For a period back in 2015, Josh Trank was Hollywood’s wunderkind. Coming off the back of found-footage superhero flick Chronicle (opens in new tab), the director was working away at Fantastic Four (opens in new tab) and was linked to a Star Wars movie centred on Boba Fett. As we now know, neither project worked out as expected, with Fantastic Four being critically panned and the Star Wars movie never coming to fruition.
Word quickly spread that Trank had been fired from the project due to his “erratic” behaviour on the set of Fantastic Four – claims he has denied. In a new interview with Polygon (opens in new tab), Trank has since claimed that he was not fired from Star Wars but quit after finding that working within the studio system was proving difficult.
“I quit because I knew I was going to be fired if I didn’t quit,” he told the publication.
Trank also revealed that, while mulling over an offer from LucasFilm to work on a Star Wars movie, he had walked to George Lucas’ house and, on the journey back, he formed his three-act Boba Fett movie. “The visions that I had in that moment were just out of this world,” he said.
The filmmaker has previously said that he had not wanted to comment on the Star Wars situation because “it would blow over”.
“But I was shocked,” he continued, “it just hasn’t blown over. People get so excited to raise their pitchforks. I knew that this was going to be questioned and it was going to come under scepticism as to why I left Star Wars, and it was hard.”
The Boba Fett movie never came to pass, and instead morphed into Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian – and you can read about the Mandalorian season 2 (opens in new tab) here. Trank, meanwhile, has a new movie coming out, Capone, about the later life of Al Capone.
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