A million-dollar mystery: the Harrison Ford movie Sean Penn cut himself out of
As far as cinemagoing audiences and home video viewers are aware, Harrison Ford and Sean Penn have never made a movie together, despite the two actors shooting scenes for the same film. How did the latter end up on the cutting room floor? Well, it’s complicated.
Even though it did nothing to dent his eternal star power, the 2000s weren’t the greatest decade of Ford’s career. The millennium got off to a great start when he played deliciously against type in Robert Zemeckis’ psychological chiller, What Lies Beneath, but after that, the wheels started to seriously wobble.
K-19: The Widowmaker and Hollywood Homicide bombed at the box office, Firewall was dragged around the back and shot by critics, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull became one of the most hated blockbusters in modern history, and he ended an altogether dire stretch with writer and director Wayne Kramer’s crime drama, Crossing Over, which became the worst-reviewed thing he’d ever been in.
Ford played an immigration and customs agent with a first-hand view of the difficulties faced by those immigrating into the United States and seeking legal status. The cast also featured Ashley Judd, Ray Liotta, Cliff Curtis, Alice Braga, and Mahershala Ali, but not Sean Penn, who’d been on set to film scenes and was reportedly handed a million-dollar payday for his troubles.
Why wasn’t he in it? This is where things get sticky. One side of the story claimed the two-time Academy Award winner objected to a sequence depicting an “honour killing” and demanded that he be removed from Crossing Over, a request that was granted by the picture’s producer, Harvey Weinstein, without consulting or seeking approval from Kramer, who wrote and directed the movie.
However, Penn’s team claimed that “Sean’s portion of the film was somewhat experimental as it had a mystical quality that the rest of the film did not have,” whatever that means. “His not being in the final edit was a creative decision of which he was aware.” That doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but it’s nothing if not a very Sean Penn reason to cut Sean Penn out of a film.
Meanwhile, Kramer was quoted as saying, “I’m not trying to be evasive about it, but that’s a question you should ask Sean.” Obviously, somebody did, and the response they got was borderline nonsense. Was that the end of it? No, it was not, with an ‘anonymous source’ sharing their version of events, and to make things even stranger, there was a belief in some circles that the ‘anonymous source’ was, in fact, Kramer himself.
The unnamed insider, who may or may not have been the writer and director, accused Penn of telling a “blatant lie” by claiming he knew he there was a chance he wouldn’t make it into the final cut, with his role described as “integral” to the plot, before he decided that he didn’t want to be in Crossing Over anymore. To rub one last pinch of salt into the wound, it was also noted that he showed no inclination to repay the $1 million fee he’d received for one day’s work.
What’s the truth? Somebody knows, but neither Penn nor Kramer have opted to share that information, but it’s undoubtedly the most interesting thing about the film by far.
