The blend of comedy and action in Taxi landed him Fantastic Four, based on the series of Marvel comics. He didn’t think about the historic nature of his assignment, but focused on the bigger budget and the extra layer of complexity caused by special effects. “With those types of big movies, you’re directing three movies,” he says. “There’s the movie you’re shooting, there’s the second-unit action stuff, and there’s the visual effects movie. You’ve got to learn how to deal with all of them.”
But at times, he admits, he accepted too much help. “The other thing I learned from those two Fantastic Four movies, is that sometimes you can be too lax on how much control you give to the visual effects team, or the production design team, or whoever. If you end up in situations and you’re not happy with certain things, it’s because you didn’t stay on top of them.”
In the aftermath of his two superhero movies, Story wanted to get back to actor-heavy character pieces. “Doing the big movies with the special effects—that’s not 100 percent what I set out to do,” he says. “I wanted to get back to what I knew was in my heart. I think as a filmmaker, there’s the bigness of Hollywood, but if you come from small, personal pieces, you want to get back to that at some point.”
His small, post-Fantastic Four movie was Hurricane Season (2009), which starred Forest Whitaker and Taraji P. Henson in the true story of a New Orleans basketball coach and his team in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Weinstein Company backed the movie, but then opted to scrap a theatrical rollout in favor of a direct-to-video release. “I think if released, it probably would have done fairly well,” Story says. “But it was caught up in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis, and the Weinsteins decided it just wasn’t a movie they wanted to release.”
The result, he said, effectively stymied his career. “In Hollywood, you’re only as good as your last film,” he says. “And there was a stigma: ‘He does movies that go straight to DVD.’ It hurt career-wise, and the one thing you have to do is just lick your wounds. But I knew, because I studied Hollywood’s past, that Hollywood loves a comeback story.”
Before he could enjoy a comeback, though, Story had to find a way to downsize. “My family was getting bigger, my wife was pregnant and we were losing value on our home, so you do start to stress out,” he said. “I got out of the big house that I had, we moved to a smaller home, and I tried to make it so I could create again. When you get caught up in doing projects to pay bills, you’re in trouble.”
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