INT: Tim Story

Combining
his creativity and passion for music and film, young and passionate
director Tim Story kicked off his career by directing hip hop music
videos. He went on to make his
feature studio debut with BARBERSHOP before jumping on the
remarkable opportunity to adapt and bring Marvel Comics’ FANTASTIC
FOUR into life on the silver screen. A
big fan of the comic series, he exuded great enthusiasm when
interviewed a few moths back at the FF2 set visit.
Check out what Story had to say about his return to helm the
sequel, FANTASTIC
FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER
SURFER.

Tim
Story

What was
your biggest challenge with this movie so far?
The most complicated piece to put together?

I
guess it’s been figuring out what the Silver Surfer’s going to
look like and more importantly what his powers actually are, how
they look and the definition of what the Silver Surfer does in the
comics is pretty vague. A
couple of things like dealing with light was to figure out here we
have a character that is all powerful in a kind of a way we wanted
it, he could pretty much control matter and when you give somebody
that kind of control you can go wherever you want to go, so it’s
really been figuring out his power and then of course bringing that
to life in so much of the stuff we’ve done. So it really goes into
building the action sequences for the most part.

What did
you decide, as far as the Silver Surfer is concerned?

Let
me be as vague as I can be. We
do take advantage of the fact that he can change matter, which
allows him to have some really cool powers and you guys will see
this in the action sequences and definitely in the trailer that’s
being prepared. He does
have a very powerful force in the sense that Johnny has a fireball
that he can throw. The
Surfer has a pretty powerful power blast as well, and then of course
flight and his relationship with his board, we get some really cool
advantages to being able to do some interesting things with his
board that once again I won’t give away, but they’ve been very
creative in this way.

Can you
talk in just general terms about mounting a sequel to a film like
this. It’s obviously a
lot bigger, but beyond that what’s your approach to making this?

It’s
interesting because first and foremost you think about the
characters and their personal stories and wanting to go with those.
One of the biggest things that we all know about is that Reed
Richards and Sue Storm at some point get married and it seems pretty
obvious that the next chapter would involve them getting married,
because at some point they have kids and so on.
So there were some things that were fairly obvious.
I knew that Ben Grimm and in his last story was all about him
wanting to get out of this body that he’s been “given”, and
now he is comfortable in it. So apart from him being comfortable,
where else do you go with him and his girlfriend Alicia’s
relationship.

Johnny’s
the biggest playboy and cool kid that you can imagine, what
responsibilities can you now throw on him that he actually has to
deal with, and then some other surprises that we’ve definitely
taken the liberty to go into. I’d
definitely have to keep them a surprise, but there’s some stuff in
there when you think about where else can you go with these powers
and everything else to be taken full advantage of.
So in getting to the sequel you first start there and then of
course the next thing is the idea that I wanted more action.
We wanted to bring back Doom and have Doom be the real issue,
and bringing all of that together, I think we’ve accomplished
quite a lot.

Were there
specific elements of the mythology that you wanted to get into this
film that you felt you weren’t able to get into the first one?
Obviously the Silver Surfer.

Yeah,
that’s a really good question.
I think that the first film, as much as I wanted to be able
to expand a lot of other things, I think for the most part it hit on
the family element. There was a big issue with the Fan Four taking
advantage of their stardom and making money and being rich.
I wanted to bring up this idea that now they’re actually
are in business and they’re well off.
For the comic book characters we have out there, there
weren’t a lot well off as far as just running a corporation.
There was a lot of that I wanted to get involved.

I
wanted to bring the high tech world to it in terms of Reed Richards,
because in the first one the story really revolved around him not
making a lot of money and I had more of an industrial space, and in
this case I wanted this to be a little bit more prone to what we
know him for, which is technology.
So it was all of those, and then of course like you said the
Silver Surfer being added in and hopefully we have an opportunity to
take Victor and Reed’s relationship somewhere else as well, so
there was all of that.

Generally in this genre, this kind of successful corporate world is the
source of all evil. How
did you make it work for these good people who are rich and have
corporate power?

We
actually used that to our advantage in the story, that these are
good people and when it comes down to a group of people that have
every intention of being good. Once you have to deal with running a
corporation and what headaches that brings to being who you are, I
think any of us say ‘money is the root of all evil,’ but I
don’t know about that. We took advantage of using the fact that
now they have all these other responsibilities in terms of business
and everything else. We
used that to our advantage and incorporated it into the story
telling in this next film. So
we did have to finesse it but at the same time it really brought a
good layer to the personal story that these four superheroes have.

Tell us a
bit about the car and that you want to get involved in the design of
it.

It’s
just the coolest thing in the world.
We tried to get the Fantasticar in the last movie and it
didn’t make sense for it to come that early.
I just knew when this first started to come to the idea of
doing a second one, the two top things that I started working on
were the wedding and the Fantasticar, because the Fantasticar is
like the fifth character of the Fantastic Four, and it’s just
cool. To think about a
flying car and it breaking up in pieces and them all having their
own pod that they have to control.
I just knew it would be as cool as it’s starting to look to
me so I just got into it immediately.

What
changes did you want to make in the film from the first one?

There
are a lot of things. Of
course one of the biggest things that I heard and knew about was the
fact that they wanted Ben Grimm to be bigger and bigger.
We had it rather large at some point and found that the
biggest problem we ran into was that you couldn’t light his eyes,
because anytime I lit a set, his eyes would be in shadow. And
Chiklis was so amazing at being this character, the last thing we
wanted to do was hide his eyes from everybody, so we actually had to
scale back his brows from what we were originally thinking we were
going to go.

They
always wanted Doom to be more of a bad ass, and I’ve taken those
ideas to heed and they wanted action.
They wanted action, action, action which was the main point
that I got from most and I think we deliver on that 100%.
So those are three of the top.
There were other things that I don’t always respond to in
my Bloggs or whatever the case may be, but I read.
Not at this point, because now the movie’s taken care of
itself, but through preproduction and the early parts of filming, I
continued to read things on the web and just anything that I can use
and bring to the screen, I would.

Have you
guys pretty much stuck to Don Payne’s script, or have there been
challenging scenes you needed him to rewrite or modify?

I
find it in most of these types of films, you always look at a scene
and go, “Hey, we are going to have to add this sub plot,” or
whatever the case may be. So we got about 75% of his original
production script and then throughout the process, you get on the
set with the actors and they bring up points that we didn’t think
about and we’d have to go back and Don sometimes is called right
on the set. “Don we need you to give me this and I need a line for
this and I’m shooting in about two hours, so good luck.”
He’s doing some changes to what I’m shooting tonight
right now, so it’s always a rewriting process.
I’d be lying if I said we get the script and that’s it.
We constantly go back and try to improve upon what we’ve
done.

Everything
seems to be routed in a little bit of reality, from the car and the
way it was explained to us. So
how do you go about making a Surfer as believable as the original
one?

It’s
the situation that we throw him in.
We’ve done a little situation where we’ve kept him away
from human contact for as long as possible in the movie, just
because we wanted to keep it more of a mystery and then when he does
get into contact with people, there is something that I wish I could
tell you but I can’t or else I’ll get in trouble, but there’s
a certain thing that you guys will find out about soon enough that
keeps it very based in reality.
With this at some point it’s a guy from space so what are
you going to do?

But
after that it’s the way we’ve gotten the character captured and
even in the CGI that we do with him, how he moves, his speech and
actually how he actually responds.
He does have conversations in this movie, on two occasions
particularly where you’re talking to a real person, it feels like,
that has a history, that understands and you see him react to
emotions and this and that. Although he is a space man at the end of
the day, he’s an alien, we keep him very grounded in reality and I
think you’ll see that in the way we portray that in the movie.

Why are
you not using Doug Jones voice for the Silver Surfer?

The
plan was always to use an actor to basically cast an actor for the
voice. There is a chance
we may stick to this, because I must admit in editing him it sounds
very good right now, so who’s to know what’s going to happen but
the plan was from day one to always voice an actor and let that come
through. Our plan was
even before Doug Jones was going to do the motion capture, we knew
from then that we were going to cast it out.

Talk about
Johnny’s powers in part 2.

I’ll
just say that Johnny’s powers are enhanced at some point in the
movie and I think it brings a very fun and very big twist to what
happens in the movie.

What about
everyone else’s powers?

You
know, we just found ways how can we make them bigger and better.
There’s things with Sue that in the first movie we
weren’t able to go into. People
know that she’s able to create force fields and actually she’s
able to hover on top of her force field, so there’s things like
that. We didn’t get a
chance to really stretch Reed’s powers as much as we could have in
the first one and then it’s always fun to just think about Johnny
and think about what else he can do with his power.
If you can go on fire, does it make you bulletproof in the
sense that a bullet comes at you and will it blow up or melt before
it gets to you. There’s
things like that, and can you go through walls, because it didn’t
get so hot in supernova, you could pretty much melt through a wall
and go through it, so we always discuss this and the fun part of
doing the next movie is where can you take these powers and go
further with them.

Do you
have any ideas or given any thought to which characters to use for
FF3 or 4?

I
definitely have ideas. There’s
so many different characters. The
ones that come to you immediately are Puppet Master, The Inhumans,
the Skrull any of those, you immediately think of some of those guys
and think what would be the coolest one. But one of the things we
always do with the new villain, and I think this goes for any comic
book movies, you think of the visuals and what would be the coolest
thing to bring the screen
and how? So I definitely
have a couple of story lines that have been swirling in my head that
I’ve already talked to Avi Arad (Producer) about and we’ll see
what happens.

Was there
any question of how do you keep the comic book idea alive?
How do you keep improving on it when for the most part the
mainstream audiences now are blasé about CG effects?

Well
I think it begins with the characters.
I think these movies…it’s cool to see somebody catch on
fire and fly and this and that.
At the end of the day I think you have to make the story
compelling, because I think the audience and we’re talking
ten-year-old, they’re so savvy to it that it’s not enough to
blow up enough stuff. You
have to now always ask yourself the question, you’re the person
with the power, even with the Silver Surfer having this cosmic glass
that he has. The idea is
not to have him use his hands when he does this.
How can he emit this power without the normal hand gestures
we’re used to.

Instead
of seeing him go from A to B, how does the power travel?
You have to constantly think of new ways and we’re lucky
that in a case with some of our characters, there’s a lot of stuff
we haven’t seen before and we were able to just kind of go with
it, but I think it always starts with the character.
The secret to Batman is Bruce Wayne and I believe that.
The secret to these kind of characters are giving the people
behind the superheroes the story, and I think once you do that, and
you do that successfully, I think you’ll be ok.

What’s
the message that you want the audience to take away from the
trailer?

That
we’re just giving you action and we’re going to make it a fun
ride and we haven’t forgotten about the humour, that brought the
audience to the first one, and just that we mean business.
I think we turn in this trailer at the end of this week and
of course the studio decides what they’re going to do with it, but
there’s some really cool stuff in it, and I can’t wait for you
to see it.

Is the
Silver Surfer in it?

We’ve
definitely got a lot of Surfer shots.
I’m always a part of it, but we always do certain versions
and we never know what makes it to the theatres, but there’s some
really amazing shots in this trailer.

Will we
see any other characters come out of the story?

Wherever
I can I try to throw in characters that maybe the world is familiar
with. There’s no other
“superpower” in this film. Frankie
Ray is just if Johnny is going to have a relationship then why not?
Why not go there and what happens with her in the future?
It does open itself up for the third one.
And then there’s some hints that a couple of other
characters in the movie that are thrown out at some point and
we’ll see where we take those leads and finish them in the third.
Stan Lee appears in the movie again and it’s a really funny
homage to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and that again, Stan was up there
for one day and he was doing the wedding and it’s a really great
piece of film.