Josh Trank burst onto the scene with CHRONICLE, a found-footage sci-fi/thriller which starred Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, and Michael B. Jordan as three high-school students who gain telekinetic powers after being exposed to a strange object in a cave. The film was a critical and commercial success, which led to plenty of studios approaching Josh Trank with offers for bigger projects, but Trank chose to tackle FANTASTIC FOUR, a reboot of Marvel's popular superhero team.
As we know, FANTASTIC FOUR wasn't exactly the success which Fox had hoped for, and much as been written about the rumoured behind-the-scenes shenanigans which occurred during the lengthy reshoots. Josh Trank recently sat down with Polygon to discuss a variety of topics, including getting candid about FANTASTIC FOUR. When he got the gig, Trank tasked Jeremy Slater with penning the script, but while Slater looked at THE AVENGERS as a template for what they should be doing, Trank wanted to go in the opposite direction, at least for the first film.
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 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." While Trank doesn't recall receiving any complaints from 20th Century Fox during the production of FANTASTIC FOUR, the first cut of the film apparently caught the studio off-guard, who said that it wasn't the "marketable romp" they were expecting. Fox brought in several other writers to pen the reshoots, as well as hired Stephen Rivkin to re-edit the film. Trank worked on his own cut with the hope that the studio would test-screen both versions, but felt defeated when Fox's rewrites were clearly catered towards Rivkin's version.
When the reshoots of FANTASTIC FOUR began, Josh Trank was still involved, albeit without much power on the set.
“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 yes or no.” This time, Trank said yes. He wanted to keep his job.
Before production began on FANTASTIC FOUR, Trank had been hired to direct a standalone STAR WARS film, but when word emerged of the troubles FANTASTIC FOUR was experiencing, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and Josh Trank agreed that he would sit out Star Wars Celebration in April 2015, with Trank later telling his managers that he wanted out. "I quit because I knew I was going to be fired if I didn’t quit," Trank said. One project which the director was also involved in following the success of CHRONICLE was a sequel, but Trank clearly didn't want the film to happen. Max Landis had written a script which focused on a young girl who was obsessed with Matt (Alex Russell) from the first movie and had built her own Iron Man-style suit in an attempt to become a superhero herself. Trank described the script as "fine," but that it had "nothing to do with why I wanted to do" the first movie. When development on the sequel began to move foward, Trank did everything he could to shut it down.
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 will soon be making his grand return with CAPONE, a crime biopic which stars Tom Hardy as notorious gangster Al Capone. The film takes a look at the final years of the mob boss as he suffers from the debilitating effects of syphilis after nearly a decade of imprisonment. Given that COVID-19 has shut-down theaters across the nation, CAPONE will be receiving a home-premiere VOD release on May 12th as a on-demand 48-hour rental.