmaker Josh Trank is coming forward and getting candid about everything that happened.
In 2015, Fox’s “Fantastic Four” reboot received scathing reviews and disastrous box-office, the flop coming off of reports of rather unstable behavior from Trank on-set along with a major portion of his film having to be reshot. Trank, who had come off the success of low-budget sci-fi film “Chronicle,” disowned the cut that was being released mere hours before the movie opened.
In an exceptional and very long piece over at Polygon, timed with the launch of Trank’s new film “Capone” on VOD this week, Trank explains what happened.
The filmmaker was promised the freedom to create his own version of the Marvel property, but at the same time had to come to terms with life in the limelight following “Chronicle”. The original plan was for the F4 sequel to be the film everyone expected, with the first film being a setup movie that gets us there:
“The end of the Fantastic Four was going to very organically set up the adventure and the weirdness and the fun. That would be the wish fulfillment of the sequel. Because obviously, the sequel would be, ‘OK, now we are [superpowered] forever and it’s weird and funny and there’s adventure lurking around every corner.’ But the first movie was going to basically be the filmic version of how I saw myself all the time: the metaphor of these characters crawling out of hell.”
The trouble is he and the film’s scribe Jeremy Slater butted heads – Slater was a comic book fan eager to keep the original’s tone, Trank pushed back at all the comic book elements:
“The trials of developing Fantastic Four had everything to do with tone. You could take the most ‘comic booky’ things, as far as just names and faces and identities and backstories, and synthesize it into a tone. And the tone that [Slater] was interested in was not a tone that I felt I had anything in common with.”
Slater says he tried to get Trank excited about the comics but “Josh just did not give a s–t… The first ‘Avengers’ movie had recently come out, and I kept saying, ‘That should be our template, that’s what audiences want to see!’ and Josh just f–king hated every second of it.”
Slater dutifully cranked out eighteen different drafts of the script and Trank only delivered two of those to the studio and would only tell Slater about certain notes received. Slater says he didn’t receive 95% of the studio notes and Trank made sure Slater wasn’t allowed to speak to Fox without Trank present.
Slater then left the project after six months and Fox brought in its own writers to try and shape the film – nevertheless the movie went into production without a finished script or an ending. Tensions heightened as the studio considered pulling the plug on the whole thing shortly after filming began.
Trank meanwhile had to deal with not only the death of his dog shortly into production, but online abuse from fans threatening to shoot him over casting of Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm. It made him ultra paranoid and made him sleep with a gun under his pillow – a gun he returned once filming wrapped.
Trank claims right before production began, the budget was slashed by $30 million which included much of the finale – the intention being they would shoot the ending during a second round of filming. A first cut was screened for Fox who took issue with the film’s morose tone and so reshoots were planned.
“They really do pay attention to what people are saying on Twitter. They look at that and they say, ‘S–t, people are freaked out about how it’s not going to be funny. So we need to spend $10 million to do a comedy rewrite’.”
Those reshoots would not be overseen by Trank who says editor Stephen Rivkin became the ‘de facto director’ of the film, and he was choosing the wrong takes says Trank:
“There are some editors, from my point of view, who prefer using takes for pacing over performance. So they’ll say, ‘He moved out of that quicker,’ or, ‘He did this quicker.’ It’s about a certain kind of a rhythm that they are looking for… I maybe saw a couple of shots that really resonated.”
Producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker oversaw production on the re-shoots and while Trank tried to write his own pages to steer the film in his direction, they were ignored. Of the experience of the reshoots, Trank says:
“It was like being castrated. You’re standing there, and you’re basically watching producers blocking out scenes, five minutes ahead of when you get there, having [editors hired] by the studio deciding the sequence of shots that are going to construct whatever is going on, and what it is that they need. And then, because they know you’re being nice, they’ll sort of be nice to you by saying, ‘Well, does that sound good?’ You can say yes or no.”
Trank was working on the Boba Fett “A Star Wars Story” movie for Lucasfilm which Kinberg was producing, having signed on to helm it a few months before “Fantastic Four” started filming. However once word of all the on-set turmoil reached Kathleen Kennedy, Trank knew he was likely to be fired and agreed to sit out Star Wars Celebration in April 2015. He told his managers: “I quit because I knew I was going to be fired if I didn’t quit.”
During the interview, Trank also explained that he pitched a hard-R rated “Venom” movie similar in tone to “The Mask” a while back, and both he and “Big Fan” director Rob Siegel spent two weeks putting together a treatment for the film which they presented that to “The Amazing Spider-Man” producer Matt Tolmach. Tolmach hated it and Trank says he had issue with Tolmach’s attitude: “I didn’t like how Matt Tolmach was coming at me in that situation, because it felt very kind of authoritative.”
He also tried his best to not make a “Chronicle” sequel happen: “I made it difficult for them to set up meetings. I was dodgy about stuff. I did a lot of sh—y things. Because I really didn’t ever want to see Chronicle 2 happen.”
Trank also spoke about his briefly being linked to the film version of Sony video game “Shadow of the Colossus,” saying he only really remembers was his writer delivering “one of the most awkward, squirmiest pitches I’ve ever seen before”. Now he says he “couldn’t give a f–k about any good video games or turning any property into anything else.”
Head over to Polygon for the full piece which contains a lot more and is a fascinating read.
