The 'Chronicle' director claims his friends fell away and his career prospects in the entertainment industry diminished following the disastrous superhero movie back in 2015.
- May 17, 2020
AceShowbiz - "Capone" director Josh Trank's "Fantastic Four " disaster inspired his latest movie, revealing he felt like a broken man after his blockbuster flopped.
Like gangster Al Capone in his final days, Trank started chain-smoking as friends fell away and his career prospects diminished - and it reminded him of Deirdre Capone's recollections of her uncle at the end of his life.
"The story paralleled my own life," he says. "Fantastic Four had just come out and it was a massive box office disaster on a historically unprecedented scale. My career went down in flames. Before that movie fell apart I was in a very enviable position in the industry, where my first movie (Chronicle) came out and it was a number one movie at the box office and was a huge success. I was getting the opportunity to engage with all the biggest franchises and was working at the highest level in our business, and everything fell to pieces."
"Before I knew it, I was sitting in my backyard in eerie silence, chain-smoking two packs a day of cigarettes without anyone really calling me, save for some few close friends and family. I was dealing with my own personal trauma from that experience, facing it every day without any sense of my life going in any direction after that."
"I remembered the stories about the end of Al Capone's life, when he was released from Alcatraz (prison) and sitting in his backyard in Palm Island puffing on cigars in his near vegetative state, reflecting on his own self-inflicted drama and all of the unresolved loose ends from a life that he led, maybe 10 years prior when he was the king of the world so to speak."
"There he was with his bank account dwindling, his life in shambles and being haunted by memories from his past. I wanted to be able to write about that because I knew that what I was feeling was from a fairly unique experience that needed some sort of a cinematic documentation."
The film, which stars Tom Hardy as Capone, is now available on-demand in the U.S.
