The cursed movie Matt Damon called “the best thing I’ve ever done”
An actor isn’t obligated to call the most acclaimed or successful movie they’ve ever made the best, but it’s an entirely different matter for them to single out their most cursed production for top honours, even if Matt Damon had his reasons and the film’s dire reception wasn’t his fault.
It wasn’t the director’s fault either, with the blame being laid solely at the blight behind countless films: studio interference and an overbearing producer. Not just any overbearing producer, though, but the infamous Harvey Weinstein, who never met a perfectly good picture he couldn’t make significantly worse.
Having won an Academy Award for his feature-length directorial debut, Sling Blade, which nabbed him the ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, expectations were high for Billy Bob Thornton’s sophomore effort from behind the camera, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, All the Pretty Horses.
Armed with a sizeable budget north of $50million, and a top-notch ensemble that included Damon, Sam Shepard, Penélope Cruz, Bruce Dern, and Jesse Plemons playing a younger version of Damon’s character years before it became a meme, all of the signs were pointing towards a potential awards season contender, at least until Weinstein decided to throw his considerable weight around.
To do justice to the source material, Thornton planned for All the Pretty Horses to run for almost three hours, only for Miramax to order it be whittled down to less than two, which obviously wasn’t going to fly the filmmaker’s vision. After fighting a losing battle, the shell of the movie bombed at the box office and was pilloried by critics.
Landing on the wrong end of Weinstein’s wrath sapped all of Thornton’s enthusiasm for directing, and Damon was devastated that a potentially great movie he was proud of had been watered down into a shadow of itself that wasn’t reflective of the passion, creativity, and effort that everyone had put in. In fact, as big a bust as All the Pretty Horses turned out to be, the star maintained it was his greatest moment.
“This is the thing I’m most proud of, the best thing I’ve ever done,” he told ABC, “and maybe no one will agree with me, but it’s the first time in my life that I don’t care, and I really want to feel that way again.” He was right that nobody would agree, because it’s nowhere near being the best movie of his career, and it wouldn’t even make most people’s top 20, but he was in it, so he can say what he wants.
The theatrical version of All the Pretty Horses shows glimmers of what could have been, but with almost an hour axed unceremoniously on Weinstein’s orders, the film was a pale imitation of Thornton’s conceptual mind. He’s confirmed that there is a director’s cut, but he’s been refusing any and all offers to release it for over 20 years, with the self-proclaimed “best thing” Damon has ever made only ever being seen by a handful of people.
