Thanks to a fascinating profile over at Polygon, we now know a lot more about what Josh Trank went through with Fantastic Four. At the time, many of us were too wrapped up in the scandalous claims made about his work on the film to appreciate that he was a young filmmaker put in an unenviable spot by a studio system that's difficult for even the most experienced director to navigate.
It's clear that there was more to the story than meets the eye and, to put it bluntly, he was clearly treated terribly by Fox and prevented from making the film he wanted. The fallout from that was, of course, significant, and it led to him walking away from a Boba Fett movie at Lucasfilm.
That's all in the past now, though, and Trank is currently doing the rounds to promote his new film Capone starring Tom Hardy (which will be available on VOD on Tuesday, May 12). However, when we recently caught up with the filmmaker to discuss that movie, we had to ask what he had planned for the iconic bounty hunter and, unfortunately, NDAs mean he can't say much!
"The simple answer is, I signed so many NDAs that there would be no possible way I could discuss that in a responsible manner," Trank admits. "What I would say is that as a filmmaker, why I'm so excited to be talking about [Capone] and why I'm so excited about everything going forward as opposed to where I was when I was working on Boba Fett and Fantastic Four and all of these other extremely high profile, very secretive projects, is the fact that I'm not a very secretive person by nature, and when you're working on those kinds of movies, you're not allowed to talk about anything you're doing."
"You also know that everybody who loves these movies and loves what you love, they want to know about what's going on and you want to talk about it so desperately because you want to share that with everybody and you don't want to close yourself off from the community of fandom that you relate to. There's no way I can talk about any of that stuff, except that it was something that obviously I was so excited about," he continues.
However, the director could talk a little about what it was like for him to be part of that Lucasfilm machine, even if it was only for a brief time.
"The fact that all of the people at Lucasfilm I had the honour to work with for a little over two years are really close friends of mine to this day. We had so much fun together. The people who work up there in San Francisco are just the most creative, cool people I had ever gotten to work with before I started working on Fonzo [Capone's original title]."
It's a shame to think that we'll never learn more about Trank's ideas for Boba Fett, but still fascinating to hear what it was like to be part of a Star Wars movie.
Next week, we'll have more highlights from our interview, focusing on why Hardy was the right choice to play Al Capone and the filmmaker's thoughts on potentially writing, directing and editing all of his future projects after Fantastic Four.
You'll also be able to read our review on Monday, and we'll have some comments for you on his ideas for Venom later today as well. In the meantime, we want to extend a huge thank you to Josh for taking the time to talk to us, and you can check out the trailer for Capone in the player below:
Once a ruthless businessman and bootlegger who ruled Chicago with an iron fist, Alfonse Capone was the most infamous and feared gangster of American lore. At the age of 47, following nearly a decade of imprisonment, dementia rots Alfonse’s mind and his past becomes present. Harrowing memories of his violent and brutal origins melt into his waking life. As he spends his final year surrounded by family with the FBI lying in wait, this ailing patriarch struggles to place the memory of the location of millions of dollars he hid away on his property.