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."
 It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
 Shopping Cart Returner Shirt $21.68 |
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
>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."
>having only seen only a few episodes of the cartoon from the mid-90's and having a general distaste for comic book movies
why the frick do they keep giving franchises to people who not only know nothing about the source material but actually dislike it
>we're making a fantastic 4 four movie! Do you like fantastic four?
>nope
>oh uh, do you know anything about fantastic four?
>not really
>well it's a superhero movie do you like superhero movies?
>actually i fricking hate em
>YOU'RE HIRED!
to be honest all of those sound like positives, and the movie itself was watchable until it became slop
>do you like uninteresting generic superhero team?
>"no, because no one likes them, I will make them interesting my own way"
>ok well we really just want capeslop to retain the rights so we will reshoot the movie after the fact so we can justify another remake in 5 years
>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.
Well, that really sums it up. Even without the massive bullshit frickery from the studio, it would have been shit because this homie was making a movie he hated. Clearly just a cash grab.
>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.
>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
Wow how bold, a black superhero? That's never been fricking done before.
>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.”
Josh Trank and his movies were always shit, he was only ever succeeded because the moronic masses are always easily impressed with cheap gimmicky shit.
tl:Dr the movie was woke
Black johnny was probably the best performance. The bigger problem is that it was fricking boring and didn't give a frick about what makes the FF work in the first place.
is the woke in the room with us right now?
It's living rent free in his head
>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.
>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.
>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
Why the frick do they always need this. Can't they just do a movie with an already established hero or team and just say in a brief exposition where they got their powers and shit. like who the frick doesn't know the fantastic 4.
That's one thing I did like about the first Holland Spider-Man movie. Even putitng aside him being in Civil War, the opening of the movie was basically
>Okay, here's the cliff notes of why he's Spider-Man
>You've seen all this shit dozens of times by now let's just cut to the chase.
>like who the frick doesn't know the fantastic 4
The F4 aren't Spider-Man nor Batman. Most people ain't familiar with them, especially worldwide.
>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.”
>“It was like being castrated,” he said of being on the set,
hmm, so he already knew what being castrated feels like
interesting
>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.”
>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.”
>Trank pitched to Sony a hard R Venom movie in the vein of THE MASK
this guy literally has the worst fricking ideas that completely miss the entire point of everything and then when people are like "wtf? this isn't remotely what anybody who wants to see fantastic four wants?" he gets butthurt his vision is trampled. Dude your vision fricking SUCKS
>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.
He sounds like such an butthole. What a shame.
Josh Trank sounds like a pretentious tool.
Fox ended up rebuilding the rented house he and his dogs demolished while filming, he went full Cocoon.
that describes 99% of the people who work in Hollywood
He's a colossal homosexual who blames everyone but himself. He even ended up here trying to defend himself and he only really made things worse. His career was ruined by himself, no matter how badly he wants to pretend like it was everyone else's fault.
>He even ended up here
I vaguely remember that. Was there actual proof it was him?
Not full proof, but consider this:
During the course of the thread, he said that Kang would be in a sequel. Up to this point most people believed Kang would've been part of Marvel Studios. It wasn't until a few days later that James Gunn confirmed Kang rights were over at Fox.
Some people who tried to talk about the thread on like a podcast or something, received a cease and desist or a takedown notice from Fox. That was what actually made people way more suspicious
Here were the people who got takedown notices talking about it.
The irony is that if Fox didn't send takedown notices, most people would've believed it was some guy pretending to be Trank
Somebody posted a whole thing here about him and his girlfriend being awful housemates and shitty people some years back.
Still wonder if all that was true, did anyone save it?
Never mind, got my answer
What was that?
Do we really need any story beyond "the movie sucked"?
No, but it was still a fun read.
Not really.
The only fun story about that movie was that rumor about Kate Mara shitting herself once, and even then it's likely bullshit.
Yes, because it was more entertaining than the film itself.
Seriously do you not remember the time Trank showed up on Cinemaphile
It sound more like he was fired for being unlikeable which he comes across in this interview, rather than being untalented which he is also.
>it's clobberin time was the thing Ben's brother used to say before beating the shit out of him
>Josh Trank was the obvious candidate to reinvigorate the Fantastic Four for 20th Century Fox.
First sentence and I'm already laughing.
To be fair I can kind of see the reasoning
>Chronicle was an unexpected hit
>this is the perfect guy for our movie about a team of superpowered people
It's an "out of touch greedy exec" kind of logic, but it's there.
>working on comic book movie
>hate comics
Many such cases!
Josh Trank is a c**t but most of the fault here lies with the studio for not knowing what they wanted at the beginning
It sounds like the studio had an idea ("do it like Marvel"), hired someone who didn't want to do that, and left him free reign.
The movie was only made to keep the rights. Fox is still to blame though.
the movie was made because Rupert Murdoch thought the Marvel rights FOX held were valuable to Marvel/Disney
he'd forced FOX to threaten to make a new Daredevil movie a few years prior and Marvel had said "sure, go ahead" and nothing happened because FOX had nothing in the pipeline to go ahead with, so the rights reverted at the end of their period
FOX typically takes a very long time to bring things to screen, First Class (2011) was conceived of five years prior and very little was done with the idea until much later, because they were still pursuing doomed projects like Wolverine Origins and the other aborted projects from that series - Magneto I think and Gambit - while everyone got older and everyone's calendars filled up; Deadpool took 7 years and Reynolds really pushing for it
with Fantastic Four they hadn't had any work done on the concept since somebody spitballed a Silver Surfer standalone movie, but then the FF sequel failed and nobody wanted to make that Surfer movie, so it got shelved
with Trank what they had was a young director who was relatively cheap and much too eager and naive about why they wanted him to work on this movie - he describes them being unsure about his hiring a buddy to write the script when what they really wanted was someone to make it look like they were moving forward
then at some point it all had critical mass and they idiotically decided to actually let Trank film, thinking they'd at least make some money back and would preserve the rights for another decade per the existing contract from back in the 80s, which is important if you're a studio that struggles to make a movie inside of a decade from having the idea, they were already looking to the next reboot and maybe hoping for a sleeper hit
that's how we end up with garbage, a process nobody oversaw because nobody cared which began as a naked rights grab because nobody cared ended with filming nobody oversaw because the they picked a paranoid junkie
First Class cannibalized on bits from the scrapped Magneto origin movie that was meant to follow from the Wolverine one.
This is basically the actual tl;dr.
>Josh Trank is a c**t but most of the fault here lies with the studio for not knowing what they wanted at the beginning
It sounds like they wanted a fun adventure blockbuster that'd get them Avengers money. They knew what they wanted, they just didn't know who could deliver it.
>Still seething enough to write all that shit down.
tl;dr?
only guy I feel bad for is Jeremy Slater. Sounds like he was the only one who understood what they were adapting.
Why superheroes movies fail (usually)
>Studio: We want X movie
>Director: I want Y movie
>Studio: Noooo stop we need to spend millions of dollars on reworking this movie we hate and hired you to direct and then rework it until none of it makes any sense but it's funnier
>Audiences hate it. It fails
>Studio: what the frick
The Flash, Justice League, FANT4STIC, Dark Phoenix.
These studios are so fricking stupid and cowardly. They are so afraid of criticism, they'll waste money in a panic just to save something with no direction.
Forgot suicide squad and one more I think
I agree but maybe we'd understand their motives better if we had examples of when studios stepped in and genuinely fixed things. I imagine a lot of gratuitous boobies came down to that
The Flash’s situation is pretty interesting because for a decade WB went through many interesting directors all of whom wanted to do a genuine Flash movie instead of a universe reset. Muschietti was the studio’s “guy” and it shows, movie is basically AI slop.
Remember when he posted here