The long, ugly, and often delayed road to “The Wolfman” came to an end last Friday when the film, with an estimated budget somewhere in the $150 million range opened to scathing reviews and in third place. Through it all, director Joe Johnston has been surprisingly chipper and remarkably forthcoming in interviews especially for a director who joined the film only four weeks away from its shooting start date and whose name will forever be saddled with this trainwreck. Speaking to Time Out London, Johnston very clearly outlines the various issues that left to original director Mark Romanek’s departure and what of his vision of the film remained intact. What emerges is a portrait of a film that probably would’ve been better off (and cheaper) had Romanek stayed on board.
While Romanek was rumored to have butted heads with producers, it was his request to have an additional twenty days to shoot — that was turned down by the studio — that led him to leave. Johnston got the gig by saying he would be able shoot the existing script in eighty days — only to end up adding seventeen pages to the script, thus expanding the shooting schedule that Romanek had wanted anyway. “One of the issues with the previous director was that he had said he needed another 20 days and that became one of the areas of disagreement that led to [the studio] looking for a new director. I told them I could do it. But after I was hired, we soon added about 17 pages back to the script, so that schedule no longer applied.”
And while Johnston does credit Romanek with making “a lot of the correct choices,” there was a small rewrite done on the script by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self and sequences in the original draft that were cut to save time and money…..sequences that were eventually filmed in reshoots anyway because they turned out to be integral to the film (/foreheadslap): “In the original script, there was a much longer sequence at the end and one in London where the Wolfman is loose,” Johnston explains. ‘They were both cut to save money. We shot the film, put it together and it was immediately apparent why those sequences were in the story, and so we went back to shoot a bunch of new stuff for the end. We reshot other stuff as well. That has happened to me several times: you try and save money, and you say the movie will work without this, then you find something is lacking after you shoot, [and] you need to go back and do it.”
As for the ending, Johnson says he filmed and “enhanced” one of the two versions that was already in the script. “There were two versions of the ending [that] involved the fate of the Wolfman. When we went back to shoot the new stuff, we enhanced one, because our suspicion was it was going to be the more dynamic ending. So we shot new stuff for that, the B-version, which is now the version in the film.” Johnston goes on to clarify, “It was two versions of an ending. One was where one character died, and in the other version, the other character died. After our first preview it was clear we wanted the ending to go one way. We extended it, made it more rewarding.” Thus it’s not that much of a surprise that two sets of editors at one time were trying to make something salvageable out of a film that producer Scott Stuber said was “running long with all the extra footage.”
So let’s just summarize: Romanek left because he needed more time to shoot, more time which Johnston got anyway. Sequences from the original draft were cut to save money, only to be reinstated because they were made sense. And the ending was one of the versions that was being considered from Day 1 anyway.
As much as we like to rag on Johnston around here, any director brought in with only a few weeks before a film is set to shoot on a project this big is going to be forever chasing their tail. And that’s certainly not helped when your bosses aren’t exactly sure what they are looking for in the first place. We think Universal (naively) wanted to kick start a franchise on the cheap and got burned in the process. Had Romanek been given the extra shooting days he asked for, and been left to bring his vision to the screen, Universal could’ve saved themselves a lot of time, money and aggravation and probably would’ve had a better film in the can as a result.
Remember Hollywood, indecision is expensive.
