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Features
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Mark Fergus of Queens
What does a screenwriter do for an encore after earning an Oscar nomination for Children of Men? Easy: he directs his first feature, nudges John Lasseter towards an epic and gives Robert Downey Jr. the comeback role he's been looking for.
Friday, March 23, 2007 at 5:45 PM
By Daniel Robert Epstein
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Jordan Strauss/WireImage.com
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Fergus, with actress Julie Gawkowski at the premiere of First Snow
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Screenwriter and first-time director Mark Fergus (First Snow) came this close to convincing Paramount to move forward with an adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel John Carter of Mars. But he’s still stoked at the prospect of Pixar picking up the slack, either by way of animation or special effects enhanced live action.
“[Executive producer] John [Lasseter] brought us in to do an adaptation of the trilogy,” Fergus explains during a recent interview with FilmStew. “The trilogy is huge and I hadn’t read them before, which was great because it made it fresh material. I was like, ‘Wow. Everyone has pillaged these books over the years for sci-fi stories and movies.’”
“What we really had to do is focus it to just be a mythical fairy tale,” he adds. “It could be a four-hour movie if you wanted it to be. But it’s quite a simple story when you strip away the hundreds of side characters and layers and all of that. When we showed them that we knew how to travel through this material and find that story, I think that’s really what made them want to get us involved. I think we nailed that.”
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John Sciulli/WireImage.com
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Knows how to work a room
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“I felt so happy about that draft. It’s a giant proposition for anyone who wants to make that. It’s almost employing technology that’s not even invented yet. It has got to be very scary to a filmmaker to need the resources that that one might take, to mix different size creatures and different worlds and different layers and have it all be very seamless. Even if the creatures are not of this earth, you’d still get an actor to do a performance and their face would actually be melded with the creature, so you’d get a real performance. I think Pixar is going to do it now.”
Moving into production much more quickly is Fergus’ other hot button script, Iron Man. And he credits another John, without the ‘h,’ for that fearsome Hollywood heat.
“We actually tried to get John Carter of Mars off the ground with Jon [Favreau], but it was still not ready to rock,” Fergus reveals. “So I think Paramount were ready to really push Iron Man forward.”
“Jon is the guy who just makes things happen,” he adds. “He just has a way of seducing everyone in the room to want to be part of this movie and to make it great. It’s absolutely no accident that his career has gone so well, he went from acting and writing to directing and now he’s doing everything.”
“It’s because he’s so damn smart and he has such a sharp sense of how to tell stories and how to deal with actors and how to deal with the studio and writers and everybody. Most of all, he’s just got this leadership vibe. To watch him as a director and as a leader is pretty awe-inspiring.”
Certainly, Fergus wasn’t necessarily expecting an over-40 actor like Robert Downey Jr. to land the lead role of Tony Stark. But boy, is he happy about it.
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Marvel Comics
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Awesome grandeur
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“We were all over the moon about the choice of Robert,” Fergus enthuses. “I think the character is somebody who has demons, who has layers to them and is struggling to rebuild themselves. It’s going to be take the story in really cool directions.”
“If Tom Cruise did it, it wouldn’t have been the same character,” he continues. “I love the guy, but he seems like Iron Man even without the suit. He’s a superstar. He seems Teflon already.”
Before writing the Iron Man screenplay, Fergus poured over thousands of pages of source comic book material. In the end, he and writing partner Hawk Ostby wound up zeroing in on Iron Man: Extremis, by Warren Ellis and Adi Granov, as the critical jumping off point.
“When I saw the look and the vibe of that, it was awe-inspiring,” Fergus remembers. “It was like, ‘Wow. A movie inspired by that artwork; I feel in my gut.’ The power of it, the down-saturated darker palette and really heroic imagery. The characters are very complex and they’re unsure and they’re fumbling.”
“There’s a lot of great drama going on out of the suits, in the suits,” he exclaims. “Many other eras that they gave us to read were cool, but they seemed retro, corny. When you see the Extremis suit and theory and the awesome grandeur of that, it makes the other ones look like rough drafts.”
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