Director Zack Snyder and producer Deborah Snyder at Next on Netflix Animation Preview. Photo: Netflix.
Preview:
Zack Snyder will finally get to make ‘The Last Photograph’.
He has cast ‘Rebel Moon’s Fra Fee and Stuart Martin in the movie.
It follows an ex-DEA agent hunting for missing family members.
Having put aside his giant ‘Rebel Moon’ sci-fi franchise for now, Zack Snyder is taking time to finally put something more personal before the cameras.
Deadline reports that the director is getting ready to start production on longstanding passion project ‘The Last Photograph’.
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But he hasn’t entirely forgotten ‘Rebel Moon’, as two of the actors from that movie –– Fra Fee and Stuart Martin –– are aboard to lead ‘The Last Photograph’.
Director Zack Snyder at Next on Netflix Animation Preview. Photo: Netflix.
With a story crafted by Snyder and veteran collaborator Kurt Johnstad (the latter wrote the actual screenplay), ‘The Last Photograph’ follows an ex-DEA operative who must return to the mountains of South America in an effort to find his missing niece and nephew, following the brutal murders of their diplomat parents.
Enlisting the help of a washed-up junkie war photographer, the only person to have seen the face of the killers, he sets out, determined to find the children and the truth, but soon learns he must also face the ghosts of his past.
Here’s Snyder telling Deadline what the movie means to him:
“The idea of taking camera in hand and simply making a movie in an intimate way is very appealing to me. ‘The Last Photograph’ is a meditation of life and death, embodying some of the trials that I have experienced in my own life and the exploration of those ideas through image making.”
Snyder, working alongside producing partner/wife Deborah Snyder and fellow producer Wesley Coller, has wrangled together the funding for this one partly thanks to a tax incentive based in Colombia. The movie will shoot in the country as well as Iceland and Los Angeles.
With a score to be written by Hans Zimmer, Steven Doar and Omer Benyamin, the movie starts shooting this month.
Where else can we see Fra Fee and Stuart Martin?
Fra Fee attends the Netflix Premiere of Zack Snyder’s ‘Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire’ at TCL Chinese Theatre on December 13, 2023 in Hollywood, California. Photo: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Netflix.
Martin has been part of just-launched TV series ‘In Flight’ and is attached to another show, ‘Atomic’. Beyond those, there are the in-development movie likes of ‘Storm Witch’ and ‘From These Ashes’.
‘The Last Photograph’ has yet to lock down a distributor, but given Snyder’s name behind it, we doubt it’ll take too long to find a willing company.
Zack Snyder attends the Netflix’s Tudum: A Global Fan Event 2023 at Fundação Bienal de São Paulo on June 17, 2023 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Photo by Alexandre Schneider/Getty Images for NETFLIX.
One of the more memorable aspects of the original “The Lion King” (and, keep in mind, that was a movie made up almost exclusively of memorable aspects) was the score by Hans Zimmer. Zimmer, a composer who, by that point, had already worked with Barry Levinson, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Ron Howard, and Penny Marshall, commanded your attention from the opening frames of the film, as his bombastic “Circle of Life” brought every audience member to the savanna with jolting force. From then on, he helped give the movie scope and weight and added considerably to the songs written (quite quickly) by Elton John and Tim Rice.
So it’s no surprise that Disney re-enlisted Zimmer for their gorgeous 3D animated version, opening this weekend. He was an essential part of the original film’s success and he’s an essential part of the success of the redo. (Zimmer even managed to recruit his buddy Pharrell Williams to help on the updated tracks.)
We were lucky enough to sit down with Zimmer in Beverly Hills recently, where we talked about the original film (which he won an Oscar for), whether or not he was interested in coming back to Pride Rock, why he never returned to work on another Disney Animation movie and what Pharrell brought to the production.
Moviefone: So let’s talk about the written the original movie first because from what I understand, the songs were written pretty quickly and you gave them the scope that they ended up with.
Hans Zimmer: I don’t ever really know the complete history, but I don’t think I was the first call. I think a few people had to go at it at the songs. And then they got the idiot who didn’t know how to write a musical. I kept saying, “I don’t want to write a musical.”
I just had this idea that it should start with this African voice. It should be very atypical to a Disney movie, you know, and I sat there was Elton … you know, I’m such an Elton fan, so I could either be terrified and try to absolutely slavishly copy what he was doing or try and make it my own. And the brief was go and make these western songs into African. So I remember getting it completely wrong. They had said to me, “We want 30 seconds of ‘Circle of Life.’ Then it’s a dialogue scene.” Then I started off with the Lebo M. thing and then I did the whole song and the second chorus is different than the first because I had another idea and it’s endless.
Don Hahn and the directors Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff came in and I played them this thing. And as I’m playing it to them and I’m going, “Shit, they asked me for 30 seconds and then dialogue scene and here’s this four-minute thing with the big drum hit at the end,” which is only there because they were coming in and I didn’t have time to do anything else. It’s a total accident. And they went off and huddled in a corner and they were talking and I thought they were basically talking about how they’re going to fire me. And I wandered over to them and said, “Look, if I it’s supposed to be 30 seconds and then get quiet, I can do that.” They said: “No, no, no, no, no, no. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about how we’re going to change the whole scene, take all that dialogue out because this works great.” I was unleashed at that moment.
But did you feel like you were really contributing to this movie?
The other things is I’m telling you the truth. The truth that never was revealed. I never saw a script, so it was just a room, roughly this size with storyboards. They were still making things up as they went. And Roger and Rob were shoving a stick at the storyboards, trying to tell me the story. They’d get stuck at a certain place where they would start arguing amongst themselves about which way the story was going to go. And I’d just be sitting there, waiting for them to finish the argument. And we never got to the end of the movie.
You never did another Disney animated movie. You did “Prince of Egypt” and many films for DreamWorks, but you never came back to Disney. Why?
Well I wasn’t asked.
Did something happen?
David Katzenberg left and I thought he was interesting and I started working with him. It’s only fair. That’s what happened. Plus, it was like such a weirdly individual movie. I was the one who was saying no all the time. I didn’t want to do this movie. I okay, I’ll do this movie, but I don’t like musicals. And them saying, “We promise you it will never turn into a Broadway musical.” So it was all like this. Okay, I’ll do it because I wanted to take my daughter, who was six-years-old. I want to show off a dad. I’d be honest about it. That’s why I’m doing it.
Next thing I know, I’m confronted with the death of a father. My dad died when I was six years old, so I’m her age and I’ve tucked all these dark memories away. And now suddenly I need to go and open those dark places because what else? How else am I going to write? You know what I mean? So that, that actually was relatively heavy.
You don’t want to do it. You do it. It’s a massive hit.
Massive hit? Let me tell you a story. Give me a story. Right. Oscars. Win an Oscar. Have a fabulous night. Partied all night. 10 o’clock. I’m having a meeting with Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson on “Crimson Tide.” I just won an Oscar, they don’t even mention it. I played them the first piece I’d written and they go, “It’s completely wrong.” And it was like boom back to reality and that was good. You know what I mean? There’s nothing more pretentious than somebody going, “I just won an Oscar.” It’s like, I didn’t even get to say that sentence to these guys. It’s like, roll up your sleeve, why are you late? Let’s get to work.
Disney
Well, was there any trepidation for you coming back to this? Was there or was it just sort of like, if they’re doing it, you want to be a part of it?
There was a bit. But there was also a sense of ownership. Plus, I know this sounds really crazy, but there are always bits in it, which bugged me a little bit, which I thought I could have done better. Who gets a chance to redo? Nobody in the world ever complained about these things., I had this weird experience where, my musician friends kicked me out of the studio going, “There comes a point in every film composer’s life where you have to actually look the audience in the eye and stop hiding in your dark room and hiding behind a screen.” And for one reason or the other I ended up playing “Lion King” at Coachella, which I thought was totally inappropriate until I played it. And I’m going, “Whoa, look at this.” All these people are really … there’s an honesty in the emotion. It’s not sentimental. I’m having my shit hot band performing. I thought, well let’s make that more, it’s about performing.
Can you talk about Pharrell? What did bring to this?
Honesty, knowledge, and he protected me whenever I was going totally insane, which I have a tendency to do. I get overwhelmed by the task at hand. We’ve known each other for such a long time. And through ups and downs and thicks and thins, et cetera. One of the things I don’t think people really realize is if you really want to produce a vocalist, you have to be a singer. So Pharrell was vital in that. I was trying to make Seth feel comfortable, but Pharrell got a performance.
Mireille Soria, president of Paramount Animation, shared more about the film during the VIEW Conference in Turin, Italy.
According to Cartoon Brew, Soria said the film will indeed feature a “nice homage to the classic movie” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which is teased in the title. But the larger focus of the movie is an origin story:
“For the first time ever, we’re going to the get to the origin of how little SpongeBob met the rest of the Bikini Bottom gang at summer camp. The film’s opening will take place at Camp Coral when all of our favorite characters meet for the first time.”
“It’s a Wonderful Sponge” will reportedly be the first film to show a full CG version of the SpongeBob universe, while also continuing to feature hybrid scenes with the characters in the live world.
“The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” came out in 2004 and made $140.1 million worldwide. There was a long wait until the next film, “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water,” came out in 2015. The wait was worth it, at least to the box office, with the film making a whopping $325,186,032 worldwide.
“The SpongeBob Movie: It’s a Wonderful Sponge” will open in theaters July 17, 2020.
Academy-award winning composer Hans Zimmer reveals how a movie score can tell a story where words can’t, and how he got started. Zimmer composed the score for “Interstellar,” his collaboration with director Christopher Nolan.
