fantastic four
Marvel’s first family returns, to head up the 10 Coolest Movies Coming Your Way, including...
Director Josh Trank
Starring Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kat e Mara , Jami e Bell, Toby Kebbell
ETA 6 August
We’ve been here before. Back in 2005, two superhero movies were released within a few weeks of each other. One was Fantastic Four, a garish, goofy actioner that got a bit of a pasting from all who saw it. The other? Batman Begins... Ten years and one MCU later, the Fab Four are trying again – this time landing their reboot right in the middle of the most crowded blockbuster season in years. But forget whatever you think you know about Marvel’s other super quartet; this time, they’re getting it right.
Created in 1961 by Stan Lee to compete with DC’s Justice League, Fantastic Four became one of Marvel’s bestselling and best-loved comic series. The concept is simple: four young geeks botch an experiment and get a faceful of cosmic rays. One acquires bendy limbs (Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic), another turns into a flying fireball ( Johnny Storm/The Human Torch), the lady vanishes (Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman) and the final guy wakes up as a giant rock monster (Ben Grimm/The Thing). One of the comic books' biggest fans was
Chronicle wunderkind Josh Trank, who watched the 2005 film with more disappointment than most. “I always felt very, very personally and emotionally connected to the Fantastic Four,” he explains. “I was always an outsider growing up. I had severe social anxiety and never fitted in, I was bullied a lot, and I just felt a kinship with these characters.” And, after making waves with his genre-busting 2012 super-kids debut, he got the opportunity to do justice to the series when 20th Century Fox came looking for someone to make the fantastic film the Four always deserved.
Working with fellow super-fan Simon Kinberg, writer and producer of the X-Men series, Trank had a super-clear idea of what he wanted – and it wasn’t what anyone expected. The new buzzwords
were youth, energy, realism, grit and, er, body horror. “I always bring up David Cronenberg,” says Trank, “but does this movie feel like a Cronenberg movie? Not really. It’s like when I say it's ‘Dark Amblin’; I'm saying it's a movie about kids who are going to do something extraordinary and the consequences are going to be magical in a lot of ways... But in a darker, more cynical way than you would have seen in your typical Amblin movie.”
“One of my favourite directors of all time is [ the late British director] Alan Clarke,” he carries on, muddying the waters yet further. “I don't know how many people directing superhero movies would start referencing Alan Clarke but, for me, whenever I think of a truly challenging, honest depiction of being lost in youth, in my mind I always go to the way that Clarke would depict childhood in Scum [ 1979 banned borstal drama] and Made In Britain [ 1982 skinhead TV movie]. In those kinds of films, you're getting a slice of life.”
So that’s The Fly via Spielberg meets Ray Winstone wielding a sockful of snooker balls? Clearly, the all-new Fantastic Four were set to be a breed apart from Jessica Alba and Chris Evans in matching unitards...
Castin g against hype
All the film needed now was its four fresh leads. Picking actors instead of stars and deliberately casting against type, Trank and Kinberg chose rising Chronicle star Michael B. Jordan, just risen Whiplash lead Miles Teller, House Of Cards standout Kate Mara and ex- Billy Elliot Jamie Bell. Met with a mumble of mild confusion from fans, the new line-up seemed to fly in the face of everything Fantastic Four used to stand for: no chiselled jaws, no platinum blondes and, oddest of all, no massive muscle-man to play the Thing.
“I asked Josh if he was crazy,” says the 5ft7 Bell, laughing, of taking the role most expected would go to a WWE star twice his size. “It didn’t make any sense. I’m not big and brooding... I’m pretty small. I couldn’t possibly fill the shoes of a 6ft8 rock man. But he persuaded me. He said, ‘Do the unexpected – give people what they want but don’t take the obvious route in getting there’.”
“There’s something nice about the unknown,” agrees Teller, who leads the group as the elastic Mr Fantastic, “if only because it seems like there’s less and less of that. A lot of this movie is dealing with power. I think we’re exploring that through these four kids who are at an age where they’re not jaded, they’re wide-eyed and thirsty for this sense of discovery and being the first ones. They kind of do that naively and that’s what ends up screwing them. They think they’re untouchable...”
Untouchable at least until the despicable Doctor Doom shows up, that is. Borrowing plotlines and tonal shifts from Marvel’s Ultimates, the film introduces Victor Domashev as the fifth member of the team, played by Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes’ Toby Kebbell.
"It's 'Dark Amblin'-extraordiary and magical in a darker, more cynical way"
“They’re brought together from different places for different reasons, and Victor is a big part of the group when we first meet them,” explains Kinberg, “He’s a complicated guy, a darker figure, but he’s just a normal guy. We see him transform like them and react differently...” Cue more Cronenberg references and the crux of the whole film: with all five youngsters having to adjust to their new “afflictions” and pick a side, the good guys quickly realise that four supers are better than one.
“What’s nice about Four is that you don’t have to feel the weight of an entire franchise on your shoulders,” agrees Teller. “For me, I always prefer an ensemble. I enjoy acting in that way. And there’s no ego on this. It’d be very difficult if there was one clear star and then a bunch of other people, but that’s not how it is.”
A boy genius who gets his big break too early, Reed Richards might develop the ability to shapeshift his limbs into long elastic tubes but his real power is his head. “He’s a very intelligent guy,” says Teller, “so whenever Reed was talking about quantum physics or bio-mechanical engineering or complex mathematics, you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about! Josh sent me these Quantum Physics For Dummies books...” With a bromantic comedy ( That Awkward
Moment), a YA blockbuster ( Divergent) and a Sundance- and Oscar-winning indie ( Whiplash) to his name in the last year, Teller is almost as elastic as Richards at the moment. But this new character is arguably his toughest to date, encompassing all the aspects of his last few roles at once: cracking jokes, busting blocks and
suffering his own share of mental anguish.
“With Reed as a person, you get that he’s not super social,” says Teller, “his whole journey through life has been pretty isolated. The only person who kind of understands him is Ben Grimm, so that friendship means a lot to him. When the accident happens it changes everything. In a way, they all lose their innocence. Reed blames himself, I think...”
Fanboy-ing the flam es
Foil to Richards’ overstretched superbrain is the ultimate hothead, Jordan’s Johnny Storm. Bursting into flames, shooting fire from his fingers and flying through the sky like a burning comet, The Human Torch basically gets all the cool powers.
“Exactly!” agrees Jordan, reuniting with both Trank (after they jointly rose to fame on Chronicle) and Teller (following That Awkward Moment). “I was a diehard fan before I signed on. I went to comic stores as a kid and picked whatever caught my eye, and I’ve always been a big FF fanboy. Johnny is charismatic. He’s impatient. He’s eager. And he’s the cool one!” Pegging his character as “the glue that holds the group together” and wielding a mean CG fireball (which he hasn’t had a chance to see on screen as yet), Jordan says his standout moment came when he got to scream The Human Torch’s famous self-igniting catchphrase – most definitely still a big part of the new film. “I didn’t practice the ‘Flame On!’ at all,” he laughs, “but the crew were all waiting for it on set that day and I got a big round of applause. As a fanboy, that’s about as cool as it gets...”
Slightly less enthused was Kate Mara, whose big power is... not being seen. “It was a bit of a bummer, not being around for the big action stuff,” she admits of being CG’d out of the set-pieces as Johnny’s invisible sister, Sue. “But Josh had a very specific idea for how the invisibility was going to look. It was never just going to be as simple as holding your hand out and disappearing at will, it was supposed to feel like the weight of the world was on your shoulders: physically and mentally exhausting. He told me it was going to feel like Sue was holding her breath underwater.”
Best known for series such as House Of Cards and American Horror Story, Mara might have already earned her place in Marvel movie trivia by popping up in Iron Man 2 as one of Tony Stark’s would-be conquests but Fantastic Four is her biggest film by far. “None of us has done anything like this before though,” she says. “Miles had Divergent but this is a whole other thing. It’s impossible to not be bonded by that experience and we really did become a little family. There are no sidekicks in this movie; the Fantastic Four is a unit and they’re at their best when they’re together. Off-camera, it’s kind of like I have three new brothers, which is... exhausting! Miles is definitely the most sarcastic, Michael and I have the best back-and-forth and Jamie is the sweet and sensitive one. But don’t tell the boys I said that!”
Wait, he’s sweet as well as slight? What kind of giant rock monster is this? A far cry from Michael Chicklis’ rubber wrestler suit in the first two
Fantastic Four movies, the new Thing is rendered entirely in CG from Bell’s motion-capture performance. And it’s not just the tech that’s changed; Trank wanted his biggest star to be more man than monster. “I’m the muscle but I’m definitely also the heart,” agrees Bell in his thick Teesside drawl. “When you think of The Thing or the Hulk, you think of them as big blocks, as monsters. Josh said to me, ‘Think of Edward Scissorhands instead’. He’s still got the
"Invisibility was never going to be simple"
strength, for sure, but there are a lot of moments in the film where The Thing tries, and often fails, to be a normal human being.” He suddenly catches himself and laughs: “Whenever I start talking about story points, a little red dot appears on my chest and slowly moves up between my eyes...”
Standing on stilts and covered in tiny dots (albeit not from imaginary snipers’ laser sights), Bell spent lots of time inside a mo-cap studio for his super-sized performance. Luckily, he happens to know the leading exponent in the field. “I’ve been very fortunate to have worked with Andy Serkis more than once [ on King Kong and The Adventures Of Tintin] and I’ve seen first-hand how he harnesses the technology,” says Bell. “Gollum is a piece of cinematic history, so is Caesar. Andy could probably play a piece of bacon if he wanted to – there’s nothing he can’t do. But when he gets on set, he’s no longer Andy Serkis. Seeing that up close was a real advantage.
“I learned that you have to sort of throw yourself at the wall, like a Jackson Pollock painting. And you have to do your homework. So I watched a lot of videos of heavyweight boxers. I liked the way they carried themselves – they’re heavy but they’re also kind of twitchy at the same time. They’re always stretching out their muscles and cracking their back, stuff like that. And I worked with a movement coach, Richard Ryan, who’s done everything from Lord Of The Rings to Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, and most of that was to not play the monster. It was to not do the physical affectations that you expect and to try and always bring it back to the teenage kid who’s stuck inside, still getting used to all this size and mass.”
The departed
Leading the charge into the film’s biggest action set-pieces – including the scene in the trailer that really wowed CinemaCon, when The Thing slam-dunks a truck from an airplane – Bell’s physical performance was just one of the challenges of what’s now being reported as a notoriously tough shoot. Dogged by rumours of stress during filming, Trank made a sudden exit from the upcoming second Star Wars spin-off on 1 May (after being a mystifying no-show during the Star Wars Celebration), blamed on the pressures of helming Fantastic Four.
“Look, all these big movies are challenging and stressful,” says blockbuster veteran Kinberg, who’s still producing the Lucasfilm project without Trank. “There’s so much riding on a title like
Fantastic Four, and big movies are big movies. We were shooting in a hot, sweaty Baton Rouge in the middle of summer with storms blowing through 100-degree days, with technology that nobody had ever used before and, yes, there were a lot of unique challenges. But the thing about Josh is, from our first conversation to, literally, a few days ago, it’s all been about the characters
"This movie is really stripped down, really grounded, and really raw"
for him, just as it was with Chronicle. Everything has to feel real for him.”
Reality remains the driving force for the whole film even if it ended up putting Trank’s career on the line. Whether it’s painfully real transformation effects, forging chemistry between the leads or a script that keeps itself firmly grounded in science,
Fantastic Four is all about bringing the superhero movie into Trank’s world.
“Josh was persistent that everything had to be logical,” says Bell. “Inter-dimensional travel isn’t possible at the moment so we’re taking some liberties, of course, but in terms of the design, in terms of having a smart kid who has an idea and someone who’ll listen to it, that’s pretty common. All these internet start-ups are led by 20 year olds, they’re leading the way with technology. It’s about the grown-ups giving the kids a chance.” “I think that’s ultimately why
Fantastic Four will feel really different from all the other superhero movies,” adds Kinberg, keenly aware the Fantastic Four have another fight on their hands: fending off the Avengers and Ant-Man in the battle for audiences’ attention. “If you had to plot the tone of the movie on the DC/Marvel spectrum it’s closest to X-Men, but it’s all the way on the edge... The X-Men movies are slightly heightened and operatic but this is really stripped down, really grounded, and really raw.”
Not that it’s all Doom and gloom – as Mara points out, “No-one’s gonna be crying their way through a Fantastic Four movie...” – with everyone keen to keep some of the colour of the comics. It is, after all, a film about a bunch of kids who (eventually) have a lot of fun with their powers. “The comics have an optimism, a hopefulness to them which is very different from, say, Batman,” Kinberg continues. “It’s a brighter universe, and
we wanted to honour that by making sure the movie didn’t feel dour. But no matter how many buildings you destroy, no matter how many cities you level, that’s not as good as seeing a character you care about get scared. That’s how we’re different: you’ve never seen Sue Storm about to die, you’ve never seen Reed Richards not able to control his power at the moment where the stakes for the whole world are meaningful. And you’ve never seen The Thing...”
So what’s next? With the whole cast buoyed up about the possibility of working with each other again for another five (according to Jordan and Mara) or eight (says Bell) years, the modernday Fantastic Four can’t get their origin story out of the way quick enough.
“We were thinking about future films right from the start,” laughs Kinberg. “We’ve already talked a lot about FF2 – and we’re very actively working on that – and also about ways that we could cross them over into a shared universe with the X-Men.”
“I would certainly hope so!” chips in Jordan, barely containing his inner fanboy. “There are so many different possible storylines for the Fantastic Four, so many different villains, so many friends and best-friends coming together. Human Torch and Spider-Man are best friends in the comics, so... who knows!”