Mottola Talks The Miracle Of “Confess, Fletch”

(FASTNEWS | COLOMBO) – Last week came director Greg Mottola’s “Confess, Fletch,” a $20 million budgeted new film adaptation of the books that spawned the two Chevy Chase-led crime comedy features of the late 1980s.

The Jon Hamm-led film wasn’t picked up for wide theatrical release and didn’t score an SVOD premiere, instead it went for a very limited theatrical run with a simultaneous direct-to-PVOD release.

Reviews have been excellent for the movie, and the hope is word of mouth will lead to it being watched because, from the sounds of it, it was a miracle the film was made.

In a revealing interview today at Uproxx, Mottola says that Hamm gave back 60% of his salary to help finance three extra days of filming on the indie project. Mottola also gave up a portion of his own salary to extend the shoot.

Former Miramax executive Bill Block put up money for the film, but it only covered 27 days of shooting. Mottola and Hamm went out to find extra funding to cover the extra three days but were rejected by every financier:

“Everyone said, ‘I don’t know that this kind of comedy works in this day and age. They just had a kind of like, ‘Who’s Fletch? I don’t think anyone cares anymore. So, basically, what we did is Jon gave back 60 per cent of his salary to the budget.

I gave back some of my salary, not as much as Jon because he’s richer than me and I’ve got three kids. And we bought three more days of shooting. We got it up to 30 days in Boston and one day in Rome. And we said, f— it, we’re insane, we’re dumb. We’re going to make this movie. And then Miramax really supported us, creatively. They didn’t fight us on people we wanted to cast.”

The new film is based on Gregory Mcdonald’s’s first “Fletch”-centric novel and finds the character becoming a suspect in several murders while investigating a missing art collection. Lorenza Izzo, Marcia Gay Harden, Kyle MacLachlan, Roy Wood Jr. and John Slattery also star.

Mottola also reveals that Block has hired Mottola to write a sequel based on “Fletch’s Fortune”, which unfolds at a journalism conference. The hope is either a streamer opts to promote the just-released film or, over time, it generates enough interest that a sequel can go forward.

“Confess, Fletch” is now playing in theaters and available to watch on demand.