‘London Fields’: The truly awful movie Billy Bob Thornton called a “terrific” masterpiece
It’s not hard to see how an actor gets easily blinded by a project, mistakenly thinking that they’re part of something incredibly groundbreaking, when really, it’s just a steaming pile of shit.
When you work on something for ages, dedicating yourself to a gruelling process of creation, you almost become held captive by what you’ve made. Either you doubt yourself entirely, failing to see the brilliance in what you’ve made, or you hold it to a much higher standard than it realistically deserves. That might sound harsh, but sometimes your vision really does get clouded by being all-consumed by a creative project.
This is certainly what happened to Billy Bob Thornton when he starred in a movie that bombed hard – both with critics and general audiences – yet he was utterly convinced that he’d been part of a “masterpiece”. Somehow, Thornton just couldn’t see that he’d actually starred in a total mess of a film, one that even earned a Razzie nomination and wound up with an impressive 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Released in 2018, London Fields had some promising talent behind it, such as a screenplay co-written by Martin Amis, but the film simply crashed and burned. A nonsensical, boring mess of a movie, it didn’t even scrape $500,000 at the box office despite its $8million budget. Thornton should’ve written it off as a failure – it happens to the best of actors – but instead he doubled down, comparing it to a genuine masterpiece of a film instead.
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, the actor explained, “I just made a movie last year in London that’s gonna come out next year. 12 people are gonna see it, six of them won’t know what it means, and the other six are gonna think it’s a masterpiece, which it is.”
Calling it a “brilliant” film, he added, “It feels very contemporary and yet it feels like a movie like Blow-Up. You know, it’s terrific.”
Comparing your flick to Michelangelo Antonioni’s iconic 1960s postmodern exploration of art and truth, set during the swinging sixties, is a bold move. While Blow-Up continues to polarise due to its lack of resolution (because that’s not the point of the film), there is no doubt that it’s not an incredibly well-crafted and thought-provoking movie, encapsulating a period in time that was utterly transformative for culture and politics.
London Fields, the story of a terminally ill writer, doesn’t even touch the kind of territory that Blow-Up does. Still, Thornton said, “It excited me to see it. It excited me to make it and every day it was hard. Every day was miserable on this movie, and with the weather in London, and we had no time and no money, and it was a real, real hard movie to make.”
Adding, “And I miss it. It’s almost like an abusive relationship or something. It’s like I wish I was back there making it again because it was so hard and yet we knew we were making something that the bloggers will destroy it, a few of the critics in the papers and stuff like that are gonna love it.”
“It’s gonna be a polarising movie… Like if you’re looking for a broad audience like the guy that runs a lawnmower shop out in Iowa or something, they won’t even know what it is,” Thornton concluded. Or maybe they’ll just think it’s a bad film, because it is.
