The movie Gene Hackman was forced into: “I would prefer not to be making this picture”
Every actor makes mistakes, that’s part and parcel of the job. The best kind of actors are the ones who admit to their mistakes, holding their hands up to the fact that they’ve taken on a job they probably should’ve turned down.
It can be rather frustrating to see actors blindly championing the films they’re in that are so clearly not their finest efforts, so to admit to certain regrets is certainly something in an industry that runs on dishonesty and manipulation. Gene Hackman could be honest about his career, and when he signed up for a movie four years before its eventual release, he realised that it’s probably not smart to agree to projects so far in advance. A lot can change in that time.
Regret is just a part of life, and Hackman certainly felt it when he was forced to make a movie he didn’t want to be a part of, contractually bound to appear on screen for all to see his apparent mistake. As it turns out, he needn’t have been so worried, because the film he had second thoughts about, French Connection II, performed pretty well.
Of course, it didn’t hold a torch to the original, which earned five Oscar nominations and landed Hackman his first golden statuette. The French Connection had been directed by William Friedkin and released to acclaim in 1971, with Hackman starring as Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle, who, alongside Buddy ‘Cloudy’ Russo, attempts to track down a drug-smuggling French criminal.
With the original movie being such a hit – it grossed $75million – it was only a matter of time before a sequel was conjured up. Hackman couldn’t deny what the first film had done for his career, so he signed himself up for number two, although it seems like his involvement with a terrible movie at the time clouded his vision a little. Anything sounded better than The Poseidon Adventure.
“I would prefer not to be making this picture. I was contracted to do the sequel over two years ago, when I was making Poseidon. As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time,” Hackman told The Guardian. While The Poseidon Adventure did earn a few Oscars somehow, it had a cheesiness to it that was unlike the movies that Hackman typically starred in. Perhaps the idea of doing something like The French Connection again was more appealing.
The sequel wasn’t directed by Friedkin this time around, though, with John Frankenheimer stepping up to the role instead, but Hackman wasn’t sure what the sequel was going to be like, and while he hoped it would be good, it seemed like, deep down, he knew that he should’ve stayed away from it.
Hackman elaborated, “I don’t mean to do a poor-mouth job on the sequel. Three years ago, after the original French Connection was completed, I talked to Billy Friedkin, the director, about what kind of film we’d made. Either it was a masterful art film, or it was an adventure film.”
“Yet somehow it was both. This one may very well be as good as the first one. Even if it’s better, there will inevitably be comparisons, since the first one was so fresh. Since then, there have been many number of police films, and some were good ones,” he concluded.
