Bruce Willis’ disappointment with one of his biggest hits: “All the great scenes are on the cutting room floor”
In 1998, Bruce Willis didn’t just star in a hit movie – he starred in the single highest-grossing film of the year. Under normal circumstances, this would be a huge win for an A-lister like Willis. Unfortunately for the star, though, his relationship with the film has always been strained. Over the years, he’s been honest about having a tough time on-set with the director and disagreeing with many of his editing decisions. In fact, he once claimed that all his best scenes in the film wound up on the cutting room floor.
In 1996, Willis was shooting Broadway Boxer, a romantic comedy with Maura Tierney, in which he played a retired hockey player. If you haven’t heard of this film, that’s not surprising because it was shut down in the middle of production and never released. Willis complained about the work of several cast and crew members, which led to some being fired, and his behaviour on-set was reportedly pretty poor. When the film shut down due to a financial issue, it wasn’t put back into production.
This put Willis in an awkward situation where he had left himself open to a $17.5million lawsuit from Disney. Instead of going to court, he agreed to make three films for the studio at a much-reduced salary, and the first of these three movies was Michael Bay’s Armageddon.
Despite the film being a stratospheric success that put Willis on much better terms with the House of Mouse, he has always been honest that he wasn’t happy with how it turned out. In ’98, not long after the film was released, he told The Morning Call, “A little too MTV-camera cutty for my taste…Billy Bob was under-used for my taste, the spacesuits continually malfunctioned, and one night, Ben Affleck was seen bashing the front glass on his helmet with a rock because he couldn’t breathe.”
Okay, so far, so bad – but it gets worse. In later years, when Willis was asked if he’d ever reunite with Bay, he told Ain’t It Cool News, “Few people will work with him now, and I know I will never work with him again. It was a great crew, but a screaming director does not make for a pleasant set experience. But look, we were all big boys, and we got through it.”
In 2002, Willis returned to his complaint about Bay’s trademark fast-cut editing, but this time elaborated on what he felt the film lost by adopting such a choppy style. He mused, “There were so many scenes in Armageddon. All the great acting scenes are on the cutting room floor and were sacrificed for this sort of MTV version, Michael Bay’s vision of filmmaking. That’s Michael’s choice as a filmmaker.”
Amusingly, in 2007, Willis was given an opportunity to walk back his scathing comments, but he chose to stick by them. When asked if he had any regrets about being so brutally honest with his take on Bay and Armageddon, he said, “I don’t have any regrets. What I say is what I say. I don’t always say the right thing. I don’t always say the politically correct thing. But yeah, I don’t have any regrets about that.”
Ultimately, is it possible that Willis and Bay simply didn’t see eye to eye as artists, and Willis was famous enough that he could air his grievances in public without fear of reprisals? Yes, probably. However, is it also possible that the Die Hard icon was forced into making a film he didn’t feel passionate about, and that’s always stuck in his craw? Also, yes.
