How committed was Jon Hamm to getting “Confess, Fletch” made? Director Greg Mottola revealed to Uproxx (via IndieWire) that the “Mad Men” Emmy winner 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.
According to Mottola, the money that Miramax executive Bill Block was able to put up for the film only covered 27 days of shooting. When Mottola and Hamm went out to find extra funding to bring the shoot to 30 days, they were rejected by every financier.
“Everyone said, ‘I don’t know that this kind of comedy works in this day and age,’” Mottola said. “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% of his salary to the budget,” the director continued. “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, fuck 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.”
“Confess, Fletch” is a crime comedy based on Gregory Mcdonald’s 1976 novel of the same name. The character previously inspired two Chevy Chase-starring comedies in the 1980s, “Fletch” and “Fletch Lives.” Hamm took over the role for the new film, which is based on Mcdonald’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 in the new film.
“After other directors struggled for years to reboot Gregory Mcdonald’s popular mystery series, Greg Mottola gets it rolling with Miramax in this amusing adaptation,” Variety film critic Peter Debruge wrote of the film in his review.
“Confess, Fletch” is now playing in theaters and available to watch on demand.