When it comes to the characters of J.M. Barrie’s beloved fairy tale classic Peter Pan, you might not find a bigger fan than Jason Fuchs, the screenwriter of Warner Bros’ Pan (out Friday, October 9) and his enthusiasm is quite infectious when you talk to him.
“I’ve been pretty obsessed with Peter Pan from a young age,” he said at the press conference for the movie, going on to explain how a faulty ride was partially to blame. “I got stuck on [the] Peter Pan amusement park ride with my dad when I was 9. We were up in a miniature flying pirate ship over London for about a half hour and I got really curious about where he came from and how he flew and where Neverland was. So for about twenty years I was fascinated by this and twenty years later I’m sitting here.”
Related: Interview | Director Joe Wright on ‘Pan’ and… Astrology?
What came out of those twenty years is the screenplay for a prequel origin story for Peter (played by Levi Miller) where he first travels to Neverland and meets many of the people who will have a bigger impact on his life, including Garrett Hedlund’s Hook and Rooney Mara’s Tiger Lilly.
Our interview with Fuchs began with a little confusion because we thought we were about to interview Joe Wright until the door opened and Jason was there instead. But that led right into our first question…
Crave: I remember this screenplay was on the Black List and I actually have read some of it and went to set, but you jumped ahead to my other question, because I was curious about when a director like Joe Wright comes in and has his own vision of your screenplay. So how involved were you after he came on board?
Jason Fuchs: It’s kind of a scary thing, because you’re all excited and you have this director on board, especially when you have a director like Joe who is so incredible, that’s a very exciting development, but then you go, “How much is going to change? Am I going to be able to be a part of this? Am I going to be included?” You probably know as well as anyone that screenwriters are often the first one to get the boot in a process like this.
Or they’re not necessarily as involved once a director comes on board…
Yeah, exactly. Joe was the most kind, generous collaborator I could imagine. He sat down with us when he first signed on to do the film and he was very clear that he wanted to know why I wanted to write this script. He wanted to understand why it was such a passion project and why it was so important to me, and he was very very passionate about shepherding this through production with me.
In terms of pre-production, Joe and I were working cheek to jowl developing the script and getting it to the finished product. In terms of the shoot, I was there for a little over half of it. It was a five and a half month shoot in London and I spent more than half that time on set. You were on that set. That’s a very unique experience walking into the Neverwood for the first time. So I was very grateful that I was able to be a part of it from start to finish.
“If you were on a date with me between 2012 and spring 2013, you probably heard this pitch.”
You talked about the story of how you got interested in writing about this earlier but you also had been working as an actor, so was writing something you were doing on the side?
I started acting when I was really young and it never occurred to me that screenwriting was a potential path for me. I knew that I wanted to do more in film and more in the business. I had a very circuitous path. This is going to sound weird but it’s true. I did an internship with a place called the Global Information Network, so I’m fascinated by politics and foreign affairs, and I thought “Oh, this would look really good on my resume submitting to colleges.” So I interned there and ended up being hired by them to do intelligence analysis, so I was mostly writing about the Middle East but I ended being their UN correspondent, so I thought, “This is really cool. I guess I can write.” So my first hired writing gig was totally unrelated to film or TV.
I was acting and writing for them and at the end of that experience, I thought that my experience working with these guys could be a cool movie, kind of like Three Days of the Condor in high school, so I wrote a script about that. That went okay, got me my first literary agent, so I thought “Maybe I’ll try a comedy, maybe I can be funny” so I wrote a short. That turned into a feature script called The Last First Time and that was a script I thought I really was going to act in and we’d make it on a small budget. Didn’t happen but that was ultimately the sample that Fox read that got them to sit down with me and consider me to write Ice Age 4 which is my first feature credit.
It was never a conscious choice where I thought I was going to focus on one thing vs. the other. It just sort of organically happened where Ice Age—it’s a two-year commitment, you’re an exclusively on that—and then I finished Ice Age and the first thing I wanted to do was Pan. I had been thinking about it for so long. I knew that it was the thing that I wanted to do more than anything in the world,and everyone passed. I pitched this to every studio and as you know, everyone is so obsessed with IP (intellectual property) and thinking of a way to take advantage of those, so for me, this was really just a total passion project but I ran into that when I started pitching because everyone said “Oh, we have our Peter Pan project set up.”
So I was kinda bummed. It died on the vine for a bit. I would pitch this to anyone who would listen for the next year. If you were on a date with me between 2012 and spring 2013, you probably heard this pitch…
There’s probably going to be a bunch of women out there who see commercials for Pan and think, “Hey! That sounds familiar…”
Not “a bunch”! [Laughs.] A bunch is a little excessive. A handful, a dollop. And so I eventually had a general meeting with [Pan producer] Sara Schechter, who was then an executive at Warner Bros. and she said, “If you could write anything in the world, what would it be?” and I said, “Anything? Well there’s this Peter Pan thing but I’m not going to pitch it to you because everyone passed so you’re not going to want this.” She said, “No, no, let me hear it.”
And that was it. She said, “Great, we’re going to buy this. Go meet Greg Berlanti”—who I was a fan of but never met. He signed on and then we were off to the races.
So when this screenplay got on the Black List…
That was after I already sold it. I never wrote it on spec because I loved it so much and I felt such an attachment to the material, I didn’t want to write it and then see it not get made. It would have been too crushing. Because every writer has this. You put so much into a script, so I was very cautious about going forward and writing the script until it was set-up and we had the chance to make it. Then I wrote it that summer of 2013.
We were very quick because we knew there were all these competing projects. When the script went out to directors and it leaked into the community, that’s when the Black List thing happened, which is really kind of surprisingly cool. It didn’t occur to me that would happen.
“I want to give those stories oxygen and room to breathe and grow organically. And the result was the movie you saw.”
Well it’s interesting because Peter Pan is in the public domain where literally every studio can make a Peter Pan movie if they wanted to.
Correct.
And it’s always about who is going to go first?
Totally, but that’s what I think separated us from a lot of other revisionist fairy tales that studios are working on or have worked on. This isn’t a bad thing because a lot of great movies come out of that process, but so many of them are motivated by a studio going, “How do we monetize, how do we take advantage of a property that people know?” It’s a sort of cold, analytical process.
This is so the opposite of that. This genuinely was my little baby that I hoped someone would like as much as I did, and I think that combined with Joe—he’s not a traditional commercial filmmaker—he made this movie because he wanted to make a movie his son Zubin would love. It was the combination of those two things that gave this movie a very special, very different feel of a lot of the revisionist fairy tales out there.
It’s a prequel but you don’t end where the Barrie story begins so you have that gap to do more. Did you always know ahead of time where you wanted to end to leave space open for more? As far as putting in the references and nods to the known story, how much of that did you want to put in there?
I just felt like the characters were so rich and I loved them for so much of my life that each of them deserved a little bit more time to have their stories told. I would have felt like we were giving Hook or Tinkerbell short shrift had we shoe-horned everyone’s origin stories into one film. My focus from the beginning of the development was that this is Peter’s movie. This is really an origin story for Peter. He’s going to meet an earlier version of Hook, he’s going to meet an earlier version of Tiger Lilly and Tinkerbell but we’re going to leave this film with most of these characters not at the destination where we’re eventually going to pick them up at when Barrie begins his book.
So it was not so much a conscious choice as to leave it open to sequels, as it was that I love these characters. I want to give those stories oxygen and room to breathe and grow organically. And the result was the movie you saw.
“I like going to big tentpole commercial movies that don’t tie everything up neatly in a bow that leave unanswered questions.”
As you probably know, there’s a double-edged sword to doing that because yes, there’s the potential to do another movie and stories still to be told, but you’re then at the mercy of other factors to determine whether we ever see those stories told.
Listen, it’s certainly a risk when you have so much of this story in your head and want to see these character finish their journeys, and you’re a thousand percent right. But I just love the characters too much to try to fit them all into one movie in terms of each of their origin stories. We meet them, but Hook for me especially, he’s such a complicated character, and I think there something cool about leaving this film not knowing how he turned into the Captain Hook we know. I think that one of the fun things about where this movie leaves Captain Hook is it seems very difficult to figure out how he got from Point A to Point B.
In the animated version which most people know, he’s a lot like Blackbeard is in this movie, so I think people would be curious to see how he would go through such a change.
Correct. I definitely think that his encounter with Blackbeard in this movie helped shape his perception of what a pirate looks and sounds and acts like, and I also think that the guiding light for me in terms of the Hook character was “Why do Peter and Hook hate each other so much?” Because you think about these geo-politics of Neverland in the Barrie book, there’s no real reason for them to hate each other as much as they do, so I thought, “That kind of hatred has to stem from them initially feeling very different.” You don’t hate someone that much who you didn’t at one point love, and so the idea of building a Peter and Hook who genuinely grew to love each other by the end of this movie, felt different and felt like an organic way to justify the level of anger that these characters one day feel for one another.
I have this feeling that Tiger Lilly is somehow involved with them turning against each other cause all big feuds start over a girl.
One of the fun things about this movie is it does leave you with those tantalizing questions and you go out of the theater having the exact conversation we’re having now. What happened? Is it Tiger Lilly who comes between them? Does Hook turn evil for other reasons? What is the relationship between Blackbeard and Hook?
I like going to big tentpole commercial movies that don’t tie everything up neatly in a bow that leave unanswered questions. My hope is that people get as excited as I’ve been about this and want those answers and I get the chance to come up with interesting exciting possibilities for how those questions get answered. I think that Peter finishes this movie basically as Peter Pan but everyone else has a long ways to go.
You’re working on another mythos with Wonder Woman, and she’s one of those characters they’ve been trying to make a movie about for many, many years. I was curious about how you’re approaching that especially when you have these other movies—Batman v Superman and Justice League—on either side, and making that work.
Sure. I’m sure you’ve spoken to people who work for the Marvel machine. The DC ethos when it comes to secrecy is equally intense so I wish I could say more about what I’m up to in the DC Universe but I will just say this: I have been a fan of the DC Comics since I was a kid. I was always a DC guy. I love all of the major characters in that Justice League and what’s exciting to me is that Zack [Snyder] and Geoff Johns and Warner Bros are building a DC cinematic universe that is very, very different from anything else going on in superhero genre films.
They really are taking—and this is not a secret, I think people are seeing this in the trailers that have been released for Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad—they’re taking a darker, more grounded, grander mythological approach to these stories, and so I wish I could say more but I’ve read the same things you’ve read about my involvement in that project and I sure hope it’s all true.
“Zack [Snyder] and Geoff Johns and Warner Bros are building a DC cinematic universe that is very, very different from anything else going on in superhero genre films.”
But have you started working with Patty Jenkins already?
Patty is directing the film but I wish I could say more about that process but hopefully the next time I see you I’ll be able to talk a little bit more.
What else are you working on? Have you given up on acting at this point?
No, I don’t have a lot of time for it. I just did a small thing in a movie called La-La-Land, it’s Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to Whiplash which is really kind of thrilling, but the big thing that’s going to take up a lot of my time in the next few months is a movie I’m really excited about starring Hailee Steinfeld, it’s called Break My Heart a Thousand Times. It’s based on a YA book by Daniel Waters.
I’m going to start shooting that in Winnipeg in February with Scott Speer directing. Much smaller film, much darker, supernatural, but I’m excited to see how that turns out. I wrote it and I’m executive producing it and Scott directed Step Up Revolution which was his first big film, but he’s directing “Midnight Sun” with Bella Thorne and Patrick Schwarzenegger which I think is going to really blow people away, so this will be his follow-up to that.
Images via Warner Bros.
Edward Douglas is the Associate Editor at ComingSoon.net and writes the weekly movie column The Weekend Warrior. He can be found on “Twitter” at @EDouglasWW. You can also read his previous interview with director Joe Wright.
