FANTASTIC FOUR: Josh Trank Lawyers Up As Shocking Details About His On Set Behaviour Emerge
If you love behind the scenes drama, Fantastic Four is the gift which keeps on giving. The Hollywood Reporter has an in-depth article up about how Josh Trank allegedly behaved on set, and it sounds like the director was most definitely to blame for how the reboot turned out. After sending an email to select members of the cast days before the movie was released in which he said Fantastic Four was "better than 99 percent of the comic-book movies ever made," he received a response from one cast member with only: "I don’t think so." Ouch. With Fox furious about his now deleted Tweet about the movie, the trade reveals that pit-bull lawyer Marty Singer has been hired to advocate on Trank's behalf. So, what exactly happened on set? Here are the highlights:
-Trank apparently didn't produce good enough material to ever create a film which could be salvaged, and refused help from the studio and producers. "He holed up in a tent and cut himself off from everybody," one insider tells the site. "He built a black tent around his monitor. He was extremely withdrawn. [He] would go to his trailer and he wouldn’t interact with anybody."
-While Fox initially had faith in Trank's vision of a grounded and gritty Fantastic Four movie, it appears as if the filmmaker took that too far as he forced a gloomy tone on the movie by obsessing over the cast's performance. "During takes, he would be telling [cast members] when to blink and when to breathe. He kept pushing them to make the performance as flat as possible."
-You may remember some time ago that Josh Trank and his dogs were accused of causing as much as $100,000 worth of damage to a house which was rented for him in Baton Rouge by Fox. After landlord Martin Padial made moves to evict the director, "photographs of the landlord’s family that were in the house were defaced. Padial made a complaint to the local sheriff’s department and filed a civil suit in Louisiana that is sealed.The sheriff’s department says the case was 'closed as a civil matter between landlord and tenant.'"
-Before you completely blame Trank for how Fantastic Four turned out, one source says that the movie was always "ill-conceived, made for the wrong reasons and there was no vision behind the property." Fox were terrified of losing the rights to Marvel and the reboot was in chaos before shooting even started. They "were afraid of losing the rights so they pressed forward and didn’t surround [Trank] with help or fire him. They buried their heads in the sand."
-While they initially considered firing Trank, Fox had faith in the director and believed he could be the next J.J. Abrams. However, as it became apparent that he couldn't cope with the movie, it was simply to late to ditch him. "How do you ask someone to take over half of a movie shot by someone else? You either hire somebody desperate for work or you [start over], write off pretty much the whole budget and lose the cast." Fair point!
-Those reshoots have been blamed for the poor quality of Fantastic Four, but the movie apparently didn't even have an ending when shooting concluded. Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker scrambled to come up with something, but the former's busy schedule and the fact that much of the cast was unavailable led to "a lot of material was shot with doubles and the production moved to Los Angeles to film scenes with Teller against a green screen. 'It was chaos,' says a crew member, adding that Trank was still in attendance 'but was neutralized by a committee.'"
-Who was responsible for that terrible ending and second act? Fox reportedly put together a dream team to rescue the move, and that included Drew Goddard. Whatever he and the rest of that team did obviously failed horribly!
