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Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann has recently been out promoting his Elvis Presley concert film “EPiC” and has been getting ready to shoot his new Joan of Arc biopic with Isla Johnston (“The Queen’s Gambit”) starring.
As a director, Luhrmann has been on the scene for almost four decades now after breaking through with 1992’s “Strictly Ballroom”. But he’s also famously picky with his projects, this Elvis concert film marking only his seventh directorial feature in all that time.
Recently, the filmmaker did an interview with Happy Sad Confused where he touched upon the projects that got away from him over the years and revealed that at one point he was offered the chance to do a Marvel feature based on the “Fantastic Four” character, The Silver Surfer.
In the chat, he reveals this offer seemingly came in the early 1990s, sometime after “Strictly Ballroom” came out, and he ended up instead opting for 1996’s “Romeo + Juliet” as his second feature. He says:
I very stupidly said ‘no’ to…the first versions of a couple of extraordinarily super iconic…franchises, and I would be a very wealthy person [had I directed them]. So I was pretty silly.
My brand is about taking stuff that people think is cheesy or forgotten or even new works, but primary stuff. I need to prove it to be relevant and new and fresh and of the moment. I’m not quite sure why, but it is [my] brand.
This will become a lot of clickbait, but way back in the day, I just thought, oh, I love Silver Surfer so much. Before Marvel was so big, you know, this was really early. And the guy who owned Marvel sent me all those Silver Surfer toys and books and I went like, hmm, philosophical, surfer in space, you know. But alas, no, I did ‘Romeo and Juliet’ instead. It worked out for everybody.”
Luhrmann confirmed he was definitely offered “Spider-Man” and the first “Harry Potter” but wasn’t interested. His “Joan of Arc” film is partly inspired by two other failed projects of his – biopics of Alexander the Great and Napoleon. For the full interview, head to Happy Sad Confused.
The post Baz Luhrmann Passed On A Silver Surfer Film appeared first on Dark Horizons.
