British director Sam Mendes, from left, screenwriter Jon Brown and Scottish writer Armando Iannucci attend the LA premiere of HBO's original series The Franchise at the Paramount theatre in Los Angeles, on Oct. 1.CHRIS DELMAS/AFP/Getty Images
It was Sam Mendes’s own experiences directing superspy movies that provided the initial spark for a scabrous new behind-the-scenes TV satire about a film studio and its overextended superhero universe.
The Franchise, a new half-hour HBO show that debuts on Crave in Canada on Sunday, has its origin story in a lighthearted lunch conversation that the Oscar-winning director had with Armando Iannucci, creator of small-screen political satires Veep and The Thick of It, after Mendes had finished work on the James Bond movies Skyfall and Spectre.
“He was telling me funny stories about what it’s like when you think you’re in charge, but, in fact, the franchise itself has a bigger life outside of you,” recalls Iannucci, during a video interview.
“As a throwaway, without being a serious proposition, I just happened to say, ‘Oh, there’s a comedy right there.’”
Thus, The Franchise was launched over lunch – with Mendes and Iannucci, who are executive producers on the show, deciding the best setting for such a comedy would be a studio making superhero movies similar to Marvel or DC.
Jon Brown – a superhero fan and a British screenwriter who worked with Iannucci on Veep and also wrote for Succession – was brought on board as showrunner for what has turned into another foul-mouthed and funny peek into a corridor of power that journalists can’t always access.
Powerful PRs and a profusion of NDAs make it as hard to do in-depth reporting on Hollywood studios as it is to cover the inner circles of ultra-rich media moguls or vice-presidents’ staffs, but Brown says artists and crew who had worked on superhero movies were more than happy to share stories with him off the record.
Some of those he heard went straight into the show – like the scene in the first episode where first assistant director Daniel (Himesh Patel) has to talk an actor in full body prosthetics out of a panic attack so that the doesn’t rip off his latex and delay production for half a day.
Taking place on the set of a movie called Tecto: Eve of the Storm, The Franchise focuses on the people who don’t walk the red carpet, from a low-level producer to a third assistant director all the way down to the lowly overworked and underpaid VFX team – and those Brown spoke to wanted to make sure his portrayal was authentic.
Sam Mendes, left, and Jon Brown in HBO's season 1 of The Franchise.Colin Hutton/Crave
“There is a perception that these films are very neatly road mapped: If you look at Marvel and DC, they have these timelines for the next sort of eight movies or nine movies all sequenced,” he says.
“But you don’t have to dig too deep to find out that it is secretly incredibly chaotic … Choices are being made and being changed constantly.”
A great source of information for the writers was Mendes – who compares working on franchise films to jumping onto an already moving train. “As a director, you’re used to being the instigator, the creative driver – and, with a franchise, you have to accept there are people there who know the story, and they know the world better than you do,” says Mendes, whose non-Bond films range from American Beauty to 1917.
Some of the cast of The Franchise had their own stories, too. Playing Eric Bouchard, Tecto’s German director, is the German-Spanish actor Daniel Bruhl, who, lately, has been a part of the Marvel universe as Helmut Zemo in Captain America: Civil War and the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
“This material obviously resonated with me,” says Bruhl, who shadowed Mendes as he shot the pilot, and also took inspiration for his jaunty director’s scarf from Swedish director Ruben Ostlund (Triangle of Sadness), with whom he is about to shoot a film.
Bruhl has only positive things to say about the “well-oiled machine” that is Marvel – but he did another film he prefers not to name that he calls “a nightmare from day one.”
“It had nothing to do with what I had read on paper in the script,” he recalls. “You’re standing there each day under the shower and you look at your miserable face in the mirror and you think, like, ‘How am I gonna do it tomorrow?’”
That level of despair is a comic sweet spot for Iannucci – who’s not anti-superhero and indeed has written a couple of stories for the Marvel comic books Daredevil and Spider-Man. He cites Iron Man, Captain America: Winter Soldier and Thor: Ragnarok as great stand-alone superhero films.
“It’s when they started to feel like they were just part of a bigger monster – that you won’t be able to understand this film unless you’ve seen these three streaming TV shows – that’s when I felt this is out of control,” he says.
“It felt like the right time to draw on that; this sense of a very, very confident studio going through a little bit of an existential crisis is, I think, a potentially funny thing to watch.”