How Jeff Bridges’ passion project was ruined in an instant: “I was going to have to let go”
There are a lot of movies that seem as if they were tailor-made for Jeff Bridges.
The most obvious, of course, is The Big Lebowski, in which he set the template for the West Coast slacker with a touch of Zen master. Crazy Heart, which earned him an Oscar in 2010, drew on his real-life country music talents, while the Coen brothers seemed to have written their version of Rooster Cogburn in True Grit as a Jeff Bridges parody.
While he might not have the producing credentials of stars like Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, Bridges doesn’t just wait around for roles to be written for him, and on several occasions, he has played a hand in the behind-the-scenes machinations of filmmaking and felt the all-too common pangs of regret and frustration when things didn’t go according to plan, but unfortunately, the project into which he invested the most time and energy turned out to be the biggest disappointment.
His journey as a producer started all the way back in 1992 with the independent crime drama American Heart, also serving as executive producer on Crazy Heart, signalling that he was clearly on the right trajectory, which is why there was every reason to believe that he would nail his next project, but one thing stood in his way.
Bridges had been wanting to adapt Lois Lowry’s young adult novel The Giver since the 1990s. Set in a futuristic world where society has been homogenised into a pain-free, frictionless utopia, the story follows a boy named Jonas who is chosen to be the sole carrier of emotion and memory. Its bleak exploration of authoritarianism, memory, religion, and free will has led schools around the US to ban it at various points since its release in 1993 (a low bar, admittedly), but it has also earned numerous awards and sold more than 12 million copies.
After more than two decades of trying to scrape together a budget and a script, the Big Lebowski star made a deal with the devil, otherwise known as Harvey Weinstein. The sexual predator and Miramax boss breezed in with a load of cash and a lot of opinions, steamrolling all of the careful planning and rewrites that Bridges had poured himself into.
“I knew getting Harvey involved [meant] I was going to have to let go of my vision,” the actor admitted in 2015, a year after the film thudded into cinemas. Like the Zen master he is, though, Bridges just took it as an opportunity to be chill, man. “I just decided to do it sort of as a spiritual exercise in letting go,” he explained.
There were many reasons to dislike the version of the story that Weinstein came up with – it’s shallow and action-heavy, ignoring many of the thorny questions that the novel raises in favour of visual spectacle and over-acting, but one of the main problems was casting a 25-year-old, Brenton Thwaites, to play the 12-year-old Jonas… it was weird, and everyone knew it.
While Harvey Weinstein will be remembered for far worse, ruining The Giver was one of his dumbest cinema-related own-goals, and as usual, he ignored decency, refused to listen, and squandered an opportunity to make something worthwhile, but on the whole, Bridges escaped relatively unscathed, and he had the good sense to avoid joining forces with the soon-to-be-disgraced mogul again.
