Josh Trank, who’s just coming off of directing the Fantastic Four reboot that has caused some rather awful fan arguments, somehow thought he could just leave his upcoming Star Wars Anthology project and not say anything about it, and everyone would just be cool. Of course, the Internet jumped right in to fill in the blanks with less-than-flattering assertions, so Trank has finally set the record straight about why he left every fan’s dream project.
“At first I was like, ‘I’m just not going to say anything because it will blow over,'” Trank said to the LA Times when asked why he recently left the project after about a year of work. “But I was shocked – it just hasn’t blown over. People get so excited to raise their pitchforks.”
And I’m surprised he didn’t know better, considering the reason he left the project was that he wanted creative freedom away from a giant, rabid fanbase. He went on,
I want to do something original after this because I’ve been living under public scrutiny, as you’ve seen, for the last four years of my life, and it’s not healthy for me right now in my life. I want to do something that’s below the radar.
I have a great relationship with everyone at Lucasfilm and with [Lucasfilm VP of Development] Kiri Hart. And they all understood it because this whole experience for me has been very psychologically hard.
Meanwhile, the Internet rumors described a Josh Trank who’d been increasingly difficult to work with on Fantastic Four and had been dropped from the Star Wars project by producer Simon Kinberg, who also produced and co-wrote Fantastic Four and was supposedly on the outs with Trank. However, both of them have shot down that rumor, with Trank saying,
Simon and I have become closer friends through this. To have the rest of the world – other than the people who know us – think that we’re in some blood feud with each other over something…
It feels sometimes like I’m living in a Paddy Chayefsky script or something like that. Every misconception that could possibly be made about this has been made to a hilariously satirical degree. And it’s people who haven’t met me before. If they met me – I don’t know, I feel like I’m a pretty harmless person.
That flies pretty contrary to an angry ranter on 4chan who claimed to be Trank, and weird rumors that his pet dogs had caused a very expensive amount of damage to the home he was staying in while working on Fantastic Four, which Trank also says is nonsense. True or not, the attention surrounding Trank’s involvement on both projects sounds like it was getting to be a circus, and it’s pretty understandable that he might want a break from it, despite that he said, “It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make in my life.”
I hope he can rest up a bit on whatever lower-key project he takes on next.
—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—
Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
