Billy Bob Thornton names the greatest movie of his career: “I’m not saying it’s the best”
Most people would assume that any actor or filmmaker considers their most well-known, acclaimed, or award-laden movie to be the greatest of their career, but Billy Bob Thornton disagrees.
He’s been in plenty of well-known, acclaimed, and award-laden movies throughout his career, but the one he selected didn’t really tick any of those boxes. It barely turned a profit at the box office, earned some tidy reviews, did decent business on home video, and notched a couple of nominations, but that’s it.
As the old cliche goes, though, it’s about the journey, not the destination. Thornton couldn’t have cared less about how critics or audiences received the film; the only thing he was interested in was having a good time. He thought he would before a single frame had even been shot, and when his instincts were proven correct by the end of production, it became his fondest filmmaking memory.
Objectively, he’d probably call Sling Blade his greatest work. After all, it was the first one to roll off his tongue when he looked back at his decades in the business and settled on a septet of definitive features, and the one he called the best didn’t even make the cut, which illuminates the point made above.
He’d definitely call Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There his most overlooked, underrated, and/or unsung picture, because that’s literally what he did. Several times over. And yet, Barry Levinson’s largely forgotten 2001 crime caper, Bandits, retains a spot as close to Thornton’s heart as any movie could hope to be.
“It was the best experience I ever had,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m not saying it’s the best movie I ever did, but it’s just an experience of making it, of me and Cate Blanchett and Bruce Willis, and we were all pals to start with. And the locations were incredible. And we actually did it in sequence and all the way down the coast, and the locations were just tremendous, and we had such a great time.”
Levinson’s presence behind the camera was also a plus, with the actor admitting he’d “always wanted to work with him, and he turned out to be a wonderful guy.” Character-wise, Thornton’s Terry Collins allowed him to make a movie where he was “playing somebody closer to myself than my image as portrayed with the public and everything,” adding another check to the ‘win’ column.
He knows that Bandits isn’t the ‘best’ thing he’s ever been in as far as conventional metrics go, but that combination of two co-stars he knew, liked, and trusted, a director he’d dreamed of working with living up to the image he had in his head, a chance to visit some great locations, and the opportunity to play someone closer to his real-life personality made for a suitably intoxicating combination.
Two fugitives on a cross-country bank-robbing spree who become entangled in a love triangle with a housewife trapped in a dissolving marriage was never going to rip up any cinematic trees, but Thornton had a hell of a good time making it.
