Los Angeles, May 11 (IANS): Filmmaker Josh Trank says the failure of his much-anticipated "Fantastic Four" upended his life, making him broke from being "extremely successful professionally".
In 2015, the filmmaker's career fizzled out after the failure of "Fantastic Four" -- a reboot of the superhero film, which went on to lose millions of dollars at the box office. What followed was a blame game, with many pointing fingers towards Trank for the setback.
As Trank gets ready to be back with "Capone", which looks at the final year of Al Capone's life, the director has recalled how his life changed with the failure, reports variety.com.
"I didn't set out initially to make a movie about Al Capone at all. This came at a time when I had just experienced the most disastrous professional experience of my life. ‘Fantastic Four' had just been released. My life was upended," he began.
"I'd gone from being in a place where I was extremely successful professionally. For a good four-year period, I had experienced what it feels like to have the world at your fingertips. It was obviously a very surreal experience. It's kind of like being granted superpowers for a period of time. I was working with the most powerful corporations in the world and dealing with all the movers and shakers. I was in the pilot seat of the most expensive world class jet one can imagine," he explained.
The director continued: "I'd gone from that to broke and sitting in my backyard chainsmoking and not knowing what was going to happen in a few months when my bank account ran out. I had no professional opportunities coming my way in the near future."
He recalled the stories coming out at the time of the release.
"In the five months leading up to the release of ‘Fantastic Four' there were numerous stories in the press that described a person who had the same name as me -- Josh Trank -- who was allegedly a mess of a person, just destroying these movie sets and getting involved in all sorts of embarrassing situations. I'm reading about this person, who has my name, except I didn't remember any of these stories the way that they were being told to the public. My first reaction at the beginning was to feel very defensive and to want to defend myself. When I realised I couldn't defend myself against the way I was being characterised, I had to just sit there and spectate. I ended up with this very warped sense of my own identity. I felt I had no control over and no authorship of my own life. Once the movie was out and it was the disaster it seemed like it was going to be to everybody, I was kind of left with no story to tell of myself," Trank said.
Asked did the failure of "Fantastic Four" lead to "Capone", the director said: "While I was sitting out there with a few months of just no activity and just being immobile and doing a lot of therapy, this seed of an idea popped into my head based on all of my own reading about Al Capone from when I was a kid."
"I knew about that time in his life after he was released from Alcatraz when he was suffering from neurosyphilis. He was just in his own backyard in Palm Island smoking cigars and not really interacting with other people. He was so far away from being the reigning king of Chicago and one of the most powerful and feared men in the world. In my head, I just wondered what would it have been like for Al Capone to end his life being so far removed from the Al Capone that he got to be for awhile," he said, adding: "What would it be like if he flipped on the radio and heard a fictionalised radio play about Al Capone? How would he have felt about that? That's where it came from. I realised it was an important story for me to engage in as a human being and as a writer, because I had so much I wanted to explore with it. The more I started writing it, the more I realised that this is a story about an iconic figure in history, seen through a completely different window."
"Capone" stars Tom Hardy.