The Former Head Of 20th Century Fox Spilled The Secrets On All Your Favourite Blockbusters

The man behind Titanic, X-Men, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace tells all.

Bill Mechanic is the man behind those tiny films you may have heard of like Titanic, Independence Day, and Fight Club.

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From 1994 to 2000, Mechanic was chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, and under his leadership, Twentieth Century Fox rose to the number one studio.

He spoke to The Feed's Marc Fennell and spilled the tea on what it was like to be part of one of Hollywood's biggest studios.

One film Mechanic worked on was Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

20th Century Fox

"George [Lucas] called and said, 'OK do you want to see the movie?' We get there and he says, 'OK so here's the rules. I'm gonna show you the movie, we're gonna have lunch afterwards, and you're not allowed to talk about the movie'."

He also spoke about the experience of making Titanic.

20th Century Fox

“Titanic was the only year that I didn’t go for my physical because I thought I’m going to go see the doctor and he’s going to say, ‘well your blood pressure is high’ and it’s like… well, YEAH…”

And what it was like to work with James Cameron.

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"At one point we didn’t know how much the movie was going to cost so we had a colossal fight, Jim and I, and he basically quit the movie. We shut down for all of about 12 hours, I didn’t tell my bosses that I’d shut down a movie that was $750,000 a day.”

Mechanic had always been a comic book fan, and was a driving force behind Fox's X-Men.

20th Century Fox

Reflecting on just how many superhero films are being made nowadays, Mechanic remembered what it was like to fight for the mutant movie. "I got fired on the week that X-Men opened because I called it my $70m art film. Nobody thought you could make a comic book movie again."

He also revealed that initially, Wolverine wasn't going to be played by Hugh Jackman.

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"At one point I had Russell Crowe, who was supposed to play Wolverine, and... I met him with my bad script and comic books and I said ‘this will one day be a great script’. Then he won the Oscar for Gladiator and said to me, ‘Sorry mate, can’t do your movie now…’ so we started shooting without Wolverine and we had to almost stop, and so I went to my head of casting and she said there were two people, one of which was Hugh Jackman."

Now a producer for films like Hacksaw Ridge, Mechanic has some great life advice.

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Check out the full interview here.

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