The director who knew he couldn’t work with Will Smith: “You need to do things the way you want them done”
Sometimes, it’s better to walk away from something when you know it’s not right. Could be the meal you’ve spent all night cooking, and you taste it and realise you’re going to have to call a takeaway in after all. Or it might be a jumper you’ve delicately knitted, and someone walks past and says, “Nice hat.” Or if you work in Hollywood, it could be you’re making a movie with Will Smith, and you’ve just had enough, quite frankly.
That was the case for The Grey and Smokin’ Aces director Joe Carnahan and the third Bad Boys movie, Bad Boys For Life, which he had written and started production on before deciding to cut his losses and quit – something he has some history with, having walked off Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible 3 back in the early 2000s. And it isn’t just that he doesn’t like the final part of a trilogy.
This being pre-slap Will Smith, Carnahan didn’t have a problem with the Independence Day action man personally, but it sounds like he was coming up against some pretty frustrating behaviour as he told The Collier podcast shortly after leaving the movie.
Carnahan said, “I love Will, he’s a great guy, it’s just… I know myself, man, and I thought what we were doing at that point was the law of diminishing returns. I wasn’t servicing the story that I was really excited about telling, that the studio had greenlit. And again, this isn’t to throw shade at Will – it’s your face on the poster, it’s your name on the poster, you need to do things the way you want to do them. (But) that won’t work for me.”
Carnahan duly left Bad Boys For Life and Belgian directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah stepped in, leaving the original director sad that what he thought was a brilliant ending he had written wouldn’t now be in the movie, including an Easter egg about just how much he despised an Eddie Redmayne movie about a trans woman.
He added: “I’m telling you the end of my original Bad Boys script is one of the best endings I’ve ever written in any movie… I had a sequence where they’re on a gun bus, like a German motorcycle. I hated The Danish Girl, the movie, so much, (so) I said, ‘Can you make a poster for The Danish Girl and then blow it apart?’ They said, ‘Yeah’. I fucking hated that movie with the white hot heat of a thousand suns.”
The new directors made a decent fist of the franchise, it’s fair to say, however, when Bad Boys For Life was released in 2020, it took in over $400million at the box office, making it one of the biggest action flicks in years, and they repeated the trick with Bad Boys: Ride or Die four years later.
Carnahan, meanwhile, has written and directed a film called The RIP, starring old pals Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, which will hit Netflix in January next year.
It’s an action thriller about a group of Miami-based cops who come across a huge amount of money, causing outsiders to question their loyalty and professionalism.
