Incredible Hulk writer, Zak Penn
The Incredible Hulk writer switches to directing The Grand.
CraveOnline: Incredible Hulk was an older script of yours. How did you update it?
Zak Penn: Well, it was based on an older script of mine. They wanted to use it as an inspiration for the present movie but I worked on it. I did many, many drafts of it last year to get it the shape that it was in before they went into production. So it changed considerably. It's not like it's not a totally new script. It's just more that they had read that old draft and said, "Hey, let's use that as the model for what we're doing."
CraveOnline: They're so vocal about undoing the last Hulk, were there certain instructions to that end?
Zak Penn: No. Here's the thing. One thing I like about Marvel is there's not a lot of people involved. It's like pretty simple. It's me and Kevin Feige and Avi Arad. Avi's not there anymore but there's not a lot of people. It was pretty much me and him talking about- - I just said, "What do I want to see in this movie?" That's it. They were kind of grilling me in the other room about why remake The Hulk and I said, "Why not?" If it works… If it doesn't work, then you're right, why remake it? That was stupid. If it does work, that's fantastic. There's no rule. I had problems with elements of the story. I thought the first one is very underrated in terms of how it's shot. It's really incredible and there are scenes in it that are great but there are things about it that just I had trouble with, just as are many movies. So we had a whole debate in the other room about whether one should remake a movie. I said, "2001 would not be a good movie to remake." To take something that is the singular work of someone that is about their take, to remake Taxi Driver would just be stupid in that you're going to look bad by comparison. It's just not going to work.
CraveOnline: Psycho?
Zak Penn: Here's the only thing. I was actually defending Psycho because I said, "That to me is an experiment worth trying." Why not? It's actually weird that I've never seen it so I guess I'm not that curious but I have no problem with someone attempting to do something, particularly like Gus Van Sant. He got all this sh*t for it but let's be honest. It wasn't like he couldn't think up another idea. It's not some dopey director going, "Oh, I'll just do the same shots." He was trying something that was an experiment. What if we replaced the actors but keep it shot by shot? I think that's fascinating. It's so weird that he took so much sh*t for it. There are times where you feel like, "What the hell? This is just them trying to wring another dollar out of this property." But clearly with The Hulk, that's not the case. They feel like there's still a good Hulk movie to be made and they want to try to make it. I'm all for it.
CraveOnline: Did you come up with anything they couldn't afford?
Zak Penn: Not really. It's a pretty expensive movie but there's always stuff like that. Every movie has stuff like that. On X-Men 3 there were tons of stuff they couldn’t afford and that was not a cheap movie. I wrote this one scene in the first draft that I wrote of The Hulk which I kind of felt was one of the best scenes I'd ever written for a movie like that where Banner gets thrown out of a helicopter. It's a pretty cool scene where he transforms midair and the guys looking from up above look down and he falls through some clouds. When he hits the ground there's this enormous explosion and they're like, "Hmm, that seems wrong." Then they fly down and try to find him but for the most part, on movies like that, it's more about the budget having to do with a global approach to the movie.
CraveOnline: Are you also still attached to Spy Hunter?
Zak Penn: No, I did a draft of that and I can't seem to escape it. It's like pinned to my back. A lot of times you get paid to work on something, they'll ask you to do a rewrite and then you become forever attached to that script. I doubt I'll ever get credit on that. I don't know, maybe I will. I don't even think they're making it.
CraveOnline: Can you talk about Dirty Dozen?
Zak Penn: Here's the thing. I'm just the writer on that. I'll give a brief answer and then I think I have to go. On Dirty Dozen, I'm a hired writer. Guy Ritchie is directing it and I'm there to write a script for him. We're working on it. The approach that we're going to take to it is pretty much up to Guy and the studio and it's just my job to execute. I have my say, but I'm there to kind of do it as an assignment. It's not something I'm writing and directing.
CraveOnline: Do you go back and watch the old film?
Zak Penn: Well, I personally, when I do something like that, I go back and watch the first movie 10 times. I read the book that it was based on. I do all that research. Will it happen that way? Will it be set on Mars and all of them be played by teeny boppers? Don't ask me. Not on my watch but who knows?
CraveOnline: Your X-Men 3 director Brett Ratner was surprisingly hilarious in this.
Zak Penn: Yeah, thank you. I say thank you as though I'm him but he was someone who needed a little bit of direction but I think he's a talented actor. I think he's got a weird charisma to him. I shouldn't say weird.
CraveOnline: Did I noticed that one of Jack Faro (Woody Harrelson)'s ex-wives is the runaway bride from a few year ago?
Zak Penn: Right, all those women have some relevance in some way. One of them is [cowriter] Matt Bierman's wife. I think one of them is Darva Conger. I don't know if she's still up there. I think they're all random brides from different places but some of them are inside jokes between me and friends. One of the characters in the movie is his wife who's in there also. But yes, runaway bride. It's weird how much people recognize. I didn't recognize her when they showed her to me but it freaks me out that people know her more than they know JFK. I wrote a movie called PCU many years ago that had this whole scene where Jon Favreau plays a character who imagines he's up for a senate confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court and he's a total stoner. Ted Kennedy is the one who asks him questions about smoking marijuana. It's like the whole "did you inhale thing." Literally, we showed it to a test audience and none of them knew who Ted Kennedy was, even though it said "Senator Ted Kennedy" underneath him. So we were like wow, they don't know and they can't read.
CraveOnline: Was the idea from the beginning to do improv? Was it ever scripted?
Zak Penn: Never. In fact it arose from my desire to do an improvised ensemble comedy. My friend Matt who I played poker with, knew that I wanted to do something like that and he said, "You know, you should do something about poker." He kind of pitched me and said, "What if you did something about the tournament, World Series of Poker, because if you look at the coverage, it's really pretty interesting." It took me like a day or two and I said, "God, you're right. That's a great way to do this. Let's do it." So poker was almost the afterthought. It was ensemble improvised comedy, where should we set it? I toyed with doing something about a failed TV show and people who are fans of it and some other weird things. This seemed like the fact that the stakes are built into the story, because it's very hard to do a plotty movie with an improvisational, in that kind of improv. It's really hard to keep all those subplots struggling and everything else because you have to get the actors to get the lines. So poker was a good fit I thought.
CraveOnline: Was there ever a time you were going to plot out the final game?
Zak Penn: I absolutely, from the very first outline, it said I don't know who's going to win, we're going to play it out for real, whoever wins, wins. I thought wouldn't that be a fun way to do it? And actors really responded to it, and so did everyone. They thought what a great idea, it'll be a lot of fun. And some of it, partly I'll admit, we were saying, "At the junket, that'll be an interesting thing to talk about." But I completely panicked. Once we got there, I said, "This is asinine. I can't believe I've done this to myself." Everyone else, the producers were like, "You're not serious about doing that" and I was like, "No, I guess I'm not, what was I thinking? How are we even going to shoot that and what if it's boring?" Then what we realized was that mathematically, it was far more complicated to fix a poker tournament than I thought and it was far more complicated to shoot each individual hand than it was to simply get a bunch of cameras and film them for four hours straight. We literally didn't have the time in the schedule to shoot it if we shot it conventionally. So I was kind of forced back into being, I'd like to tell you that I just kept my word, but it was more that I was forced to. The actors were dead set on they thought this was what was going to happen and they wanted it to happen that way. I asked our poker advisor Andy Newman. I said, "Look, what if it sucks? What if someone just steamrolls the rest of the table?" He said, "Yeah, that would suck." I was like, "Could you set some decks for me? Could you set some decks so I could control it?" He explained to me that would require setting a deck for every position on the table as well as each player. So for each individual position, you have 36 iterations. Literally he set 100s and 100s of decks that were in a giant duffle bag marked with this inscrutable code. When we actually got to shooting it, I was like, "I don't even know how to read this. I don't know how to deal with it. Just let's pray." We kind of sent it out there and hoped it would turn out. That's the true story, whatever the actors tell you.
