We hear about certain movies being called passion projects, but Jon Hamm just gave the world a real lesson on what that really looks like. The actor was so committed to getting Confess, Fletch made that he took a significant pay cut just so the production would be able to afford to make the movie.
If you weren’t even aware that a new Fletch movie recently opened, with the now rare simultaneous theatrical/VOD release, starring Jon Hamm in the role once made famous by Chevy Chase, you’d be forgiven. The film was always a very small sort of production working 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 movie financed at all, they had a hard cap on how much of the studio’s money they could spend. Mottola explained…
So, I finished a draft, and Bill Block at Miramax has been the champion of this project since the beginning. I don’t blame anything about the release of this movie on him. He’s tried everything he could try. Basically, he said, ‘Up to a certain amount of money, I can fully finance this film,’ but it was the kind of amount of money that would mean 27 days of shooting, which seemed especially challenging. So we looked for partners on the movie, and everyone passed. 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.’
The amount of money they were going to have to make Confess, Fletch was going to make it a pretty tight production schedule, and they looked for other sources of money, but apparently couldn’t find them. It had been years since the last Fletch movie and while the book series is known, it’s not one of those that everybody has read.
So, in the end, it turns out that the extra money the movie needed was provided by Jon Hamm himself as well as the director. Hamm gave back 60% of his salary, Mottola also gave back some of his (but not as much for entirely justifiable reasons) which was enough to pay for the movie to have three additional days of production. Mottola continues…
So, basically, what we did is Jon gave back 60 percent 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, 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.
Now, as stated, it’s possible you weren’t even aware that Confess, Fletch is a movie that’s actually in theaters right now, but if you do know about the movie, it’s probably because the film is getting incredibly good reviews. Jon Hamm and Greg Mottola made their financial sacrifice for a worthy cause.