We hear about what some films call passionate projects, but Jon Hamm has just taught the world a real lesson in what it really looks like. The actor was so interested in getting “Recognition” that Fletch cut his salary significantly just so that the production could afford to make the film.
If you didn’t even know that Fletch’s new movie had recently been released, with the now rare simultaneous cinema/VOD release starring Jon Hamm in the role once made famous by Chevy Chase, you’d be forgiven. The film has always been a very small production with a fairly limited budget, but now we know how limited it really was. Director and co-writer Greg Mottola recently told Uproxx that in order to get the film funded at all, they had a hard limit on how much studio money they could spend. Mottola explained…
So, I finished the sketch, and Bill Block from Miramax was the champion of this project from the very beginning. I don’t blame him for anything in the release of this film. He tried everything he could. In fact, he said: “Up to a certain amount of money, I can fully finance this film,” but it was such an amount of money that would mean 27 days of filming, which seemed especially difficult. So we were looking for partners in the film, and everything passed. Everyone said: “I do not know if such a comedy works in our time.” They just said, “Who is Fletch? I don’t think anyone cares anymore.”
The amount of money they had to get to make a Confession, Fletch was going to make it a pretty tight production schedule, and they were looking for other sources of money, but obviously couldn’t find them. Years have passed since the release of the last Fletch film, and although this series of books is known, it is not one of those that everyone has read.
So, in the end it turns out that the extra money needed for the film was provided by John Hamm himself, as well as the director. Hamm returned 60% of his salary, Mottola also returned part of his (but not so much for quite good reasons), which was enough to pay for three additional days of film production. Mottola continues…
