Fantastic Collaboration!

Well, I can now officially mention that I’ve been part of the filmmaking team (in a way) working hard to bring you an enjoyable and interesting Fantastic Four movie! I think it has been about two and a half years (?) since this all began. This was a nearly perfect model of how science consulting can work in film. I worked with everyone, wherever I was needed, with the director, writers, producers, director of photography, VFX teams, set design, and so on. They made me feel welcome and part of whatever creative team I was talking to, which was great. They were open to lots of ideas right from when they were starting out thinking about tone, story ideas, and so forth, right through to final (key) tweaks right at the end of the process as recently as mere weeks ago.

It began early on with with having great conversations Matt Shakman and his writing team about the fact that Reed Richards is first and foremost a curiosity-driven physicist (and so quite different from the engineer we have in Tony Stark that we see RdJ bring out so well), and how things like his dedication to his work (and his outlook on things that comes from such work) might play out in terms of family dynamic, personal relationships, etc., – Without it turning into the tedious cliches about scientists somehow not being able to navigate the world of human relationships. Obviously, I could speak to this as a physicist who works on precisely the things Reed works on, as well as a family man, and as well as someone who remembers that it’s still all about telling a story. And there are so many stories to tell at that intersection… Anyway, I think these early conversations (as well as suggestions I made in many sets of notes along the way) helped inform (even if only a little bit? who knows?) what Pedro Pascal brought to the character. This aspect of the film is one of the things I’m most pleased about seeing up on screen.

Beyond that, you’ll see lots of things I gave them that I’m also delighted to see made it to the film, in many scenes. This includes (but not limited to!):

• Yes, you can look closely at the chalkboards because there’s story-relevant detail in nearly all of them. I was on speed dial across eight timezones when a lot of Reed’s lab work and work at the board was shot, so there was a lot of blurry-eyed writing of board-fulls of equations, suggestions for board performance, things to mutter (as many of us do) while writing and doing science activities, and so forth. (I may have stuck in an equation with more relevance to my own research at one point. More on that another time, but experts can look out for it…)
• A really big action sequence that I’ll not say anything about for now so as not to spoil anything. (I pitched it to them early on and hardly dreamt it would get made! I was sure everyone would forget it came from me but then I ran into the writers at the premiere and they, unbidden, mentioned the meeting where they remember me pitching it!)
• A number of actual computations were done for various plot points. Some of the computations made it to the boards, but sadly much of that did not make it to the movie, so you don’t see it discussed in the final version. That’s ok!
• This might seem like a minor thing to you, but it’s a triumph for me: A certain kind of science-inspired SF object is spherical instead of circular! The MCU has, despite my previous efforts (e.g. in Thor:Ragnarok), missed out on the visual beauty of choosing one over the other. Perhaps I’ll expand on this later.
• Aspects of the overall look of certain things: Sue’s force fields, space, space travel, the ship, the other ship, Kirby-Krackle!, various astrophysical objects, etc. Throughout the months (and years!) it was a delight to talk with intelligent curious people (the folks in VFX, the amazing director Matt Shakman, the fantastic Director of Photography Jess Hall, and others) and others about things like this and help them sort through the many choices involved in finding how they wanted to visually tell the story.

I could say more, but I’ve got some pressing matters to attend to, so I’ll stop for now.

I had a great time at this movie. Not just as a person a little bit involved in how it got made, but as a fan of movies, classic Marvel, and of a fun time out as part of an audience! Go see it!

–cvj