Hulk (2003)

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Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone what I would call a misunderstood mid-ots misfire that may have motivated the mothering of the MCU.

As always, I'm Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host back from maternity leave, Lizzie Bassett.

Lizzie, how you feeling?

I'm feeling like I just had a baby.

Fantastic.

Feeling great.

Feeling great.

Ready to talk about this.

Honestly, I'm excited that this is the one that I'm back for.

What a movie.

They did it.

They made it a movie.

You know, we're going back.

I think a lot of folks recently have said, you guys need to go back to your roots.

You need to go back to some misfires, some box office bombs.

And even though I like this movie, I will defend this movie and elements of this movie.

I didn't hate it.

Yeah, it was not a hit by any means.

I can see why.

Yes, there are some problems that we'll discuss.

Lizzie, though, had you ever seen Angley's Hulk before?

And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching for the podcast?

So I'm sure that I did.

I probably saw it in theaters because I believe my mom had a pretty big crush on Eric Banna.

So I think I saw a lot of Eric Banna content in theaters.

I saw Black Hawk Down in theaters, although that was because I was in love with Orlando Bloom.

But there are a lot of attractive men in Black Hawk Down.

Honestly, a whole bunch.

Hot Men Down.

Hot Men Down.

That's yeah.

Working title.

So I think I saw it in theaters and I didn't have any memory of what it was like.

I mean,

not a memorable movie.

I have to say, like for a child, I don't think that this would particularly stand out.

I'll tell you, though, what went wrong, Chris?

I'll tell you right away.

Tell me.

It's Sam Elliott's mustache.

Who did that?

They trimmed it.

It's a military mustache.

I know.

It's so bad.

It's a little too high.

It's so high.

If you haven't seen this movie,

it shows, I literally didn't recognize him.

And I was like, who is this man with a Grinch that stole Christmas lip underneath his mustache?

It's Sam Elliott.

They trimmed it so high that you can see like the bottom of his top lip and it's horrible.

I couldn't look away.

It is accurate.

To our men in uniform, thank you for your service, but Lizzie's not having it.

I understand.

Don't do that.

Well, that is one thing that certainly went wrong.

They turned a a sex symbol into a not-so-sexy sex symbol.

Yeah, he's not hot on this, and it's hard to make Sam Elliott not attractive.

It's also hard to make Eric Bannon not attractive, and somehow they do that as well, even though they try to make him and Jennifer Connolly nerds, which also does not work.

No.

But

just before we start, I just want to say I understand on paper why this movie should have worked and why it should have made sense.

I understand what the pitch was.

I think that they were going for full-blown comic book before someone had really done that on screen, maybe.

And unfortunately, it is completely humorless.

And I think that that is what kills this movie.

I couldn't agree more.

And we're going to get to all of the specific reasons why it ended up being that way.

And I would argue one of the biggest detriments to the film, as you say, is the fact that it's humorless when, as we'll discuss, Eric Banna can be very funny.

Yes, and he's not having any fun in this.

He's not having any fun here.

So we'll talk about it.

As we've said, there's a lot about this movie I actually really love, love, I really respect.

There's a lot about the visuals that I think is really interesting.

Lizzie, as you mentioned, it's really trying to do interesting things to blend the comic book medium with the film medium that I think is really respectable.

But of course, it came out at a time when superhero movies were finding their footprint.

And this did not fit the mold.

No.

But if you'll allow me a brief bit of housekeeping before we get started, guys, if you missed our announcement last week, we are finally going weekly.

That's right.

Lizzie came back from maternity leave and we decided let's work her to the bone.

And so we will now be gracing you with four episodes of Behind the Scenes Chaos a Month rather than two.

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It's no longer a side hustle.

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All right.

Now, I would also just like to to mention: if you're new to this podcast, this is not a film criticism podcast.

This is a film appreciation podcast.

If you are looking for film criticism, we might recommend something like Unspooled with Amy Nicholson.

We do like to offer our opinions.

We hope you take them lightly.

We're not trained critics.

We are also not film historians.

That being said, we take pride in presenting the most accurate information possible, and so do our researchers.

If you spot an error in our research, feel free to send us a correction at whatwentwrongpod at gmail.com, especially if you worked on one of these films that we're discussing.

Yes.

I love being right, but I hate being wrong more.

And so I want to be wrong for as little amount of time as possible.

So corrections are always welcome.

All right.

Housekeeping over, Lizzie, let's get back to Hulk.

Now, as we'll learn, this movie endured over a decade of development hell, gained and shed writers faster than the Hulk gains and sheds weight through his transformations, and was released less than six months after Sam Raimi redefined the superhero genre as very much not whatever the hell Hulk was.

Yeah.

But first, the details.

Hulk is a 2003 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name, directed by Aang Lee, written by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, James Seamus, John Terman, and Michael France,

among many, many more, as we'll learn.

Never a good sign.

Nope.

The film stars Jennifer Connolly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas, Nick Nolte, and of course, Australian Eric Banna as the titular Hulk/slash Dr.

Bruce Banna.

Released by Universal Pictures, it was intended to spark a franchise, but of course, that never happened.

I would argue it remains a unique film in its approach to adapting a comic book for the big screen.

And as always, the IMDb logline for the film reads, Bruce Banner, a genetics researcher with a tragic past, suffers a lab accident that makes him transform into a raging, giant green monster when angered, making him a target of forces seeking to abuse his power.

Pretty good, Lizzie, I'd say.

Pretty good, although it is leaving out all of the insert shots of jellyfish abuse, of which there were way more than I expected.

Yeah, starfish abuse, jellyfish abuse, just cutaways to lichen on rocks in the desert.

Also being abused, yeah.

Yeah.

Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Comic book movies by David Hughes, coverage from Variety, The New York Times, the rest of the trades, the Telegraph, and more, interviews with Aang Lee, Eric Banna, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Michael France, Jonathan Hensley, John Terman, Gail Ann Hurd, and Avi Arad, Comic-Con coverage of the movie, and more.

The question remains, how did the producer of The Terminator and the director of Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger?

I know, but I'm starting with Sense and Sensibility.

I love Sense and Sensibility.

That's my favorite of his movies, for sure.

It's an amazing adaptation.

But in terms of why they hired him, Michael,

it wasn't that.

We're getting that.

And an Australian stand-up/slash-sketch comedy actor come together to produce the mother of all Marvel movies dealing with daddy issues.

And to answer that question, Lizzie, we got to go back to Hulk's humble origins.

Now, as discussed, the film would end its trajectory to the big screen with a gnarly fight for credit amidst its many credited screenwriters.

So it's only fitting the character would begin with one, too.

Lizzie, are you familiar at all with the character, Hulk, from Marvel Comics?

No.

I mean, I've seen like, you know, the Lou Farigno

Hulk, but I'm not familiar with his history.

Well, he debuted in May of 1962.

He was the creation of writer Stan Lee, who you can see in the film

exiting the Berkeley nuclear lab with Lou Farigno and artist Jack Kirby.

And which of these two men should get the most credit for his creation is disputed.

Stan Lee says that the Hulk was his idea.

He wanted to create a heroic monster.

His inspiration inspiration was the 1931 pre-Hays Code Frankenstein, starring Boros Karlov.

He added tragic depth and complexity by pulling quite liberally from Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde, which this is, I mean, come on.

It's

right there.

Hulk was, according to Lee, an alter ego of Bruce Banner.

Now, Jack Kirby, for his part, says he came up with the concept and the name and brought them to Stan.

His inspiration, also Frankenstein, and that apocryphal tale that I feel like we all hear about the mom whose child gets stuck under a car.

Yeah.

And in like the rush of adrenaline, she can lift the car up.

And so, as Kirby later put it, it suddenly came to me that in desperation we can all do that.

We can knock down walls, we can go berserk, which we do.

You know what happens when we're in a rage?

You can tear a house down.

This woman proved to me that the ordinary person in desperate circumstances can transcend himself and do things that he wouldn't ordinarily do.

I've done it myself.

I've bent steel.

Quite the quote from a a comic book artist, but who knows?

Maybe he has.

Regardless of who birthed him, Hulk was born with a very key characteristic missing, and that was his green skin.

He was originally gray in the first issues of the comic book.

Hmm.

Yeah, he was like a big gray monster, and he looked a lot more like Frankenstein.

It was unfortunately too difficult to consistently print the same shade of gray, so Hulk became green.

And a few of the rules were a little different.

At first, he could only transform at night, then he got blasted with another batch of gamma rays, and then he gained the ability to transform during the day.

Anytime you need more powers, just hit him with some more gamma rays.

Stick him in the microwave.

You can give them whatever you want.

Okay, so gamma rays were part of Hulk's story from the beginning.

Absolutely.

Gamma rays are a universal.

We can justify anything via gamma rays in this world.

Yeah.

Later, they added the fact that transformations were actually triggered by stress and trauma,

repressed trauma, became a a part of the character.

Emotional injury.

Exactly.

Far more devastating than physical injury is.

As they tried to seriously explain in this movie.

Yes.

Dr.

Green Eyes, Betty Ross, tells us in this film.

All right.

You mentioned Lou Ferigno.

Hulk first appeared in television, not in live action, but actually in an animated series, The Incredible Hulk, 1966.

And then a decade later, in November of 1977, he made his live-action debut in a TV movie, The Incredible Hulk, which starred bodybuilder Lou Farigno as the Hulk.

Lou Ferigno, if you didn't recognize him exiting the Berkeley nuclear lab, is an enormous man.

I think he was six foot five at the time, like 270 pounds.

He was known as Arnold's foil in the Mr.

Olympia competitions, and you may have seen him in Pumping Iron, the documentary about them both competing in bodybuilding.

The character was called Dr.

David Banner in this instance because they thought Bruce was too effeminate.

What?

I know.

I think Bruce is a very masculine name.

It's a like Bruce.

It's like a man-man name.

I know.

Well, regardless, his name was Dr.

David Banner.

Ferrigno apparently beat out Arnold Schwarzenegger for the role.

I would take that with a grain of salt.

I don't know.

I would imagine Arnold as the Hulk.

Yeah, he would have been great.

It would have been funny.

Dr.

Bruce Banner.

He did apparently replace Richard Keel.

Eliza, you'd recognize him.

He's that 7'1 tall actor who played Jaws in The The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker from the James Bond films.

Within a month, there was already a sequel, The Return of the Incredible Hulk.

And by March of 1978, Frigno and his co-star, Bill Bixby, were making it back into a TV show.

So this version of The Hulk lasted five seasons, and it was canceled in 1982.

And it was responsible for one of the most iconic lines associated with the character.

Don't make me angry.

You wouldn't like me angry.

So this was not part of the comic.

This was the creation of TV writer-producer Kenneth Johnson.

Hmm.

Was Hulk Smash part of the comic?

Yeah, I believe so.

Okay.

And like Hulk Clap, which creates like a wind storm that he does.

Not as good.

No.

Hulk Clap.

There were three more TV movies after the show was canceled.

1988's The Incredible Hulk Returns, 1989's Trial of the Incredible Hulk, and 1990's Death of the Incredible Hulk.

Two more animated series, both called The Incredible Hulk.

And there was, of course, the live-action spoof, the trauma film, The Toxic Avenger, which I'm not sure if you've seen Lizzie, but is totally ridiculous and very fun.

Anyway, the point is there was a lot of Hulk in the world.

He was very popular.

He was well known.

He had a fun catchphrase.

It was only a matter of time before the Hollywood studios came knocking.

All right.

December of 1992.

What's happening in Hollywood around this time, Lizzie?

Any ideas?

92, 93, 94?

A rebirth of sort of action franchises?

Yes, absolutely.

But also kind of the birth of modern CGI.

Ah, duh.

Right.

You've got like Terminator 2.

Should have gotten that right.

Jurassic Park, yes.

Right.

So in December of 1992, Variety reported that Universal and Marvel were in talks about producing a live-action Hulk film.

And it wasn't the only Marvel property under consideration.

Here are a bunch of other announcements from that same article.

Terminator 2 director James Cameron hopes to produce, direct, and write the live-action Spider-Man feature for Carol Co.

Sources say the budget, currently at $60 million, could be the highest ever for a feature film.

And they are confident that this project will hit screens regardless of what ultimately happens to the financially troubled Carolco.

Obviously, it did not hit screens, and Carolco went out of business within a few years.

And James Cameron will take care of that budget situation with Titanic.

Exactly.

Columbia Pictures is developing the Black Panther to star Wesley Snipes.

Now, he did go on to star in the adaptation of Marvel's Blade, which speaking of, rapper LL Cool J is developing Blade, the story of a black vampire hunter.

Oliver Stone is in early discussions about doing a live-action Elektra Assassin, which of course would end up starring Jennifer Gardner in the early 2000s.

Yep.

And two studios have made competing offers for a live-action film featuring the popular Ghost Rider, which Nicholas Cage would end up playing 10 years later.

Yes.

There was a live-action Fantastic Four announced.

This actually got made.

It's like a German-American co-production and was never released.

So it's like a film that exists in limbo somewhere in Germany in a vault.

Wow.

Yeah, just disappeared.

Point is, Marvel films were hot.

Why?

I think three reasons.

One, 1989's Batman.

So Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, Moody, PG-13, exploration of a moneyed vigilante.

It nearly 10x'd its $40 million budget at the box office, and its sequel, Batman Returns, did incredibly well.

Then you also had Ron Perlman and I believe Carl Icon, not the actor Ron Perlman, the investor Ron Perlman.

They had taken Marvel public.

It was a private equity play in 1991, and it seems like they were just trying to liquidate as many licensing deals as possible.

So they were probably just going to the studio saying, which characters do you want?

We just need cash.

Would you like Electra?

Exactly.

You want an Electra out of a stone?

All right.

Plus, comic books were minting it on the small screen.

The Halloween of 1992 debut of X-Men, the animated series, on Fox Kids, became a breakout hit.

Lizzie, you probably remember this from your childhood.

Oh, yeah.

Watched it, loved it.

Fantastic.

So this is an era of kind of the revenge of the nerds.

Comic books are coming into the fore, pop culturally speaking.

And it's around this time in 1994 that screenwriter Michael France, who had just written 1993's fantastically over-the-top cliffhanger, which just one of my favorite John Lethgau performances.

So good, met with Universal and Stan Lee.

So France claims that a producer attached to the project, it's unclear who, wanted, quote, Hulk versus Terrorists.

All right.

France thought this was a terrible idea.

To the producer's credit, this is the era of blank versus terrorists.

I mean, you know.

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, what is it?

Patriot games versus the IRA.

Yeah, Patriot games, speed, true lies,

blown away.

Die Hard.

Die Hard.

Even Cliffhanger, kind of.

It's a heist movie, but they're, you know, kind of terrorists.

It's back when terrorists were fun, before they got a little more real and significantly less fun.

Pre-9-11, as they say.

Now, France wasn't interested.

Now, as mentioned earlier, James Cameron had been partly responsible for this gold rush of comic books.

When Cameron's interested in something, I think a lot of people become interested in it because he's done a very good job predicting the future of this industry.

But it was his ex-wife, Gail Ann Heard, who would actually get one made.

Now, depending on the source, sometime in 94 or 95, Heard, who, if you are unfamiliar with her name, you know her work.

She is such a prolific producer.

She got The Terminator made.

She produced Aliens, The Abyss, so many more films, along with her then-newlywed husband, screenwriter Jonathan Hensley.

He had just written Die Hard with a Vengeance, speaking of the versus terrorists storylines.

They're officially attached to produce.

Now, Heard has said that she was working on Hulk as early as 1990, so it's possible she was courting Marvel this whole time, but it wasn't until like 94, 95 that it was official.

Okay.

So they make a big decision here.

Hulk is going to be created via CGI by industrial light and magic.

It makes sense.

I mean, I, yeah.

So this is a character who had either existed in animated form or had been played by an actor.

And they're saying, no, we're going to do it with CGI, which, like you said, it makes sense.

Jurassic Park had come out two, three years earlier.

And it kind of blew the doors off what people thought could be accomplished with computer animation.

And the dinosaurs were kind of green.

So it makes sense that they think, hey, we could make this big green monster.

We said a T-Rex.

Yeah.

I mean, as you see in the end result, they make the sort of classic mistake of early CGI where they try to do completely CGI, I think.

And as we've said many times before, it doesn't quite look as good as when it ends up being a hybrid the way that it is for a lot of Jurassic Park.

We'll talk about that.

And I have a couple of thoughts on why some shots don't hold up quite as well, but some, I think, hold up very well.

It doesn't look terrible.

I do have to say, the transformations don't look that bad.

Now, I assumed that Jonathan Hensley would be writing the script, but apparently the studio wanted to bring in a heavy hitter for that role.

It's also possible he was busy with Armageddon, which he was writing, and we're going to cover that at some point.

Oh my God.

It was around this time that Universal exec Car D'Angelo tipped off the baby green screenwriter John Terman that there was a Hulk movie in the works.

Now, you might not know John Terman's name, but you might know his father, Lawrence Terman, producer of The Thing and the Graduate.

Oh.

So John was looking to get into the room and he had one advantage.

His competition didn't.

He was a big comic book fan.

And so when he came in, he could speak to the film aspects of the script with the execs, but then he could also speak to the comic book side of things with Stan Lee, who was also in the room.

So he thought there's no way he would get this job.

In fact, he was so confident that he was never going to see anybody involved again that he brought his copy of Hulk number one.

And at the end of the meeting, he said to Stan Lee,

I'll never see you again.

Could you please sign this?

End quote.

Stan Lee did.

And then, of course, to his surprise, Termin got the job.

Now, Lizzie, it was a dream come true until it wasn't.

Yeah.

Knew that was coming.

Because it's Hollywood.

Yeah.

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So, by October of 95, Variety reports that Turtman had written the Hulk screenplay for Universal.

But Turman says he spent two years on the project and wrote roughly 10 drafts, which would move the timeline out to roughly 1997.

And it's at this point that the studio said, we got to bring in some fresh blood.

Let's go back to somebody that already said no, Michael France.

So Michael France, in the meantime, had written a draft of the Fantastic Four.

It would end up becoming the Chris Evans version released in the 2000s.

Marvel was happy with it, and they said, Michael, come on, come on, come on.

The terrorists are out.

Come do our Hulk with us.

Please, please, please.

So France comes in.

He says, okay, fine.

I'll do it.

There's no more terrorists.

Let's rock and roll.

And they get a great director, Joe Johnston, who, if you guys are unfamiliar, came from a visual effects and design background.

I believe he was the creative designer in charge of the Lanium Falcon.

He, of course, directed Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

He would go on to do October Sky, Jurassic Park 3, Captain America, The First Avenger.

But I think most important to this movie, he had directed Jumanji, which was obviously a very visual effects heavy movie.

early in the VFX revolution.

Now, unfortunately, Michael France was fired before he wrote a single word of this version of the script.

So in April of 97, Variety announced that Johnston was officially attached to direct and that Jonathan Hensley would be writing the script.

So France doesn't know exactly why he was fired.

He assumes it's because Hensley and Johnston had already worked together on Jumanji and they looked at each other and said, why do we need this other guy?

We could just do this ourselves.

But he was paid.

So Michael France got paid for a directed.

Best case scenario.

Yeah.

No work done, money in pocket.

Move on.

Yeah.

And he may have dodged a bullet.

Joe Johnston bailed on the project three months months later.

He went to go shoot October Sky, then called Rocket Boys.

So the studio announced Jonathan Hensley would write and direct as his first feature film.

So it would be a first-time director for an enormous Marvel VFX heavy movie.

And directing your own screenplay.

That's just all around not a good idea.

Also, listeners, I apologize if you hear some adorable coos in the background.

That is David and my progeny.

Just making another podcast in the background.

Just cooing it up.

Cooing it up.

You're right, Lizzie.

It would be risky to have a first-time director whose wife is producing it, right?

And direct the film.

And so eventually they would hit some roadblocks.

But at first, it seems like they actually had a really cool version of the film in mind.

You mentioned mixing CGI and practical effects, and that was actually the goal.

They were going to do a primarily animatronic Hulk and close-ups and CGI for the wide shots, not dissimilar from something like Jurassic Park.

No.

If you guys want to see this work, you can actually Google search animatronic Hulk, you know, late 1990s, or you can go to bloodydisgusting.com and look up the interview with makeup master Steve Johnson for the practical effects-driven Hulk.

It's really cool.

They made these like 20, 30-foot-tall models, and they were building these kind of mechanical, they almost look like Terminator T-1000s, you know, exoskeletons, endoskeletons that they were going to build the Hulk around.

It's very sophisticated stuff.

It's a very different vision of the movie, obviously.

It was going to feature the abomination or the super Hulk, I believe it was called at the time, 30-foot Hulk villain.

And they said, okay, we're going to shoot in early winter in Arizona, release summer of 1998.

And of course, those plans are up and in the wind in a matter of months because they keep bringing in more writers.

Zach Penn of Last Action Hero rewrote a terminal draft.

Jonathan Hensley, the writer director, took another crack at a brand new version from scratch.

Then he reworked it with J.J.

Abrams, his co-writer on Armageddon.

That draft was rewritten by Scott Alexander and Larry Karazewski.

They had recently written Ed Wood and the People vs.

Larry Flint.

They would go on to write a bunch of stuff for, for example, Tim Burton later in their careers.

So in October of 97, Variety reported that filming had slipped to April of 1998, but pre-production had begun.

This movie is happening.

Hulk had not yet been cast, but they were working on casting a couple of the villains.

And then in March of 1998, Universal finally pulls the plug and they shut down production but 20 million dollars had been reportedly spent on development computer effects and prosthetic work which at first i didn't believe but then i saw the models that they had built yeah it's amazing i absolutely believe that they had spent that much money oh my god and it seems like part of what happened was that the gold rush over marvel comics was coming to a slow so fox's fantastic four written by michael france and to be directed by christopher columbus was abandoned by columbus after the budget apparently reached 165 million million.

Oh my God.

Which would have rivaled something like Titanic at the time.

And Fox was having second thoughts about Brian Singer's X-Men, although that movie would end up getting shot and unexpectedly jump-starting that franchise.

So it seems like a few things were happening at once.

One, Universal was terrified of a $100 million price tag.

So that number had always been discussed, and Hensley said.

By the time they were approaching production, Universal was saying it's got to be $25 million less.

And they couldn't figure out how to get the budget down $25 million on short notice.

So it may have just been, yeah this is an excuse to shut down the film there was also a regime change at universal which as we know is always a great way to get your movie canceled so casey silver head of the studio was out and hensley said later that his projects were shut down as a result but i just want to be clear casey silver wasn't officially pushed out until november of 1998 and this was shut down in march so it's entirely possible that like he was losing power and had to shut this down but it's also possible that he shut this down because yeah he was under pressure and this movie was not trending in the right direction.

Plus, there were a couple of comic book flops that were giving people second thoughts.

Lizzie, you remember a fun little film called Batman and Robin by Joel Schumacher?

Sure.

Oh yeah.

Well, that one with Batman's nipples on the breastplate infamously was released in 1997 to dismal reviews and pretty bad box office receipts.

And so even though Blade was a success, that wasn't released until August of 1998.

Too late to save Hensley's Hulk.

So Hensley left the project.

He was unwilling to just whittle it down to nothing.

And he said it was miserable.

He said he felt like he was letting everybody down.

He had a full staff, first AD, production designer, stunt coordinator, cinematographer.

They'd scouted the locations.

They'd done the previs.

He had storyboarded the entire movie.

And he had to walk away.

That sucks.

So brutal.

So brutal.

That's so much work.

He left, but producer Gaylan Hurd stayed on.

And it turns out, the third time's the charm with screenwriter Michael France.

He's back.

That's right.

Michael France couldn't get enough, or maybe they couldn't get enough of him.

They brought him back in, and for eight months, he traded treatments and conference calls with producer Gail Ann Hurd, Marvel Studios founder Avi Arad, who had taken control of Marvel Comics after its bankruptcy.

He'd seized it from Ron Perlman, Marvel producer Matt Edelman, and Universal executives Mary Parent and Stacey Snyder.

It seems like they were trying to make a movie by committee, and nobody could figure out what this movie was.

So,

as France put it, somewhere someone within the universal hierarchy wasn't sure if this was a science fiction adventure or a comedy, and I kept getting directions to write both.

Yeah, well, it's it shows.

France even claimed that he believes there were discussions about turning Hulk into a Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler movie, which kind of makes sense given the mask.

I kind of want to see that.

Yeah.

Not Adam Sandler as much.

Jim Carrey, I feel like there's a version that could work.

Punch trunk love.

That's true.

Adam Sandler with anger issues.

I don't know.

Just saying, you never know.

Apparently, he was asked to, quote, come up with a lot of jokes about the so-called wish fulfillment aspect of it.

You know, the guy at the burger counter who blows your order and is rude to you when you complain, wouldn't you like to Hulk out and get him?

To which I say, I don't really think I want to watch a movie about the Hulk beating up minimum wage employees at McDonald's.

Guys, that's not what you want.

You want him like going after your stockbroker or somebody who's been embezzling from you.

Yes, my stockbroker.

I want white collar Hulk.

I have a stockbroker.

I don't have a stockbroker either.

I'm just saying, I don't know.

What do you do in the 90s?

Yeah, Bruce Banner, lab tech at a college.

Call up a stockbroker.

Famously rich.

Swindling him.

All right, whatever France was doing, though, it was working.

Universal seemed happy.

Happy enough that in July of 1999, Variety reported that Hulk was now on a fast track with Michael France writing the script, and they just needed a director.

All right, Lizzie.

Call up the guy that made sense and sensibility.

Well you blew my reveal here

because relative to its modest $17 million budget, it's hard to find a film that had a bigger impact in the year 2000 than Aang Li's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

Yes, which is awesome.

It's awesome.

Do you remember seeing it at the time?

Yes.

Yeah.

It was kind of like the Matrix and

kind of blew the doors off of what you thought you could do in a movie.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

It's, It was totally awesome.

So it's a Wuxia martial arts film, which we discussed briefly as a genre in Big Trouble in Little China.

And it was patiently rolled out by Sony Pictures Classics and ended up making over $200 million worldwide.

It was a runaway hit.

Yes.

It was also a huge critical success.

It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and it won four.

Best Score, Best Cinematography, Art Direction, and Foreign Language Film.

Ang Li was also nominated for Best Director and it was nominated for Best Picture.

So this was like a huge, huge success coming out of China.

And it ushered in a brief renaissance of cross-Pacific filmmaking, and it also established Ang Li as a fantastic and fantastical director of action, not just melodrama.

And so, he'd obviously done a lot of comedy/slash drama.

If you think about the wedding banquet, sense and sensibility, the ice storm.

Sense and sensibility, which also won an Academy Award, at least one.

Yep.

So, some could see the potential for someone like this to helm something like Hulk.

Yes.

Yeah.

As film critic James Berardinelli wrote at the time, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon unfolds much like a comic book, with the characters and their circumstances being painted using wide brush strokes.

Subtlety is not part of Lee's palette.

He is going for something grand and melodramatic, and that's what he gets.

It's also important to understand a bit of Aang Li's upbringing because it so informs the themes he brings to Hulk.

So Lizzie, if you had to say, what's the main theme of Hulk?

The government's bad?

I don't know.

What about within families?

What's the main theme of Hulk?

Don't trust your dad if it's Nick Nulty.

Just sins of the father, right?

Maybe you would describe it as.

Like

overbearing fathers between Nick Nulty and Sam Elliott.

Overbearing father who breeds his own Hulk child.

Yes.

Indeed.

Long before he was an acclaimed period melodrama director, Ang Li was growing up in Taiwan after his parents fled China after the Chinese Civil War.

He described his mother as submissive and his father as an authoritarian that everyone was trying to please.

As he put it, my late father, Shang Li, was a traditional Chinese authority figure.

My father represented the traditional Chinese patriarchal society.

I was always living in his shadow.

That was my big thing.

I was shy and docile and never rebellious.

But he taught me how to survive and how to be useful.

He was a stately man who was very pragmatic, the headmaster of a high school.

I don't know if that was a good or a bad bad thing.

And Lee did attend that high school where his father was headmaster.

But Lee was not a good student.

He got poor grades and felt artistically repressed.

His father wanted him to have a respectable profession like teaching, but Lee failed the entrance exam to become a teacher.

He says he was too nervous.

So he deviated from this path and he attended the Taiwan University of Art.

He studied cinema and theater and he fell in love with acting.

Oh.

So in 1978, the 23-year-old Lee moved to the United States to pursue a BA in theater at the University of Illinois.

He loved acting, but he pivoted to directing because he worried his English would limit his opportunities performing in the United States.

So he went on to earn his MFA in film production at NYU.

He made a thesis film, Fine Line, that won Best Director and Best Film at the University Festival, and he was on his way.

And nothing happened for a few years, but he had a little bit of good luck.

He married Jane Lin, a microbiologist he'd met at the University of Illinois in 1983.

They had their first son a year later, right around when he was graduating from NYU.

They welcomed their second son in 1990.

And he was basically a stay-at-home dad for about six years while his wife was working and he was trying to get into the industry.

He got an agent, he pitched, but nothing stuck.

He would write, cook, pick the kids up from school, and hope for a big break.

And it just took time.

So he's in his 30s, and his big break comes comes not from Hollywood but from his home country of Taiwan.

So he won first and second place in a screenwriting competition put on by the Taiwanese government for his screenplays Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet.

Lizzie have you seen these movies by any chance?

I have not seen Pushing Hands.

I think I have seen The Wedding Banquet.

I can't remember exactly.

Yeah, so they are his first two films.

So the Taiwanese government basically connects him to a Taiwanese studio, which ended up funding these first two films.

They also referred him to a U.S.

production company called Good Machine, co-founded by James Seamus.

So Lee comes in and pitches Seamus pushing hands, and Seamus tells him exactly why he hasn't had any success until this point.

Ang Lee, you are terrible at pitching.

Just so bad at pitching.

So good at directing, so good at writing, so bad at pitching.

So in Seamus, Lee finds an enduring collaborator, and they would go on to work all the way through the Hulk and later.

Oh.

So they shoot Pushing Hands for no money, then the wedding banquet for almost no money, and that leads to his first English language opportunity, Shane Austin's Sense and Sensibility.

Which is truly, truly wonderful.

If you've not seen it, cannot recommend it highly enough.

It is great.

Absolutely.

And very subtle and very funny in a lot of ways that unfortunately do not translate to the Hulk.

No.

Now, oddly enough, his limited skills with English may have helped him on Sense and Sensibility.

As he later said, because I couldn't speak English very well, I'd give very blunt and direct directions.

The actors would be shocked by this, but they figured it was because my English was bad and I didn't know any better.

So they tolerated it.

But the better my English became, the less I could get away with it.

I had to become more civilized like everybody else.

So I really like that he used that to his advantage.

I love that.

I wonder how much Hugh Grant was putting up with, though.

He famously has a bit of a short temper.

Yeah, probably not much.

Yeah.

Over the next five years, he bounces between English and Chinese films across genres.

And yet, after each success, his father would tell him, now it's time to do something real.

So this is somebody who's

Oscar-nominated

bigger and bigger.

And his dad is still saying, okay, come on, let's put away the cameras.

Let's get a teaching job.

Let's do something practical.

That's insane.

In the interim, more writers had been brought on to Hulk.

Francis Script was rewritten by Michael Tolkien of Deep Impact, and then David Hayter, who'd just written X-Men.

And whatever Hayter did to it, Lee and Seamus responded to this draft.

So Ang Lee signed on.

Now, it's important to mention that even though Lee was coming off of a big hit with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hulk would be by far the biggest budget movie he had ever directed.

And it stands to reason he may have been a little nervous because his last big budget American film had been a flop.

And that is 1999's Ride with the Devil, a $38 million Western starring Toby Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, Jeffrey Wright, and Jewel.

Huh.

Which, based on its box office receipts, you have not seen.

No, I have not.

Nor have I.

It was received tepidly.

It made very little.

But to his credit, Lee says he liked to be uncomfortable behind the camera.

I feel that in order to do my best work, I have to put myself in a place where I don't know much about what I'm doing, a place where I could feel as if I were making my first movie.

If I feel like I'm repeating something or repeating myself, I actually feel more frightened than I would in taking the risk of doing something new.

I think his filmography reflects that pretty clearly.

Absolutely.

The quote's actually really funny.

It goes on to say that he views it like taking different lovers, something he can't do in real life because he's married, so he doesn't.

You better not, because that lady funded everything while you were writing screenplays.

Absolutely.

And I think he's saying it tongue-in-cheek.

I know.

It's a very funny quote.

So, Lee has a very specific vision for this movie.

Bruce Banner and his alter ego would represent a Greek tragedy.

This was going to be a psychodrama, not necessarily a comic book movie.

His references included King Kong, Beauty and the Beast, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, Faust, the father figure, and quote, a lot of Greek mythology.

I think that does come through for better or worse.

It does.

And there is an exact ripoff of a King Kong shot in this as well, where he lifts up Jennifer Connolly in his hand.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that shot looks really good.

It does.

Aang Li was clear.

This was going to be be an Aang Lee film through and through.

And Universal said, great.

I think in part because nobody knew what a comic book movie was at this point.

No, and also like he was a huge name as far as directors go.

I mean, that was a recognizable name to a lot of people at this point.

And I mean, again, as we mentioned, Crashing Tiger, Hidden Dragon was fantastic.

Yeah.

And action-packed, et cetera.

Lee knew this was a unique opportunity.

I think for a filmmaker, it's a rare chance.

You can do a personal film on a big canvas.

So, Lee is putting a lot of himself into this movie.

And what could be more personal than a repressed young man's battles with his authoritarian father and the future that this father has created for him?

So, Seamus got to work on the script, and Lee got to looking for his alter ego.

Who would play Bruce Banner?

Now, Lizzie, you said that your mom had quite the crush on Eric Banna, which I'm sure many an American mother or housewife or woman did in the early 2000s.

But in the early 1990s, few in Australia would have pegged stand-up comedian/slash sketch comedy goofball Eric Banna as a future Hollywood superstar.

Have you ever seen his sketch stuff?

No, I had no idea.

All right, I'm just going to, I wasn't planning on it, but I have to share it.

Yeah.

So this is a character that he calls Poyda, who is a quote revhead, which is like a mulleted redneck from the western suburbs of Australia who likes cars, basically.

There is so much about this that I do not understand because I'm not Australian.

God, I want to go to Australia so badly.

Yeah.

Okay.

Hey, kids, today I'm going to be reading to you from this top little book, right?

It's a great little novelty, and it's called Snow White and the Seven Little Dorphies.

Here we go.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young princess who lived in a beautiful casley,

on a sort of a beautiful lake full of beautiful fish.

It's pretty boring, isn't it?

I've got a better one for you.

Once upon a time, like last week, there was this chick, right, who was a real spunk.

And her name was Cheryl White.

Right?

But all the blokes called her Snow White, because whenever they asked her out, she'd say, Snow White.

Classic.

Snow White looked like this.

Bit of a spunk, eh?

Pretty flexible too, I'll give you the tail.

So anyway, Snow White lived in a one-bedroom flat with her cousins, the seven little bogans.

There was Lazy,

Dibbly,

Doped,

Prof,

because he finished year nine.

Basher and Kev.

And they all worked down at Luna Park on the Dodgems, right?

And they all reckoned Snow White was a top bird.

And she liked him so much, she used to make him biscuiti on toast every night.

Everyone loves Snow Wart, except the wicked old dragon.

Dragon, dragon, dragon.

Who worked in the fishing ship?

Anyway, I could, I can't.

I don't know half of what he's saying, but I

love it.

He does one where he's an ant farmer.

It's so stupid.

It's so funny.

And he's just a total goofball.

He is.

He's a very attractive goofball.

I wouldn't say, looking at that, that it's surprising that that guy is going to go on to become a bigger star.

Not that he's going to be a bigger star.

I would say a brooding star is a little surprising because he's such a goof.

Yes.

So as the film is developing across the 90s, Eric Banna is on no one's radar.

I mean, was Black Hawk Down kind of his intro to the U.S.?

Yes and no.

So we'll get to that in just a second.

So Johnny Depp had apparently been the studio's top choice during the Joe Johnson era.

Don't make me angry.

You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

He's also so slight.

I know.

Whatever.

It could have worked.

I mean, who knows?

I wouldn't have guessed Mark Ruffalo back in the day, but then.

He's great.

Yeah.

And he put on some weight for Fox Catcher, and he got that kind of wrestler's pose, and he works really well.

Billy Cruddup was apparently Aang Lee's first choice, but turned the role down.

Who looks so much like Eric Banna?

I think he would have been really good.

He would have been really good.

I mean, if you think about him too, as like Dr.

Manhattan and Watchmen.

Yeah.

I definitely think he could have done it.

And he also also has a humor like Eric Banna.

I wonder if he could have brought it out a little bit more.

Who knows?

Well, he was maybe a little bit more established

too at this point.

Oh, yeah.

You think of something like almost famous.

He absolutely was.

Apparently, he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2020, Angley is one of my favorites, but I just didn't understand his particular telling of it.

So I'll say kudos to Billy Credup.

That must have been a really difficult thing to say no to.

There was something else we covered recently that he backed out of because he didn't understand it.

American Psycho?

That might have been.

Yeah, that would have made sense.

Yeah, I feel like he is pretty good at being like, I like this, I like the people, but I'm, it's not for me.

Yeah, he's very discerning.

Well, somebody else who it wasn't for, Tom Cruise was reportedly approached.

Speaking of slight actors, I love Tom Cruise, but don't see him in this.

No.

And apparently, and I'm guessing this is because so much of the screen time is taken up by Hulk in his CGI form, that Angley tested a version using character actors.

And so he apparently screen tested Steve Bushimi and Jeff Goldblum.

Both of which I would watch.

Totally.

Although, I don't know if you've been watching the studio, but there's an entire episode of The Studio about how Steve Buscemi is not marketable.

Yes, I know.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Just going to headline the new Scorsese film, his last movie.

Of course, Edward Norton was also considered.

He apparently met with Lee, but passed also not fully understanding the script.

And of course, he would take on the role for 2008's reboot.

So he makes a lot of sense, especially considering Primal Fear.

Well, and American History X.

Yes.

Between those two movies,

that one makes the most sense so far.

And it makes sense that they went back to him, you know, after this film when they rolled it into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Now, you wondered what brought Eric Banna to the fore.

And I think for mainstream audiences, Banna, I agree with you, was starting to be more recognized in the United States through his turn in Ridley Scott's Blackhawk Down, but it was his role in Andrew Dominic's 2000 film Chopper, which if you've not seen,

it's one of my favorite Australian crime films of all time.

He plays criminal turned author Mark Chopper Reed, and he is

so,

so good in this movie.

He put on probably 30 or 40 pounds based on what I am remembering of the film.

He's a big guy, isn't he?

Oh, he's tall.

And he's like doughy in this.

And he is so funny and so intimidating and goofy and terrifying at the same time he is so good in this movie if you guys have not seen chopper i still think it's his best performance to date i haven't seen it i'm gonna watch it oh it's so good and he is absolutely fantastic and he goes from ah i'm just a charming hey you guys got some cash for me can i hang out to I'll give you 20 seconds to get to the door, or I'm going to pull out my gun and shoot you, mate.

And just goes, turns on a dime, you know, shooting people and then apologizing to them after the fact.

You know what it is?

It's very sopranos in tone and it's so good and he's so funny.

He can be scary for sure,

which I think we see later in like Munich and some other performances and not in this, not in the Hulk.

Well, in Chopper, he really taps into his humor and he really, it's clear he understands the character without winking at the camera.

And he knows like, oh, this guy's going to come off kind of dumb and kind of funny here, but I'm going to turn it at the end of this scene.

There's only two people in this version of the Hulk that I feel understand the assignment.

Do you know who they are?

Josh Lucas.

Yes, a hundred.

100%.

Josh Lucas.

His heel turn performance is so good in this scene.

It's great.

One of my favorite lines in the entire thing, I have to pull it up for you, was some guy asking him, should I neutralize?

And Josh Lucas going, no, we can't do anything with goop.

So good.

So good.

And Nick Nolte?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Those two.

We're going to get to Nick Nolte.

Great.

It's so fun.

All right.

So Aang Lee saw Chopper, and I can tell why he fell in love with Banna.

Banna's so good in it, and he makes a lot of sense.

And I think it's easy to see why the production felt like he would bring the duality that you mentioned with somebody like Edward Norton to this role.

Easy charm offset by outbursts of extreme but casual violence is how I would describe him in Chopper.

He's also very attractive, which I do think is kind of a weird choice for Hulk.

Yeah.

I wouldn't describe it as a necessity for this superhero in the way that other ones are.

No, it's not like Captain America where he needs to be the poster for the United States military, for example.

So you'd think this would be an easy yes from Mana,

but he thought it was risky, not the least of which because he would have to agree to it without seeing the script.

As he said in 2021 on Mark Maron's podcast, there wasn't a script.

It was an unknown genre, and he considered himself a character actor.

And this wasn't necessarily the the type of role he was looking for.

Which, by the way, fully reflected in the parts that he had taken up to that point.

And I think in a lot of ways, since, too.

I agree.

Hector in Troy, you know, Second Banana, for example.

Munich as part of an ensemble, right?

I think he's attracted to roles where he blends in a little bit more and he's not front and center on the poster.

Yeah, and that are more transformative.

He doesn't strike me as somebody who wants to be like Eric Banna on screen in the way that I think now we kind of see Tom Cruise.

Not that we saw him early on that way, but.

Yeah, I agree.

In the end, I think he wanted to work with Aang Lee, and it was an opportunity to do something different.

Now, Jennifer Connolly, who would win the Oscar for best supporting actress days before filming began for her turn as the steadfast love interest of a mentally unstable scientist in a beautiful mind, signed on to play Betty Ross, the steadfast love interest of a mentally unstable scientist.

That's true.

And Hulk.

She said that when she first met Lee, she asked him why he wanted to make the film.

And he said, quote, I don't know, but here are some of my ideas.

And she said that she just found those ideas intriguing, creative, and kind of brave.

So she signed on to the project.

I think she does a lot of heavy lifting in this movie with just her eyes.

Look, she does her absolute best.

I feel like she is just extremely watchable always.

She's so beautiful.

She's a great actress.

She's one of the most beautiful people on the planet.

Yeah.

She does her absolute best with almost nothing to work with.

So good on you, Jennifer Connolly.

Absolutely.

Sam Elliott seems to have been a Gail Ann Hurd selection, perhaps.

As she later said, quote, quote, I'm in love with Sam Elliott.

Who isn't?

Except for some of the things he says.

Right.

On screen, Sam Elliott.

Sam has that kind of authority, but he has a twinkle in his eye.

We did not want General Ross to be a cardboard cutout of a bad military guy.

And you know, with Sam Elliott playing General Ross, that there is going to be something humane at the heart of the general.

I think that comes through.

Totally.

And then they ruined it with that mustache of his.

That's so bad.

It is.

You mentioned Josh Lucas.

I love Josh Lucas.

I really like him as an actor.

I really like him in this movie.

I think he does such a good heel turn as a villain.

He was fresh off Sweet Home, Alabama, which I kind of like with him and Reese Witherspoon.

Yeah.

And A Beautiful Mind, where he plays Russell Crowe's nemesis turned friend at the end.

He was brought on to play Talbot.

Quick side note.

Can we give him, can I, I'm creating an award for us, Lizzie, the inaugural James Marsden Best Looking Guy from Your Hometown award.

And these are guys that I would argue are too handsome to be a character actor, too character actor to be a leading man.

Yes.

Other potential nominees, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode, James Badgdale.

Oh, Aldous Hodge.

And I would argue Glenn Powell for a moment maybe was going to be there.

I'm taking Aldous Hodge out of the running.

He's beautiful, but he hasn't been a lead yet.

So I just, I'm throwing it in there.

Okay, fine.

Yeah.

I mean, he's gorgeous and he's built like a freaking tank.

Yeah.

It's ridiculous.

I remember when I saw Invisible Man, I was like, those arms aren't real.

Come on.

What are you doing?

CG arms.

Ridiculous.

All right.

You mentioned him.

My favorite bit of casting, Lizzie.

Let's talk about him.

Nick Nulty.

David said this as we were watching it, which I loved so much, is that this entire movie is just Nick Nulty's mugshot.

And that is absolutely accurate.

He looks like a mess.

He's having a blast.

I love Nick Nulty in this.

He plays Bruce Banner's father, Dr.

David Banner.

Nulty claims he had sworn off mainstream movies.

And I looked through his IMDV.

It's consistent with that claim.

The Thin Red Line was his biggest film leading up to Hulk, and that wasn't exactly mainstream, as we know.

So I'm just going to read the quote from Nulty about his meeting with Ang Li, which I would pay a thousand dollars for a video of this.

When he came to my house to talk about it, I can't do this the whole time.

When he came to my house to talk about it, he said, I don't know how to make a comic book.

I know how to make a Greek tragedy.

Right away, my ears perked up.

I asked him if he thought Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, that was Ang Li's third film, was based on King Lear.

And he said, Yes.

So I took him up to my lab, and I pricked his finger, put the blood on a slide, slid it under my dark field microscope, then projected the image through a camera onto high def.

We watched his red cells floating around, and they look like jewels.

Blood is very much alive.

It shakes, it shimmers.

It's far more interesting to watch than the universe.

It was silent in the room for a while.

And Aang said, Can you do that in color?

That's a real quote from nick nulty so nick nulty playing himself is this movie it's so good i love that it's crazy i'm sure ang lie just thought can you bring your lab to set can we shoot in your house yeah it's fantastic so production begins in march of 2002 it spans northern california arizona utah and the universal lot.

Now, there's not a ton of on-set drama on this film.

Much of that's going to come with the release, but we'll talk fun details.

First, Eric Mann is doing his first leading role in a big budget Hollywood film, and Aang Lee doesn't want to show him dailies.

So this was a very nerve-wracking experience for him.

Yeah.

So Banna had to ask the producers basically every day, you know, did you see Dalies?

Oh.

Yeah, the Dalies.

Sorry for my Australian accent, Eric.

Nick Nulty apparently eventually did see the Dailies and convinced Banna, you're brilliant.

Don't worry about it.

No.

Now, there are some really fun Nick Nulty moments that we should just, just so much fun, Nick Nulty.

We got to highlight.

First of all, Nick Nulty carried an oxygen tank around with him on set.

He'd He'd take a hit,

okay, I'm ready to go.

And then they would do a take.

And everyone assumed Nick Nolte had some sort of health problem that required use of an oxygen tank.

Why would you assume that?

Well, one day he took a hit in private with Banna

and said, I don't really need this.

Just makes them think you're fucking crazy and they pay attention.

Nick Nolte for you.

He claimed himself that he basically ranted for three hours to prepare for one of his intense scenes.

Quote, I was still finding it, working on it, but I I kept passing out and I got so dizzy, Aang very patiently came up to me and said, Do you think it's time to string two sentences together?

I said, not quite yet.

Animation supervisor Colin Brady said Nolte would go around and touch everything on the set before shooting each scene.

And Nolte himself said that he covered himself in food in order to work with the dogs on set.

So there's obviously three dogs, including poodle.

Here's his reasoning.

I work with dogs a lot.

I just smeared myself in food.

That's what you eventually do.

The trainers try to hide in bushes and the dogs would run into the bushes and find their trainers.

So I just took all that food they gave me and rubbed it all over me.

You couldn't see it.

It was night and I had it in my hands.

It's like a little kid hiding candy from his parents.

It's so good.

I don't know if that is what you eventually do, but you know,

whatever.

The scent was so strong, they'd stick to me like glue.

I learned that trick on down and out.

Okay.

Nick Nulty, what a treasurer.

Also, apologies.

My Nick Nulty accent sounds like Alex Jones.

I just can't do anything else.

Speaking of dogs, there's a midpoint dog fight scene, Lizzie, that I'm sure you remember at the cabin.

Huge fight scene.

This was incredibly expensive, upwards of $16 million, and it was roughly a third of what Lee had originally imagined.

So everybody had to rein him in because he didn't know how expensive animating all of this would be.

And my guess is...

Shooting Crashing Tiger Hidden Dragon in China, where your production costs are probably going to be 10 to 20 cents on the dollar dollar of what they are in the United States because of the differences in the cost of labor.

I'm sure he just thought, like, this shouldn't be that expensive.

I just did wire work with actors floating through trees for months.

And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, we have to pay people, you know, five, 10x what you had to on the last film.

Now, Englie wanted Hulk to be nude during that scene, but this was abandoned because they kept needing to put dogs, trees, and rocks into every shot to hide his genitals as he was running around, you know, hiding the Hulk's huge

Hulky member.

Yeah.

Speaking of, let's talk about the Hulk's shorts.

The Hulk's basketball shorts, yeah.

Basketball, exactly.

So these were a big conversation throughout production.

As VFX supervisor Dennis Murin said, who we've discussed before, he's a veteran ILM VFX supervisor.

Quote, we realized we couldn't show his stuff.

So we figured when he's in a government immersion cell, those were military stretchable pants.

So those are military-grade basketball shorts.

Of course.

But earlier on, it was more difficult to rationalize.

So we figured he just wears stretchy pants.

Me too.

Yeah, seriously.

It's like Lululemons.

One thing that did help, Aang Li rediscovered his love for acting.

No, he doesn't have a cameo, but many, if not most, of the Hulk's movements are based on Aang Li's performance in a motion capture suit.

Wow.

As Brady said, one of the VFX animating supervisors, Aang gave an amazing performance.

And even after reviewing all the takes, we decided that his performance was best.

Even the tank sequence, we built these miniature props and brought in a stunt guy and an ex-football player and shot several motion capture sessions, beating the heck out of these tanks and smashing them up.

And while all the physical motion was correct, the acting wasn't there.

But Aang gave good angst.

Even the Hulk beating up the tank with the turret was 99% Aang.

Wow.

And I just love that, like...

The repressed artist, right?

Like living under the authoritarian father is released through his Hulk performance on this movie.

That's awesome.

I just would love to be on set watching Ang Lee let everything out in a motion capture suit playing Hulk.

It's so cool.

That's also cool to have, you know, given up acting to a certain degree because of a handicap that was out of your control.

And then to be able to come back in this capacity and kind of hide in a way, like hide in plain sight.

That would be really fun.

He's, you know, I don't want to get like emotional early.

It's going to get to the end.

He's such a brave person.

Yeah.

To me, he's taken so many risks throughout his career.

And obviously he like traveled to a a different country to pursue this career.

And obviously his spouse too in supporting him is really, that's a remarkable part of his story.

But man, to be brave enough to get up on set and put on, and those suits were so, you're wearing like tight lycra basically in front of everybody with the ping pong balls on you.

This was very new.

Like Andy Serkis had just started pioneering this with Lord of the Rings.

And he just said, screw it.

And he's willing to get up there and do it himself.

Like, what a cool, creative person he is.

Yeah.

Anyway, all right.

While the Hulk was CGI Lizzy, as we've discussed, the destruction of his environments was largely practical.

And this is actually where I think the movie really holds up.

When he's smashing things, those things being smashed are largely real.

So as Michael Lantieri, a special effects supervisor, meaning special effects, physical effects on set, later said, we destroyed the entire lab, which was giant.

Those are real walls that are coming down and real windows that are being broken, real lab equipment that's being destroyed.

They took 12 cars and rolled them down Telegraph Hill in San Francisco and tipped the cable car.

So I think one of the reasons, and I re-watched the 2008 Incredible Hulk as well, and even though the animation had gotten more detailed and sophisticated, I actually think the 2003 version, for my money, looks better because all the environmental destruction is real.

So the only thing that's being animated is the Hulk in these scenes.

Anyway, I just thought it was really remarkable that they did all of that physical destruction.

You know, they committed to it in the way they had in something like Jurassic Park.

All right.

Now, Nick Nolte shenanigans notwithstanding, it seems like things progressed roughly on schedule and on budget, but there was one big and unexpected hiccup.

On May 3rd, 2002, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man opened wide.

The Columbia-backed Marvel adaptation was a smash hit

and seemingly overnight set the new blueprint of what a Marvel movie could and perhaps should be.

I'm sure you remember seeing it at the time, Lizzie.

Oh, yeah.

And the problem is, the Hulk couldn't have been any more different.

Spider-Man was buoyant, accessible, grounded.

It was rooted in your kind of stereotypical coming-of-age hero's journey tradition.

Very funny.

Very funny.

Can't be elements to it.

Yeah.

Has a lot of recognizable young actors that the audience, you know, from James Franco to Toby Maguire and Kirsten Dunst.

It was not brooding, Shakespearean, Freudian, borderline Oedipal, perhaps.

Very different from Hulk.

Also, the Hulk is a lot of, a lot more adult actors, regardless of the actual age.

The people that are in this, Jennifer Connolly, Eric Banna, like those are names that were going to be recognizable to 30-plus audience members based on what they've been in previously.

So Seamus caught the movie in June, Spider-Man.

He called Lee.

and said, I think we have a problem.

But the train had already left the station.

Hulk entered post in late summer, early fall of 2002.

Editor Tim Squires, who was Oscar-nominated for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, was brought on to cut the film.

And one of my favorite parts of this movie is the transitions.

Yes.

I think they're very fun.

Lizzie, can you talk a little bit?

Did you notice anything upon re-watching it?

Yes.

I mean, I think that what he's trying to do is so clearly to replicate what transitions on the page in a comic book look like on screen here.

It is a little jarring at first.

I was getting shades of Battlefield Earth, which if you haven't seen, there's a lot of like, you know,

PowerPoint transitions.

This is much better than that.

And there are parts of this that look great.

I don't think we've really seen anything like it where he's using kind of perspective in the way that a comic book would, where characters are sort of back to back on screen, but they're talking to each other from across the room.

It's visually very interesting.

I don't know that it works.

But yeah, he's just, he's trying to really bring the page to the screen here.

Yes, Lee took a very experimental approach in post, and he'd been experimental since film school with his editing.

And he basically told Squires, just do whatever you can think of.

Anything is fine.

And then Squires proliferated that further and told the VFX editors, try anything.

And some things started as jokes, but then they made it into the film.

And the same was true with the score.

So Aang Lee brought in composer Michael Dana, who had scored the ice storm for him a few years ago.

I know, not the name you see in the credits.

We'll get to that.

Yeah.

And Dana's score was unconventional and global.

Japanese taiko, African drumming, Arabic singing.

Okay, there is some of that.

There's some of that still in the desert sequence.

I know.

They go like Arabic singing when they're going into a U.S.

military base.

Are we in Iraq?

What sounds like uh-oh.

Yeah.

Well, Lee wanted it to have a global feel.

And in a way, it feels like he was kind of playing the father, right, that he never had.

He's allowing his children to express their creativity, but someone was going to have to pay for his sins.

Now, our producer David, Lizzie's husband, once shared a story about a composer at a roundtable.

And the rough tale goes: the composer was instructed by his director on a particular film to make the music of a specific scene faster.

And every time he brought it back, the director would just say, No, it needs to be faster.

It needs to be faster.

Until finally, the composer realized what the director was really trying to tell the actor was to run faster, but he couldn't.

So he could only change the music at this point.

In March of 2003, just three months out from Hulk's release, Universal watched a cut of the film, and they promptly fired Michael Dana.

Now, for his part, Dana blames it on the studio just being shocked by what they'd seen.

The movie was not what they expected.

The music wasn't what they expected, but they could only change one of those things.

So, one of his tracks did make it into the film, Mother, but Universal needed somebody much more experienced in the superhero blockbuster genre.

And of course, they bring in who, Lizzie?

Danny Elfman.

Danny Elfman.

The oingo boingo frontman turned composer, as I'm sure you know, Lizzie, had been behind Burton's Batmans, as well as Men in Black, and of course, most importantly and most recently, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man.

A little bit of a, if you can't beat him, hire him in this instance.

And Hulk looked like it might be his biggest challenge yet.

His first thought, this was impossible, but the opportunity to work with Lee, and it seems like he genuinely liked the movie, convinced him to try.

He had 37 days to write two hours of score.

For a movie of this size, he should have had at least 100.

Things didn't start well.

He describes the first week as pure hell.

Everything he brought to Lee, Lee would just say, this sounds like a Danny Elfman score.

This sounds like Batman.

And Elfman agreed with him.

He was like, I got to try something new.

I got to do something I haven't done before.

But at the same time, Lee needed Elfman's expertise.

He was more experienced with big budget films.

And you hired him for a reason, and he has a very small amount of time to do this.

So eventually, Elfman tells Lee, there's no way I can give you 100% of what you want.

To do that would require a lot of exploration and learning about each other, but we just don't have the time.

So it seems like they both agreed, we just need to kind of paint broad with this score and we need to get it done.

Now, Elfman wasn't completely satisfied with the score, but he does point out the main titles as working particularly well to set up the film as this is not a lightweight cartoon action movie, which I think they do.

It's very, very moody, kind of the opening credits, which was exactly the problem.

But you wouldn't know that, Lizzie, based on the public's reaction to their first sight of the Hulk.

I don't know if you remember this.

I actually vaguely do.

Universal dropped the first teaser trailer for the film during the 2003 Super Bowl, months ahead of the film's release, and everybody thought Hulk looked really goofy because he was so green and the VFX weren't finished yet.

Oh, no.

As Newsweek wrote at the time, Universal executives decided to give the the world its first peek at their big green gamble during the Super Bowl in January.

The next day, they were the ones turning green.

Comic book lovers and web geeks decreed that Hulk looked puffy and fake.

Never mind that the movie's June 20th release was six months away, an eternity at ILM, or that marketers had futzed with some shots in a misguided attempt to give the trailer more juice.

The buzz was set, and it was bad.

And I do remember this actually.

People were confused because the tone seemed dark, and yet they'd picked all these daylight shots of the Hulk that felt kind of goofy and out of place, including Banna looking at him in the mirror.

I don't think a lot of people knew who Banna was at this point either.

Now, there was also a somewhat public fight over who would be credited for the film's screenplay.

So, Lizzie, we've talked about this briefly before, but when a film wraps, the studio sends the Writers Guild of America a notice of tentative writing credit, basically how they feel the credits should be attributed to the people who've worked on the film.

But any writer on the movie can demand that these credits be arbitrated and suggest alternative credits.

I've actually been through this process, so I can speak to it a little bit.

Basically, the guild brings on three anonymous writers to act as judges, and they compare each writer's drafts with the final shooting script to determine who wrote what.

And in this instance, we have five writers claiming credit, and all of them have multiple drafts.

So they have to compare the shooting script with multiple drafts from five different writers, and then try to decide who gets what percentage of screenplay credit.

Obviously, nobody's going to be happy in a situation like this.

As the New Yorker put it at the time, the perceived capriciousness of the guild rulings fuels screenwriters' chronic dissatisfaction.

Arbitration often pits a low-paid first writer, the one who had the idea and roughed out the plot, against an A-list rewriter, one of a small group of writers paid $300,000 a week to close a film and make it shine.

And this is more or less true of Hulk if you think of like John Terman getting his first big break writing it, then somebody like Michael France, who was a little more experienced doing a rewrite.

And then you have somebody like Seamus, who is decades of experience doing the polish for Aang Lee.

So Terman claimed that he was responsible for the father-son storyline.

The studio wanted to nix it.

And he says he believes that that was kept in because Aang Li liked it and he should have credit for that.

Michael France claims he was the one who humanized Bruce Banner and took him out of the military setting.

And he was the one who came up with the idea that he should use gamma ray technology to heal and not to hurt.

And then Seamus said, no, I should get full credit because I rewrote the whole thing for Aang Lee, and this is my movie.

So the verdict comes down in April.

By a two to one vote, the writing credit for the Hulk was established as screenplay by John Terman and Michael France and James Seamus, story by James Seamus.

Seamus was furious.

He had to share the credit.

France was furious at Seamus for implying that he should get sole credit.

And Terman was mad that he didn't get the story credit.

Yeah, nobody's happy.

Nobody's Nobody's happy.

But maybe they wouldn't want that association for much longer.

Hulk premiered on June 17th, 2003.

In attendance were many associated with prior iterations of the character, including writer-producer Kenneth Johnson, who had created Hulk's catchphrase.

Now, I want you to take this quote with a grain of salt because he may have been salty that he wasn't involved.

But as Johnson put it, at the end of the premiere, the lights came up and everyone was sneaking out of the back door, trying not to talk to anybody because it was just so bad.

And he goes on to, I'm not going to finish his quote because he says something kind of disparaging about Ang Lee that's hearsay from a variety reporter.

But the point is, nobody knew what to make of this movie.

Yeah.

It was very long.

This movie's two hours and 20 minutes.

The pacing is slow.

It's very brooding.

It's very artsy.

It's very dreary.

It's just a tonal mishmash.

Like nothing, nothing really comes together.

You know, there are fun performances in it, like we said, from Josh Lucas and Nick Nolte.

Eric Banna and Jennifer Connolly are in like a completely different movie.

None of it matches with what they're trying to do visually in terms of what other movies I think did do successfully visually, like Sin City or even Kickass and trying to sort of mimic the comic book elements of it.

This tries and it just doesn't get it.

I agree.

And even though I think, for example, I think the sequence when Hulk escapes the military facility and he's jumping across the desert and being chased by helicopters, I think that stands up as a fantastic action sequence.

I actually love the weightless way that he jumps.

It's fun.

I think it looks beautiful.

But as you said, the movie's just trying to do so many things at once

that it's hard to keep track of.

And I like the movie and I can, you know, recognize that.

So Pulk opened wide three days later on June 20th, 2003.

It ended up grossing $245 million against its roughly $140 million budget.

So not super successful.

No.

It was one of the top 20 highest grossing films of the year, and Universal tried to splice the numbers in a way that felt compelling.

They told CNN only 19 movies have ever opened to 60 plus million, and none have been in June.

It's the biggest June opening ever.

But the problem was the budget was so high that even though that's true, it just didn't have the multiplier it needed.

So Hulk had a historic 70% drop-off in ticket sales between its first and second weekends, which just goes to show you the hype was high, but word of mouth was really bad.

And then it had the lowest box office-to-budget multiplier of any major Marvel release since 1986 as Howard the Duck.

So its budget multiplier was 1.79, meaning it did 1.79 times its budget at the box office.

For easy reference, you want that to be at least two to get you anywhere near break even.

For comparison, Blade had done 131 million against 45.

X-Men did 300 million against 75.

Blade 2 did 155 million against 54.

Spider-Man did 825 million against 140.

So this is ghosting a third of Spider-Man.

Daredevil even did 180 against 78.

X2, which was released later in 2003, did 407 million against 110.

So Hulk just lagged all of its peers.

It is so funny because I feel like this is such a nebulous time for comic book adaptations.

And it's interesting that all of those movies are hitting between Spider-Man and Batman Begins, which I feel like are the two that kind of end up catalyzing what you can do

with a comic movie.

I think X-Men and X2 also

are the successes

in that time period, not X3.

Now, reviews were mixed.

Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars.

Rolling Stone gave it an overall positive review.

Oddly enough, Lizzie, they criticized Nolte.

They said he was laboring under the impression that he's playing King Lear as a mad scientist who pushes the psychological subtext too hard and spoils the fun.

I disagree.

He is the fun.

Yeah.

Go for it.

Put that oxygen tank in frame.

Now, the New York Times called it incredibly long, incredibly tedious, and incredibly turgid.

I don't 100% agree with the incredible adjective affixed to the front of those, but it is long.

Wait till they see later Marvel movies.

They just get longer.

The year was dominated by the triumphant X2 X-Men United.

Hulk fell by the wayside.

Although I still think it holds up much better than something like Daredevil or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which we will get to.

This is another comic book adaptation that ended the career of Sean Connery, more or less.

A planned planned sequel was scrapped and Universal let its option on the character lapse.

Ownership reverted to Marvel and 2008's The Incredible Hulk with Ed Norton became the second film in the Marvel cinematic universe.

Although I would argue did not solve the problem of how do you bring this character to the big screen in his own film.

Since then, he's always just been a supporting character in the stories of other characters.

Now, Banna hopped around.

Lizzie, as we discussed, I think he was most comfortable in supporting or ensemble roles.

He never really returned to the superhero genre, and his bank ability was questioned after Troy, which was also a flop.

Yeah.

But he did turn in, I would argue, a career's second-best performance in 2005's Munich.

I still think nobody's figured out how to use him quite as effectively as Andrew Dominic did in Chopper.

He's so good.

You guys got to see it.

He needs to be a villain.

Yeah.

No, he's very good in Star Trek as a villain.

That's true.

He is fun in that.

But I mean, I would love to see him bring him back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

If he would do it, bring him back as a villain.

Sure.

But Hulk's failure to spark at the box office hit no one harder than Aang Lee.

He grew depressed and considered for the first time retiring from filmmaking.

Maybe it was time to do something real, as his father had long said.

But it was his father who would set him straight.

As Lee put it, he told me to just put on my helmet and keep going.

That was the very first time he encouraged me to make a movie.

Aw, his father died two weeks after that conversation.

Oh, man.

Two years later, Ang Lee hoisted the best director Oscar for his work on Broke Back Mountain.

Oh my God.

And that concludes our coverage of Ang Li's Hulk.

Thank you, Chris.

I never would have watched this voluntarily, and I really did enjoy it.

I think it's a very fun time capsule.

Yeah.

It captures a moment of experimentation with superhero films that we have left far behind.

Yes.

There was none of the top-down control that there is today, which has yielded some great movies, don't get me wrong.

And it's an interesting moment right now for comic book films with the rebirth of Marvel through Thunderbolts and whatever their new phase is, and James Gunn's Superman, which is coming out this summer at the time that we record this, which I think looks great.

I agree.

I think it looks good too.

I think...

This may have sort of marked the rebirth of the Marvel cinematic universe, obviously kind of beginning them with Iron Man, where they started to really find their footing and find what works.

What we're seeing now is that the things that that they thought worked aren't working really anymore.

So I am interested to see what Superman turns up because I think we may be entering yet another era of superhero adaptations.

I want to say, Chris,

I think there's a version of this movie with Eric Banna that would have worked great, but they don't get to it until the last maybe four minutes of this movie.

And that is the very end where he is a scruffy scientist working maybe somewhere in the Amazons, somewhere vaguely South American, Central American.

And, you know, he's there, sort of doctors without borders, saving people, trying to get them medicine.

And then some people come in to take, you know, people hostage.

And he says he wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

And I'm like, I will watch that.

And give him kind of like a devil may care attitude.

He's wearing like an Indiana Jones hat.

Yeah, he's roguish and

he's funny and he's sardonic.

That was it.

I agree.

And I think that was the sequel they were trying to set up, more or less.

Right.

But they never got the chance to do it.

Yeah.

All right, Lizzie.

What went right?

Come on.

You know, I mean, I'll let you do Angly because I suspect that that's what you want to do.

So I am going to give it to Josh Lucas and Nick Nulty.

I would love to give it to Eric Banna.

I don't think he goes right here.

I don't think that's his fault at all.

But yeah, I'm going to give it to the two that I think are having the most fun on screen, which is those two.

And whether or not they were in the same movie as anybody anybody else, I don't care because they were extremely fun to watch.

And I hope we're having a good time.

It sure sounds like Nick Nulty was smearing himself with food so the dogs would eat him.

So, yeah, I will give it to those two, even though Banna and Connolly and Sam Elliott are doing a great job.

They're trying their hardest, but I agree.

It's hard.

Lucas and Nulty are given the leash to go in that direction, right?

Whereas the others aren't.

Yeah, I will give mine to Angley because

I had no idea how personal this film was.

It is an easy film to make fun of, as many people do.

I think there is a lot to admire about this movie and about the artistry that went into making it.

Yeah, I agree.

I think I will die on this hill.

I think the animation overall is fantastic, especially for 2003.

And I would argue one of the only reasons some shots are a little jarring.

is more of an art direction issue than an animation issue, which is if you look at the way that Hulk is animated now they have toned down the green substantially because he stands out so much from his environment when he is bright green that's true they didn't do that in the

slubber colored in the story they said he is bright green in the comics he's going to be bright green and they don't try to hide it go to the 2008 version they put him behind things they shoot it only at night they edge light him it's just like they're you know they're doing every trick in the book to make sure he looks as hyper realistic as possible and angley's like okay, no, it's like he's in the middle of the road in San Francisco at noon.

He's going to be front lit and that's what he's going to look like.

And to me, that takes courage, courage from the VFX artists, courage from Aang Li to get in that motion capture suit.

So kudos to Aang Li for pouring his heart into a movie within a genre that can at times feel a little heartless, especially at this point in time.

You know, some of these movies could feel like popcorn cash grabs and this was not that.

Well, it's interesting you bring up, you know, the having the courage to kind of show Hulk in full color in the middle of the street and like, hey, this is what it would look like if a radioactive, gigantic man were there.

And yes, it does look silly, but it reminds me of one shot in Sense and Sensibility, actually, when they're getting out of the carriage, going into a banquet, and they step down into the mud and like their shoes are getting covered in mud, puddles, and horse poop, basically, which is not something you typically see in a Jane Austen adaptation, but it's absolutely what would happen if you're trying to climb out of a carriage in England in the 19th century and trying to get into the ball.

So

I think that he carries that willingness to show reality through all of his films, no matter how fantastical they may be.

I agree.

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Nick Nulty and his oxygen tank back to the studio for this set of shout-outs.

Thank you to our full-stop members.

Here we go:

Cameron Smith,

Ben Scheindelman,

Casey Boogie Simmons.

You need to give me my strength back.

Scary Carrie, the Provost family, where the O's sound like O's.

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Film it yourself.

That was my downfall doing it myself.

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hemex odia we're gonna have to watch that timber of yours

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Blame him for all this.

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Wow.

Thank you, Mr.

Nolte, for stopping by.

Please stop touching the things on set.

All right.

Guys, we will be back in a week.

Yeah.

Believe it or not.

And we are covering.

What's that, Lizzie?

What is it going to be?

Goldeneye.

Goldeneye.

And I am very excited.

Guys, tune in this Friday.

We are going to be dropping a primer on the origins of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and the character.

I think it's really interesting, and it'll give you a great foundation going into the mid-90s retooling of the franchise around Remington Steel star Pierce Frosnan, noted television actor, Pierce Frosnan, who is, you know,

I love him.

It was, it was the bond of my childhood.

I'm really excited to talk about it.

Give that a listen on Friday, and we will see you in a week.

And we're just excited to be be here weekly for you guys.

We can't wait to burrow deeper into your earholes.

Yep.

All right.

And with that.

Bye.

Go to patreon.com slash whatwentwrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentrongpod.com.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.

With additional editing by Karen Krepsaw.