Josh Trank seems to have his career back in swing with the Tom Hardy drama, Capone, but his past problems are VERY well-documented. Once a rising star after his debut film, Chronicle, Trank hit an epic downward spiral that saw his Fantastic Four movie bomb like few superhero movies ever; followed by his public exit from a Star Wars spinoff featuring Boba Fett. And there were other projects he was part of that blew up for reasons that, honestly, have a lot to do with Trank’s attitude and inability to handle pressure.
In an insanely good Polygon interview conducted over four years, Trank talks about making it big with the found-footage superhero movie Chronicle, then watching everything he built after that crumble. The troubles faced by Trank’s movies have been written about repeatedly, but this is the first time we’ve heard the filmmaker talk about the anxiety he was under at the time, and it all starts with Fantastic Four. The 2014 movie will go down as one of the biggest flops ever, inconceivable when one thinks of the popular Marvel Comics team. The first bold move Trank made was to cast his Chronicle star, Michael B. Jordan, as Johnny Storm, and fans weren’t happy. Like, dangerously unhappy, to the point that Trank had to protect himself by keeping a .38 Special on him…
“I was getting threats on IMDb message boards saying they were going to shoot me,” Trank said.
“I was so fucking paranoid during that shoot,” said Trank. “If someone came into my house, I would have ended their f*cking life. When you’re in a head space where people want to get you, you think, ‘I’m going to defend myself.’”
The problems didn’t end there. Fantastic Four saw multiple rewrites and reshoots to try and fix Trank’s strange, somber, incomplete comic book movie. It was all out of the director’s hands at that point, with producers taking over creative control…
“It was like being castrated,” Trank says. “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.”
At the same time he was working on that, Trank was also involved in a Star Wars spinoff movie that would feature Boba Fett. If you recall, Trank’s battles with Fox over Fantastic Four made their way to Lucasfilm, who grew antsy about keeping him as director. They even dismissed him from Star Wars Celebration where he was supposed to officially announced the movie. It wasn’t long after that he was relieved of his duties, or at least that was the public story. Trank says he actually quit to save Lucasfilm the trouble of firing him…
“I quit because I knew I was going to be fired if I didn’t quit,” he revealed.
Those are the two biggest projects Trank has been attached to that ran into troubles, but there were others. There was the Shadow of the Colossus adaptation that never happened, and…oh yeah, there was that time he was going to direct Venom. Remember that? It was back during Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man years, long before Tom Hardy would take the antihero to blockbuster glory.
So what happened to Trank’s shelved Spidey spinoff? It was a case of Trank, who was riding high after Chronicle, being unwilling to compromise his creative vision…
“I didn’t like how [‘Venom’ producer] Matt Tolmach was coming at me in that situation, because it felt very kind of authoritative,” the filmmaker explained. “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.”
And that was pretty much it. This would become a pattern for Trank, this unwillingness to do what the studios expect of him. The same goes for a planned Chronicle sequel, which Trank never wanted to see happen and thus did everything in his power to derail it…
“I made it difficult for them to set up meetings,” said Trank. “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.”
I can’t stress enough how good of a read this interview is. There’s a lot more in there of interest about Trank and the issues he’s had. Check it out in full here. Trank’s next movie, Capone, opens on May 12th.
