https://www.polygon.com/2020/5/5/21246679/josh-trank-capone-interview-fantastic-four-chronicle
>Josh Trank was the obvious candidate to reinvigorate the Fantastic Four for 20th Century Fox. In the mid-2000s, a pair of lighthearted films led by Jessica Alba and Chris Evans failed to break through in a zeitgeist captured by Christopher Nolan’s gritty reinvention of Batman. Fox hoped that a modern sensibility could take the property in a new direction. Trank voiced his interest, and though Fox executives offered him the chance to pursue something original, the Marvel movie “felt like the most rebellious thing to do,” the director said. His take on the material made him confident. A company buying into his hype made him bullheaded. Fox didn’t want to make another Fantastic Four movie — it wanted to make Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four movie.
>Trank's first move was to hire his friend Jeremy Slater as his writer. "There wasn’t really any sort of traditional pitching process,” Slater said of his first days on the film. "Josh just said, ‘Jeremy is writing it for me,’ and Fox nervously said, ‘Uhh ... sure.'" They began work in the spring of 2012.
>Trank came to Slater with a skeleton idea: His Fantastic Four would be the opposite of every other franchise kickoff. “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."
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>Developing the script was a clamer. Slater was a badge-carrying nerd ready to convert comic book lore into bombastic, CG-ready setpieces. Trank was the opposite, having only seen a few episodes of the cartoon from the mid-90's and having a general distaste for comic book movies. “The first Avengers movie had recently come out, and I kept saying, ‘That should be our template, that’s what audiences want to see!” Slater said. “And Josh just fricking hated every second of it.”
>"The trials of developing Fantastic Four had everything to do with tone," Trank said. "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."
>In an effort to creatively engage his director by any means necessary, Slater loaded Trank up with comics from his personal collection — the greatest Doctor Doom stories, his favorite Ben Grimm moments — but nothing sparked. Trank was more interested in the early moments, digging into Reed Richards’ character development and traumatic childhood and transformation. Once the team got its powers, that’s where it started losing Trank. Galactus, Annihilus, Herbie the Robot, time travel, multiple dimensions, old teams fighting young teams — everything was on the table, and any sequence or character could get tossed out at a moment’s notice.
>“It didn’t matter if they were fighting robots in Latveria or aliens in the Negative Zone or Mole Monsters in downtown Manhattan", said Slater "Josh just did not give a shit."
>"I feel like I get Mole Man," Trank said in his defense. "He’s angry and undermined by the system."
>“The first Avengers movie had recently come out, and I kept saying, ‘That should be our template, that’s what audiences want to see!” Slater said. “And Josh just fricking hated every second of it.”
uh based?
uh no. He's trying to distance himself from his failures while promoting some shitty Capone dreck he's been reduced to making.
i do not like the look of these men
their phenoytypes, brown eyes, non-white skin
i am repulsed
>Slater wrote nearly 18 drafts and 2,000 pages of material during his time on FANTASTIC FOUR. Only two of those drafts made it to the studio. In an effort to retain control, Trank acted as the messenger between Fox and Slater, leaving certain studio notes out of their conversations, and only delivering certain drafts to the studio for feedback. “Right from the start of the process, Josh told me I wasn’t allowed to speak with Fox without him present,” Slater said. “I never saw 95% of those notes.”
>Slater departed FANTASTIC FOUR after six months and, in typical blockbuster fashion, a handful of Fox-approved screenwriters came on board to knock the script into shootable shape. Simon Kinberg, who had proved himself to Fox by guiding the X-MEN franchise with Bryan Singer, would stick around to see the entire production through. The two worked well enough together, but as the beginning of production crept closer and closer, and a hard release date hovered over the entire operation, the project moved forward in less than desirable fashion. The script didn’t have a third act, and life was compounding the intensity of the situation for Trank.
>Trank faced immense pressure as he worked on the movie. The director came from behind, and was suddenly in charge of something that everyone expected to be a huge success. "That requires a degree of experience that we often underestimate," one source close to the production said.
>Trank took bold swings where he could. Early on, he insisted to Fox that Michael B. Jordan was the guy to play Johnny Storm, a character traditionally depicted as white. “For the world I grew up in, a racially intense Los Angeles where we were used to seeing white superheroes, some of my friends who were black should have seen a black superhero, so I felt that while being in a position of power, I could change the system a little bit.” Miles Teller, Jamie Bell, and Kate Mara rounded the cast.
>"For the world I grew up in, a racially intense Los Angeles where we were used to seeing white superheroes, some of my friends who were black should have seen a black superhero, so I felt that while being in a position of power, I could change the system a little bit.”
What would be nice is taking black superheroes created by black authors and making films about them. Apparently we're maybe getting a Static movie finally. I'm sure it'll be trash, but less trash than Fantfourstic.
Trank is just a typical moron who pretends to care about blacks so he has something to boost about at parties to California feminists when he's trying to get laid.
i vaguely remember enjoying the static shock cartoon although i recall nothing specific about it
What he should have done was not called it a Fantastic Four movie and have the big reveal at the end be that it's a Fantastic Four origin movie. Also make the movie not shit in general. At least that's what it seemed like he was trying to do.
>In pre-production, Trank clashed with his team of pre-vis artists over the flavor of the movie’s action scenes, despite them all being trained in the art of alien invasion choreography. Likewise, on set, not everyone had the time or interest in hearing from the guy who made one pretty good movie.
>“In a studio scenario, you’re basically being surrounded by veterans who are going to do a hell of a job doing exactly what it is that they do,” Trank said. “Because it’s not your movie. You didn’t come up with it. You didn’t create these characters. You didn’t create this property. This guy was fricking nominated for Oscars. This guy has fricking made 20 movies with Robert Zemeckis. It’s a fricking science-fiction adventure movie. What the frick do you need to tell them other than the direction of the agreement between you and the studio? All Zemeckis’ production designer needs to know is whether this is the take, yes or no.” Of course, that type of “yes” or “no” still needed producer and studio approval. “I was aware of the protocol, but I wasn’t really asking.”
>FANTASTIC FOUR was filmed over the summer of 2014. Trank did not recall receiving a complaint from the studio during the 72-day shoot, and refuted most of the tiny grievances that came out after the fact. Teller’s alleged "I’m-a-movie-star-now" approach to acting, which involved questioning even the most low-impact performance requests, caught him off-guard, but a tussle that “nearly became physical,” according to an Entertainment Weekly story from August 2015, was a moment of miscommunication between two Type-A personalities. As for The Hollywood Reporter piece that suggested “he built a black tent around his monitor” and “cut himself off from everybody,” Trank said that was a traditional video village, and sometimes “you can’t actually be out standing next to the camera because the camera’s on a fricking dolly.”
>Trank, who has never been one to unplug, picked up on a vocal minority protesting the film over his casting of a black man as Johnny Storm. The uproar became loud enough that Jordan penned an essay on Entertainment Weekly begging people to hear Stan Lee, who endorsed the casting, and move on. “I was getting threats on IMDb message boards saying they were going to shoot me,” Trank said. To find some level of ease, the director kept a loaded .38 Special on his nightstand.
>“I was so fricking paranoid during that shoot,” said Trank. “If someone came into my house, I would have ended their fricking life. When you’re in a head space where people want to get you, you think, ‘I’m going to defend myself.’” Trank returned the gun after wrapping production.
>Josh Trank was the obvious candidate to reinvigorate the Fantastic Four for 20th Century Fox.
One sentence and I'm already laughing.
>The first cut of FANTASTIC FOUR caught studio executives off-guard, Trank said. They told the director the movie wasn’t the marketable romp anyone hoped for. It “wasn’t for fans.” The morose tone would make people uncomfortable. It made them uncomfortable. “That was the goal,” he told me. At least for him.
>Reshoots and pickups are standard for modern blockbusters, but for FANTASTIC FOUR, they were urgent: The movie didn’t have an ending. Trank claimed that before production took place, Fox slashed the budget by nearly $30 million, and cut a majority of the spectacle-filled finale, with the idea that one could be filmed in the second round of shooting. But changes to the movie would become more drastic, and a difficult scheduling process that involved bringing in actors on weekends (and outfitting them with notable wigs) made cobbling together a third-act setpiece all the more difficult. According to Slater, most of the finished film turned out to be an expanded version of his initial 40 pages, minus all of the superheroics.
>Much of the scramble to “save” FANTASTIC FOUR remains shrouded by NDAs and Trank’s own lack of participation. Fox hired other writers to generate script pages to be shot during reshoots, though Trank never met them. He wrote pages himself in hopes of putting his voice back in the film, and the pages were dutifully ignored. The director eventually confronted producers over Director’s Guild union rights that “were not being recognized,” and the studio complied. Trank said he negotiated a new deal in which he would re-edit the movie while Fox worked on its own cut, and both versions would screen for test audiences.
too many words, can't you just give me the highlights
Fox tries to do the same thing Whedon did for Avengers and Justice League
Absolute moron bites off way more than he chew and gets burned badly. He head hunted a script writer who likes comic books, even tough he hates them, kept the guy isolated from the studio and wound up shooting an unfinished script before having the project pulled from him by producers.
This really says everything about him:
>Early on, he insisted to Fox that Michael B. Jordan was the guy to play Johnny Storm, a character traditionally depicted as white. “For the world I grew up in, a racially intense Los Angeles where we were used to seeing white superheroes, some of my friends who were black should have seen a black superhero, so I felt that while being in a position of power, I could change the system a little bit.”
He's making a franchise adaptation, but he doesn't have any respect for the source material so he'll do whatever he wants. Even if that means blackwashing one half of a pair of biological siblings ...
I think it's meant to be a puff piece. The article does a good job of ignoring those rumours of him being coked out of his mind and destroying hotel rooms.
>Even if that means blackwashing one half of a pair of biological siblings ...
Did they explain that in the film? Step siblings?
I've noticed that Hollywood has stop even trying to explain mixed families. You have to just accept it on principle or have Cinemaphile call you a chud.
I think they said that it was Sue Storm who was adopted by a black family
That tracks. Just another black family, adopting a white baby.
>The studio hired editor Stephen Rivkin, whose credited work includes AVATAR and the first three PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movies, to prepare FANTASTIC FOUR for the runoff. Rivkin ultimately chose different takes for every single scene in the movie, and became “the de facto director,” Trank said. And in the director’s mind, Rivkin chose the bad takes. “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.” There are moments in the finished film that Trank appreciates — Doctor Doom blowing up security guard heads as he strolls down a hallway, the scene in which Tim Blake Nelson’s head explodes, the shriek-filled introduction of mutated Reed Richards’ elastic body (in which no heads explode) — but the director found Rivkin’s ultimate decisions to be cheesy. “I maybe saw a couple of shots that really resonated.”
>Unfortunately for Trank, the two versions of FANTASTIC FOUR were never in a faceoff. In January 2015, he realized that “there was no path out of hell,” and that the studio had already spent three months, plus millions of dollars, for planned rewrites and reshoots that would fit Rivkin’s cut. A teaser trailer that month supposedly inspired new directions for the film, which by then was out of Trank’s hands. “They really do pay attention to what people are saying on Twitter. They look at that and they say, ‘Shit, 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.’” Trank edited his version anyway, hoping Fox would pluck select scenes and drop them into Rivkin’s cut. Maybe critics would see those moments and give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe.
>A sense of loss sank in during reshoots. The contention left Trank defeated, and his new goal — to appease the producers, who might incorporate as many chunks of his personal cut into the finished product as possible — went against his artistic tenets. “It was like being castrated,” he said of being on the set, which was overseen by Kinberg and producer Hutch Parker. “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 only yes or no.”
>Whispers of the turmoil reached Disney and Kathleen Kennedy at Lucasfilm, where Trank had set up his next project, a standalone movie about Boba Fett. No one had seen the cut of FANTASTIC FOUR that would arrive in theaters (including Trank), but the he-said-she-said dispute was enough to shake her confidence. Trank said he and Kennedy agreed that the director should sit out his scheduled appearance at the 2015 Star Wars Celebration in April, but even then, he couldn’t pick the conversation back up. FANTASTIC FOUR, the STAR WARS spinoff that wasn’t, all the other development deals — they were the end of something. Shortly after bowing out of the convention over a case of the “worst flu of my life,” as he tweeted, Trank told his managers he wouldn’t do Star Wars and wouldn’t look for more blockbuster work. Days later, the trades announced that the director was “fired” off his Star Wars movie. “I quit because I knew I was going to be fired if I didn’t quit.”
>Trank tried to keep a straight face through the summer of 2015. He promoted the marketing of his ill-fated blockbuster on Facebook and Twitter. He played hype man on the Jumbotron of San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H. In interviews, he defended against the finger-pointing with level-headed messaging. “It’s been a challenging movie — for all of the right reasons,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
>Trank's frustrations kept building, and finally came to the surface - at the worst possible time. On August 7, 2015, hours before his $150 million comic book reboot opened on 3,995 North American screens, Trank smashed the self-destruct button. “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this,” he tweeted in blind rage. “And it would’ve recieved [sic] great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”
>Provoked by a review suggesting that Fantastic Four be “studied in film schools as an example of what not to do,” the writer-director fired off 138 vicious characters without so much as a reread to catch his typo. The responses were immediate. He had champions who praised the gall it took to slap back against The Man, and detractors who thought the whole episode was maybe a little gauche. Drowning in a sea of notifications, Trank finally picked up the phone when his manager called.
>“He was afraid of what was gonna happen to me,” Trank told me of the dizzying moment. “I was messing with one of the most powerful corporations in the world.”
>The tweet, as he sized up in retrospect, was spitting in the face of every person who attempted to make his version of FANTASTIC FOUR work. It offended his collaborators and silenced the friends he had in the industry. He went out swinging to defend a “fantastic version of FANTASTIC FOUR” — a version of the movie that no one, including Trank, can really say existed.
>On February 27, 2016, FANTASTIC FOUR won the Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Remake of the year. It wouldn’t have hurt as much if a production assistant hadn’t accepted the award on no one’s behalf. (“The dude saw me chain-smoking, and probably heard me crying a few times. That’s petty.”) That June, The Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters, who originally reported on FANTASTIC FOUR the year prior, took the opportunity to ask Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg about the director. “So when you look at young directors, how do you know you’re not hiring another Josh Trank?” she asked. “Who is that?” Spielberg wondered. In a text at the time, Trank shrugged off the viral shade. “At least I know he watched CHRONICLE,” he wrote.
>No matter how many times Trank quit then logged back on to Instagram, or deactivated then reactivated Twitter, he couldn’t cold-turkey quit the internet and really move on. Last November, the filmmaker created an account on Letterboxd, a moviegoers haven in which users track their viewing habits with informal reviews. Now he was back online, reviewing FANTASTIC FOUR, saying he “expected it to be much worse than it was.” In just a handful of words, the director praised the actors and curtailed any talk of #ReleaseTheTrankCut. At the end, he wrote out the mantra he’s been telling himself for four years: “I don’t regret any of it.”
I can't imagine how FF has any popularity at all these days. The best thing they could probably do is throw them into either an X-men or Marvel team up movie or vice versa.
Tl;dr
>Tl;dr
Fox hires an indy director, solely because he made Chronicle (a low budget capeshit movie, that got good reviews). Turns out the director has no fricking idea what he's doing. Fox sees an early cut of what he has filmed after principal photography has wrapped, and they freak the frick out. So they try to fix everything in reshoots, but these reshoots come much later, and are hilariously obvious in the final cut (like Kate wearing one of the worst movie wigs of all time), this possibly makes the movie even worse. Fox releases the mess, it bombs. Trank disowns it, and it kills his career. Then end.
>In the maelstrom of post-CHRONICLE dealmaking, Trank pitched to Sony a hard R Venom movie in the vein of THE MASK. Over two weeks in New York, he and his friend, director Rob Siegel worked on a treatment for the film, which producer Matt Tolmach hated. And that was the end of that. “I didn’t like how Matt Tolmach was coming at me in that situation, because it felt very kind of authoritative,” Trank said. “Well, if you don’t like what I’m doing, and you’re telling me that I have to do something along the lines of what you want, and you’re going to tell it to me in this way — sorry, but I have other things I can be doing.”
>Trank’s stint on SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS was short enough that he can barely remember the story, though he recalled his writer delivering “one of the most awkward, squirmiest pitches I’ve ever seen before.” He wouldn’t return to the film, even today. “I’m in a very different place now, where I couldn’t give a frick about any good video games or turning any property into anything else.”
>CHRONICLE 2, meanwhile, was a never-would for Trank. Original movie co-writer Max Landis penned a script, focused on a young girl obsessed with the surviving character Matt Garretty (Alex Russell) who builds her own suit of armor to become a supervillain worthy of his attention. Trank described it as “fine” and having “nothing to do with why I wanted to do the first movie". When the sequel picked up steam, the director did everything he could to stall progress. “I made it difficult for them to set up meetings. I was dodgy about stuff. I did a lot of shitty things. Because I really didn’t ever want to see CHRONICLE 2 happen. That was my worst nightmare. First of all, I’m not doing it. Second, if somebody else does it, then you know it’s gonna be a piece of shit.”
>a hard R Venom movie in the vein of THE MASK.
Wut? Who thinks of Rated R movies and The Mask in the same breath?
People who read the mask comic book, moron
Oh so 13 smelly morons who never leave their moms basement. Good to know.
>be an ignorant moron
>get called out for it
>w-well you must smell!!
lmao
>Acting like there's a real difference between people who watched AND REMEMBER that mugging moron Jim Carrey's Mask vs people who actually read the comic book it was based on
I wont watch any film that blackwashes a major character. Simple as!
Plus the director was a real jerk towards our Kate.
Kate is a spoiled b***h. She's not even an actress. Bro.
She looks like an ape
Is this article supposed to be a puff piece? Because it's worded like one, but each section just makes me hate the guy a little more. What an arrogant little never-was.
It seems like a vain attempt to hype him back into the business. But he's a witless arrogant c**t, so it will not work.
>Trank was the opposite, having only seen a few episodes of the cartoon from the mid-90's and having a general distaste for comic book movies.
...and yet he kept trying to make comic book movies.
That's not on the dude.
FOX hired him to remake the property into something different and possibly moody, but then they walked back on it and wanted something closer to what the MCU was doing. You can't walk back on things in the middle of a production.
This is also something that happened in the comics. When Marvel decided to remake the Fantastic Four for their new Ultimate line of books they recreated the team to be about young teens experiencing body horror and doing fricked up shit. It worked somewhat bac k then because everyone understood it was a new take on a very old and established property.
Where the director fricked up was that he was a major pussy and let everyone walk over him. He should have pulled a Zack Snyder and filmed scenes behind the studio's back.
Okay, I didn't notice that this was posted in 2020 right before his most recent movie came out. It's a puff piece.
That movie starred Tom Hardy. I wonder if Trank shared whatever plans he had for Venom with him.
>That would be the wish fulfillment of the sequel.
Planning the sequel before writing the original film?
Bold move, Cotton.
Is there anyone who managed to pull themselves out of Studio comic book bullshit except Snyder? He was smart about filming his shit opposite their goofy ass mandated nonsense
To be fair he has enough technical knowledge to do stuff at the studios' back. Most directors are just managers with a vision. They dont know shit about the craft. Zack Snyder can actually film and edit himself so its not hard to steal a couple cameras for a weekend and film his shit on his backyard.
Nolan
Nolan. If we're praising Snyder for the horrible shit he's made since capeshit then Nolan deserves it as well
Wtf is this? Who are these people? There was another FF movie?
This dude, David Ayer, one of the many Thor movies director. They all try to play ball and be a good worker but only after they get fricked in the ass because their name is the one in the credits that they try to cry about it.
You either quit during the production like Edgar Wright did during the Ant-Man debacle or you push your weight around and do things your way like Zack Snyder and Tim Burton did.
You can't just cry afterwards and ask for sympathy.
David Ayer showed up to set coked out of his skull and tried to beat up the lead actor?
That ain't playing ball.
To be fair, it was Miles Teller, though.
Life on set was so bad that Sue had to start fricking the Thing and accidentally married him!
I can’t believe this loser still hasn’t neck himself or trooned out at least.
Already covered in detail with more accuracy 8 years ago.
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