The troubled history of 'The Wolfman'

Following the huge success of ‘The Mummy’ franchise, Universal has been keen to resurrect more of its back catalogue of classic movie monsters, and there are plans afoot for a ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ remake and a ‘Frankenstein’ directed by Guillermo del Toro. One hopes that these films have a less taxing journey to the screen than the studio’s big-budget remake of George Waggner’s 1941 horror movie ‘The Wolf Man’ which stars Benicio Del Toro as the eponymous lycanthrope alongside Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt.

‘The Wolfman’ was initially to be directed by music video veteran Mark Romanek (‘One Hour Photo’) from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker (‘Se7en’) and David Self (‘Road to Perdition’). Sets were built at Pinewood for a February 2008 shoot, but Romanek quit four weeks before filming, citing creative differences. ‘It wasn’t coming together where we were all wanting to make the same film,’ he recalls. ‘I wasn’t able to bring to it what I thought I could. It’s a big investment, and a big project, and I felt they should have a director who’s more in line with what they want.’

‘That was a tough one, man,’ remembers Benicio Del Toro who’s also a producer on the film. ‘That was tough. He had his vision, and at some point we didn’t have the movie.’

As the studio scrambled to replace Romanek, various names were bandied about – John Landis, Frank Darabont and Martin Campbell among them – before Joe Johnston, director of ‘Jurassic Park III’ and ‘The Rocketeer’, was hired. But the clock was ticking. Filming was less than four weeks away. Johnston’s pitch to the studio had been that he could shoot the existing script in 80 days. He recalls: ‘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.’

Given the time constraints, there was only so much Johnston could do to make the movie his own. ‘The studio had invested a lot of money,’ he explains. ‘They had gone down a certain road with the production design and concept and I have to say in Mark Romanek’s defence, he made a lot of the correct choices. He had set the ship off in a good direction. But I wanted to put my stamp on the film. I did that with casting and with locations. We did a rewrite too. But it was not a situation where I wanted to throw everything out, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that anyway. I took over the wheel, took it in a slightly different direction.’

Shooting went ahead, and with the film due to be released in November 2008, Johnston visited that summer’s Comic-Con as part of the promotional build up. But then Universal postponed the movie until February 2009, then April, and then November. The delays did little to assuage the rumours that ‘The Wolfman’ was a movie in trouble – a perception seemingly underlined when Johnston undertook five weeks of reshoots last spring with acclaimed action director Vic Armstrong brought in to punch up the ending, making a costly movie even more expensive.

‘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.’

Johnston insists they didn’t shoot a new ending – rather they enhanced what was there. ‘There were two versions of the ending [that] involved the fate of the Wolfman,’ he recalls. ‘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.’ Two endings? ‘It was two versions of an ending,’ he clarifies. ‘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.’

The upshot of these reshoots was that the release date was moved to February 2010, although producer Scott Stuber told Aintitcoolnews that the latest delay was to finish off visual effects. Shortly after I spoke with Johnston late last year, stories hit the net that two new editors, including the Oscar-winning Walter Murch, had been drafted in to work on the film. Stuber claimed the movie was running long with all the extra footage and Johnston had wanted a ‘fresh perspective’. Even so, stories have continued to circulate, among them reports that Danny Elfman’s score was dumped for one by ex-Tangerine Dream member Paul Haslinger before that, in turn, was replaced by Elfman’s original. The first press screening of the film was finally taking place just as this issue of Time Out went to press (see review opposite), and since it’s being released this week, we’re pretty sure they’ve finished tinkering…

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