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\n Photo: Eric Charbonneau\/Briarcliff Entertainment via Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
In the opening moments of the gonzo sci-fi action-adventure comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don\u2019t Die, a wild-eyed character played by Sam Rockwell bursts into a Los Angeles\u2013area diner with a bizarre hostage demand. Six randomly selected patrons must help him save humanity from marauding artificial intelligence or everyone in the restaurant dies via suicide vest. Claiming to have beamed in Terminator style from the dystopian, not-too-distant future, Rockwell\u2019s twitchy, rubber-faced Man From the Future (that\u2019s his name according to the credits) possesses an uncanny familiarity with all the diners at Norms<\/a>; he says he\u2019s already been to this very restaurant 117 times trying to stop the apocalypse. Soon, he\u2019s rounded up six ill-prepared and mostly disbelieving randos (Zazie Beetz, Michael Pe\u00f1a, Haley Lu Richardson, and Juno Temple among them), who embark on what could be a suicide mission where they will encounter forces both wondrous and baffling: facing off against a legion of social-media-addicted Gen-Alpha quasi zombies, biomorphic mountains of murderous toys, and a brontosaurus-size cat creature with even more disproportionately massive genitals (not to mention a bottomless appetite for human flesh).<\/p>\n Premiering at Austin\u2019s Fantastic Fest in September, Good Luck won over critics and dazzled audiences who didn\u2019t seem entirely sure what to make of its rollicking genre mash-up and sheer fuck-it joie de vivre. But the film\u2019s director, Gore Verbinski<\/a>, can also be understood to have beamed in from a different dimension. The erstwhile Hollywood rainmaker behind Johnny Depp\u2019s multibillion-dollar grossing Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the 2012 smash remake of Japanese avant-horror exercise The Ring<\/a>, and the animated hit Rango (for which Verbinski collected a 2012 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature) hasn\u2019t released a movie since 2017<\/a>, the critical and commercial disappointment A Cure for Wellness. The unkind take is that he has been in directors\u2019 jail since that time. The more generous view holds that Verbinski decided to step back from Hollywood\u2019s gigantic, creaking content conveyor belt to follow his bliss.<\/p>\n What remains incontrovertible: After a string of blockbusters \u2014 and infamously pushing back against Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, who thought Depp\u2019s Keith Richards\u2013esque Captain Jack Sparrow was \u201cruining<\/a>\u201d the Mouse House\u2019s Pirates IP during filming on Pirates I \u2014 Verbinski\u2019s box-office run of success came to a skidding halt with 2013\u2019s The Lone Ranger<\/a>. That $215 million would-be tentpole infuriated critics<\/a>, alienated viewers and slank from the multiplex after grossing $260 million: an era-defining flop. Since then, the director will tell you he has been moving without the ball, struggling valiantly to set up a suite of projects including a George R.R. Martin adaptation and \u201chigh concept\u201d animated musical.<\/p>\n Good Luck, Have Fun, Don\u2019t Die is Verbinski\u2019s first indie movie. He actively pieced together its slight $23 million production budget and distribution via \u201cstudio of last resort\u201d Briarcliff Entertainment<\/a> in a hands-on manner that would be inconceivable to most filmmakers belonging to the three-commas club. The 61-year-old Tennessean admits a certain recalcitrance toward the current requirements for studio-movie blockbusterdom: \u201cI don\u2019t know that the stuff I\u2019m interested in doing necessarily makes it through a green-light committee.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s a crazy, let\u2019s-throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks quality to this movie. How did you gravitate toward Matthew Robinson\u2019s script? Hollywood moves at a slow pace. It tends to be hard to make a movie addressing current events because movies spend years in development while the Zeitgeist moves on. Yet this one lands squarely in the cultural moment with an encroaching fear of the AI singularity and school shootings and the scourge of social media. How did you decide to hit those targets? I don\u2019t know your films to be explicitly taking on societal ills in this way. What made you want to be topical in your filmmaking right now? Photo: Briarcliff Entertainment\n <\/p>\n This is your first indie film. I understand you had a direct hand in putting together financing from various European partners and bringing Good Luck to Briarcliff, which is a scrappy Hollywood upstart. Talk me through how this project came together on a financing level and where you found the money for it. We got the L.A. tax incentive; we tried to make it here. Couldn\u2019t hit that number. Tried to make it in Vancouver, chased that tax incentive. Tried to make it in Winnipeg. We ended up in South Africa to shoot the movie. That\u2019s the state of our industry. Tom Ortenberg at Briarcliff still believes in the theatrical experience. So after we had made the film, we partnered with him. They\u2019ve been great \u2014 scrappy but great. And we went to Fantastic Fest and Beyond Fest and found some champions for the movie. We\u2019re sort of finding the audience that we made the movie for.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve done some movies based on iconic IP. You\u2019ve excelled at IP. But this is gravitating away from that. Why? Were you personally involved in those negotiations to pull together a budget? Or did you leave that to producing partners? Let me ask you a hard question. The last movie you had in theaters was A Cure for Wellness in 2017. You said you have been working on an animated musical that is taking a long time. But I\u2019m sure readers are going to be like, Where has Gore been? So, where have you been? I don\u2019t mean to be an asshole. It just seemed like you put together gigantic blockbuster after gigantic blockbuster. You won an Oscar for Rango. And then after The Lone Ranger there was a change of momentum. Am I right in thinking that? And does it presage what you are talking about in terms of doing what you are interested in as a filmmaker versus what the studios want from you? Again, I\u2019m not interested in capable. I need to find a way into it \u2014 that\u2019s what I\u2019ve always done. If you look at anything I\u2019ve done, successful or not, the approach is always the same. At the end of the day you have to answer the question, Why must I tell this story? If you can\u2019t answer that, you might as well sell real estate for a living. It\u2019s just too freaking hard to make a movie.<\/p>\n I think the answer to your question is from a banker standpoint: Those movies made money and this one didn\u2019t. There was never a thought about making money on any of the successes. In fact, it was the opposite. On the first Pirates, they [Disney] were so scared. The second one, they\u2019re like, Just keep doing what you\u2019re doing. That\u2019s when I got nervous \u2014 when we\u2019re not scaring them anymore. Does that answer your question? Sometimes they blow up. You might as well be asking about fads. You might as well be asking about bell-bottoms. I\u2019m just making pants.<\/p>\n Looking at your track record as a blockbuster filmmaker, I never understood you as a reflexive contrarian.\u00a0 This movie was, in a sense, harder than any other movie but also more rewarding. Everybody had that sneaky feeling like you were getting away with something. It\u2019s that punk-rock attitude.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: Eric Charbonneau\/Briarcliff Entertainment via Getty Images In the opening moments of the gonzo sci-fi action-adventure comedy Good…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290277,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,30046,85,46,397,37557],"class_list":{"0":"post-290276","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-gore-verbinski","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-pirates-of-the-caribbean"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Isn\u2019t the world screaming the answer? I read it in 2020 and just was really enraptured by it. Then we spent two years working on it because AI has changed in our lives so rapidly from his original 2017 draft. We worked quite a bit on Sam Rockwell\u2019s character\u2019s backstory. But it just felt like it needed to be now. I was working on an animated musical that was taking a long time, a couple of other projects that were taking a long time. And there was a sense of, This needs to come out tomorrow.<\/p>\n
When I first started working in this industry, the old-time producers would say, \u201cWhatever you do, don\u2019t mix genres.\u201d Well, that\u2019s all we fucking do! Mix the tone, you know? Our little psychotic opera has five narratives. This sort of a Captain Beefheart<\/a> [narrative]: Sam Rockwell climbs out of a dumpster and enters Norm\u2019s [diner] strapped with explosives, saying he\u2019s from the future. I\u2019m a huge fan of Dog Day Afternoon<\/a>. Sal and Sonny are the worst bank robbers. They are not capable. I guess I\u2019m a fan of that \u2014capable is boring. So then we have this collection of misfits sent to save the future. The future is so fucked. It sent us Sam Rockwell, not Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he\u2019s not at the San Diego Navy SEAL academy. It\u2019s Norms.<\/p>\n
I would say the first three Pirates movies are about the post-modern western, corporate greed, the East India Trading Company. There\u2019s no place for honest pirates in a dishonest world. There\u2019s always a bit of medicine buried in the icing of the cake. You don\u2019t need to know it\u2019s there. I think what you are responding to is, with this one, it\u2019s not buried. The medicine is right there. It\u2019s a contemporary narrative. We\u2019re already growing ears on the backs of rats.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1b3d006892e53c442ff193da42f2d0d2a3-goresecondary.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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Every major studio had passed on the script. And in the spirit of Repo Man<\/a> from 1984 \u2014 a movie that smells like nobody asked permission to make \u2014 we knew it was going to have to be willed into existence. [Producer] Denise Chamian and our casting director just said, \u201cLet\u2019s just put out a casting call.\u201d I started meeting with Haley Lu and Zazie and Michael and we built this ensemble cast around Sam. Then this company Constantine heard about us, read the script, saw our cast, and heard the budget. Then they said, \u201cCan you do it for half?\u201d So we had to do the foreign-financing thing where money comes and it falls away and then you\u2019re there and then you\u2019re not there; you\u2019re lurching toward production.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never approached any of the IP I\u2019ve done without the sense of, How do I corrupt that in some way? I always feel like, If you\u2019re not a little mischievous, you\u2019re blind to the absurdity of life. I try to apply that whether it\u2019s a $200 million movie or a $15 million movie. When you are making it for this number, you\u2019re not going to take notes from an algorithm.<\/p>\n
No. I\u2019ve never been more involved in more aspects of a production. There\u2019s no \u201cteam\u201d at Constantine or Briarcliff. There\u2019s just five people and every person is doing 27 things. In order to get the movie made, you\u2019ve got to go meet the German financiers. I\u2019m trying to explain this movie to them and why they should invest in it. I\u2019d rather not have to do that. It\u2019s not my jam.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been working every day. We\u2019ve got a great script called Sandkings<\/a> based on a George R.R. Martin<\/a> short story. We\u2019re developing a very strange adaptation of The Gashlycrumb Tinies<\/a>, an Edward Gorey narrative. There\u2019s three or four original scripts that I\u2019m pushing forward. I don\u2019t know that the stuff I\u2019m interested in doing necessarily makes it through a green-light committee. If you\u2019re saying where have I been? I\u2019ve been right here, duking it out.<\/p>\n
I think you are talking about the financials. You are talking about profits. I feel like I\u2019m still the same person sweating and tinkering. Sometimes they blow up and sometimes they don\u2019t. When I first heard somebody wanted to make The Lone Ranger, I said, \u201cWe should do it from Tonto\u2019s perspective. We should do the Sancho Panza version.\u201d I was never going to do it straight.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve had crew print T-shirts that say \u201cRelentless.\u201d I took that as a compliment. Because mediocrity is just nipping at your heels from the outset of an endeavor. The enemy is not the studio. The enemy is not the executives or the fear. The enemy is if you don\u2019t go out and claw and scratch every day. It\u2019s just going to be okay. It\u2019s just going to be meh.<\/p>\n