If you didn’t know, Mark Romanek was originally credited to act as director of Universal’s WOLFMAN but unfortunately things didn’t turn out so great for either he or the film. After a full year of working on pre-production, Romanek decided it was best to depart from his project and move on. Bummer. In a recent interview with NEVER LET ME GO director Mark Romanek, AICN found a few interesting tidbits about what actually happened between himself and Universal. Budget constraints? Creative control? Read the snippet below to get the juicy parts of the interview.
“It was a producer driven project. It was not a director driven project. I tried to make it be a director driven project or have it be a director driven project, but it was never going to be that. I should say an actor-director driven project. Benicio and I wanted to do a certain kind of film and when we ran that up the flagpole nobody saluted. So, it was best to bow out because they knew what they wanted and it was better for them to have a filmmaker that was going to be more collaborative, I guess, toward that end. I saw it in the film. Some of the design remained and some of the locations I picked, but that’s about it, though.”
“And so it seemed better to let them find a filmmaker that was more suited to their goals. And they are good guys, they are nice guys. I don’t think they are like evil bad guys, they just wanted to make a certain kind of film. That’s what they believed in and that’s really true. I would work with any of those guys again, it just didn’t work out. Sometimes you just can’t get on the same page, which is fine. I have no regrets about it. It was a very traumatic decision to leave that film because I worked on it for almost a year, but I don’t regret leaving because it was the right decision, but it was a hard decision.”
What do you think about this whole deal? Strike down below and tell us if you would’ve preffered to see Romanek’s WOLFMAN instead?
Emily Blunt