Jon Hamm And Greg Mottola On Rebooting ‘Fletch’ And Finding Pleasure In The Puerile

Fletch is back, and he’s R-rated. Previously personified on the big screen by Chevy Chase, Jon Hamm is now the embodiment of the iconic journalist turned sleuth.

Directed and co-written by Greg Mottola, Confess, Fletch is inspired by the second book in the literary franchise. Hamm’s titular hero finds himself as a prime suspect in a series of murders and decides to try and prove his innocence. As if that wasn’t a big enough job, he also tries to find out what happened to his fiancé’s missing art collection.

I caught up with Hamm and Mottola to discuss the reboot Hollywood has been trying to make happen for decades, why smarts and silly make such great bedfellows in the Fletch universe, and how a sequel could be darker and more international.

Simon Thompson: I guess the first place to start is talking about your first interactions with Fletch. I remember renting the first movie on VHS when I was a kid growing up in the UK.

Jon Hamm: I saw the first Fletch in a theater with my best friend in seventh grade. We had a good old time and so much fun. There was no internet back then, so you had to go to the library and look up what the book was that inspired the movie. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a whole series of books written with this character at the center of them, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is awesome. That must mean they’re going to keep making these forever.’ They didn’t. I realized there’s an opportunity here, and we can reinvent this, reboot it and re-establish it for a new generation. We have all of this source material. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be fun?’ And it was very fun.

Thompson: Greg, Confess, Fletch sees you start with the second book in the series. What was the choice behind that?

Greg Mottola: Jon had made that decision before he brought the idea to me. As a younger person, I had loved the Fletch movies but hadn’t read the books. I had heard they’re great, but I just hadn’t gotten to them. I went and read a bunch of them, and I loved them, and Jon’s suggestion made the most sense. There are some nice things in the book, like that he’s already retired from being a journalist and living in Europe, and he’s coming out of retirement to start solving these two mysteries that end up happening. It felt like a good starting point. In my mind, all the events of the first Fletch movie occurred in the past of this version of Fletch in their own way. He had lived through all those things, and the character John Slattery plays here was his editor at the newspaper in Los Angeles. We didn’t want to do a nostalgia thing; we wanted to go our way, knowing there’s a shared DNA between the original movie and this. The character is the character.

Thompson: When I told people I’d seen this, many people were surprised that it was coming out. It’s been under wraps and in the works in so many incarnations over the years. Was it an informed choice to keep a lot of it quiet? We hear so much about movies so far in advance these days that we can know too much.

Hamm: I think there’s a balance that you want to strike. Obviously, you want there to be a conscious understanding of your movie in the ether. The landscape is so crowded and seemingly impossible to break through the noise unless you’re a tent-pole like Top Gun: Maverick and can penetrate any market anywhere in the world. Except for China and Russia. For our intents and purposes, it did feel a little bit like, ‘Well, maybe we’re going to let people find this in their own time.’ I think that that’s an entirely valid way of releasing things now in the world. I can think of several TV shows that bubbled up into the popular consciousness without pre-built anticipation; they just hit. That’s what the streamers and other platforms are uniquely suited to do. We’re excited for people to see this. There is some built-in sense of like, ‘What is this going to be?’ and there hasn’t been a lot of leaked stuff to give people that sense. When people first saw the trailer, they were excited because that was the first thing they saw. Now we’re excited for people to see the actual film.

Thompson: There’s a Mad Men reunion here with John Slattery. Did you petition for that, Jon?

Hamm: That was 100 percent on purpose. I wanted that little wink and a nod to being a part of this thing we did. I knew John was a fan of the original, I knew he would be great for this part, and I knew that if we got to make more of them, his character would undoubtedly come back in some capacity. Having worked with him for the best part of a decade, there’s a built-in comfort and richness to that relationship there. When we’re shooting a movie in under 30 days, you have to depend on these already established relationships. Those things are value-added, and when I watched the scenes with John, I realized a very comfortable thing to watch is us on screen.

Thompson: Have you started having conversations about a sequel? And are you lining up other Mad Men co-stars like Michael Gladis?

Hamm: (Laughs) I haven’t looked into the deep Mad Men bench. Yet.

Mottola: It’s a good bench. You’ve got some heavy hitters on there.

Hamm: We have started discussing potentially a follow-up to Confess, Fletch. As we said, there are quite a few other novels there, and if it all works out, I will keep making these until I have even greyer hair.

Thompson: It was nice to see you filming Boston in Boston and not another place pretending to be Boston. So you want to take Fletch international?

Mottola: We’ve talked about that. I don’t want to jinx us to say which book we’re thinking might be the next one because who knows if there will be a next one. We want it to have a strong contrast to this one. The book we’re talking about would feel different in many ways and is maybe a bit darker satire. I would love to shoot one in London or England because I love being there.

Hamm: If you’re a fan of the books, you know that many of the stories have a distinctly international tone. It does lend itself to that. We’re both very superstitious types. So we don’t want to step on any black cats here.

Thompson: There is an intelligent puerility to some of the humor in Confess, Fletch. One that stood out to me was from the old school children’s rhyme about round the corner where chocolate is made. I haven’t thought about that in years.

Hamm: (Laughs) I think that is an excellent example, so thank you for getting that. It’s buried in there pretty good, no pun intended. We were looking for both sides of that. The script is there for a reason; it’s an excellent framework and structure upon which to hang funny things and jokes, and you find something on the day that is just silly or stupid and makes us laugh. We put it in there, and if it doesn’t get a laugh, we can pull it out. It doesn’t matter. That was one in particular where I was like, ‘Please let me do this.’

Mottola: It makes me laugh every time.

Thompson: I watched this all to the end of the credits. Right at the last part, you hear Jon say, ‘Five stars.’ What was behind that?

Hamm: It wasn’t in the script. It was an idea where we just thought we were trying to update this for modern audiences. The books were written in the 70s. There was no such thing as UberUBER
, so it’s about bringing it into the now. It just seemed like a thing that Fletch would always make sure that he said to the person that was kind enough to ride him wherever he needed to be taken. It’s a modern-day version of thank you very much or a tip of some sort.

Thompson: What was the thing that surprised you both the most about making this?

Hamm: We obviously believed in the potential of it, but when you’re making a movie under pandemic protocols, that was a very daunting challenge, especially given that 20 percent of your budget has to go on that and to keep people safe. That money doesn’t go on the screen. You have a challenging balance that you have to strike, and we got through it, and we made the movie that we wanted to make, and if it’s a success, we’re going to get to keep making them.

Mottola: It’s also a weird time for theatrical comedies. You don’t see that many these days. Part of it is the pandemic, and a lot of movies went away during the pandemic, but they’re slowly starting to trickle back. Comedies aren’t being perceived as commercial as they used to be, so we didn’t even know where this would end up. Would it end up streaming or on demand or end up in a theater? It turns out it’s ending up in all of them. It’s a brave new world, all bets are off, and it’s a transition time. I’m thrilled that it will be on screens at all because it’s why I love movies the most. I love TV, but movies will always be my first love.

Confess, Fletch lands in theaters, on Digital, and On Demand on Friday, September 16, 2022.