The 2000 Billy Bob Thornton movie only Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are convinced is a masterpiece: “Maybe I’m wrong”
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have operated as a hive mind for as long as either of them can remember, so it’s no surprise that they’re the staunchest defenders of an otherwise forgettable Billy Bob Thornton flick, which nobody else has ever gone on the record calling a masterpiece.
Of course, just like every other form of art, cinema is subjective. Some folks think Citizen Kane is crap, and The Emoji Movie was immensely profitable, so there are really no right or wrong answers when it comes to the big screen. One of the lifelong best friends had skin in the game, though, while the other did not.
If it were up to Thornton, he wouldn’t have packed up his filmmaking tools and locked them away in his creative shed. After Sling Blade, which won him an Academy Award for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, he was heralded as having the potential to be one of the most important emerging voices in the industry.
That may well have come true, had it not been for Harvey Weinstein. As the producer and director of 2000’s All the Pretty Horses, on paper, Thornton should have had at least some level of control. This being Weinstein, though, that wasn’t the case, with the disgraced mogul destroying his original vision for the film.
Hacked to pieces in the editing suite, the literary adaptation was butchered beyond belief, with the 117-minute theatrical cut tanking at the box office and getting its arse spanked by critics. Thornton planned for a much longer picture at almost three hours, but he was overruled, which left him devastated.
Damon was in the same boat, with the actor calling it his favourite production that he’d ever worked on, sympathising with his director for having All the Pretty Horses ripped out of his hands and turned into a much lesser version of itself. That’s two people involved who were adamant that the director’s cut should have been the one released, but a third couldn’t have disagreed more.
“It was the most self-indulgent director’s cut I’d ever seen,” ex-Miramax marketing chief Dennis Rice declared. “It was like torture to watch that movie.” The key creatives were convinced that they’d made something special, but those in a position of power, who had the final say, believed the opposite.
Affleck, meanwhile, echoed Damon’s sentiments, as you’d expect him to do. “I thought it was brilliant, a masterpiece,” he maintained, with a caveat. “But I’m willing to concede that my taste may be different from everyone else’s, and maybe I’m wrong.” Wrong or not, nobody’s been able to find out where the truth lies.
Thornton owns a copy of the All the Pretty Horses director’s cut, which might be the only copy, and it’s never been made available for public consumption. That means that the only people who really know if it’s a masterpiece or not are himself, Damon, and Affleck, which is hardly a big enough sample size.
