The movie Morgan Freeman knew was doomed from the start: “What the fuck was that?”
Common sense suggests that actors know what they’re getting themselves into long before they’re standing on the set shooting the first scene of their latest film, but after he’d already signed his contract and agreed to play a pivotal supporting role, Morgan Freeman knew the results would be dire.
In his defence, it’s not like he was making it for any other reason than money. After all, when he was supposed to be promoting the film and encouraging audiences to part with their hard-earned cash to see it at their nearest cinema, Freeman told anyone who’d listen that it was a paycheque gig and nothing more.
Presumably, he’d read the screenplay beforehand, but when it was laid out in front of him alongside his co-stars for the first time during a read-through, the veteran discovered that Lawrence Kasdan’s Stephen King adaptation, Dreamcatcher, was going to turn out worse than he could have possibly imagined.
Of course, Freeman has previous with the prolific author’s back catalogue, but it’s an understatement of epic proportions to say the sci-fi thriller wasn’t a patch on The Shawshank Redemption. Not only because they occupy two different genres, but because one of them is a classic and the other is a pile of shite.
The only memorable thing about the picture is Freeman’s preposterous fake eyebrows, which are so distracting to the point that anyone unlucky enough to see Dreamcatcher fully expects them to walk off his face and do their own thing, having grown as bored of the interminable story as everybody else.
On paper, the kindly sage playing partly against type as a military colonel dealing with an alien invasion and the telepathic connection shared between four childhood friends had potential, especially when the ensemble also featured Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, Thomas Jane, and Tom Sizemore, among others.
However, as Jane revealed on the Kingcast podcast, when the cast sat together to run through the script, it wasn’t exactly encouraging. “We all sat around in a little room at the hotel, and we read the script,” he explained. “We’re reading this thing, you know, actors in a room with a director reading the story. And we read the whole damn thing from beginning to end, it takes longer reading for some reason, it took us like three hours.”
Dreamcatcher only runs for a little over two hours in its finished form, so there must have been a reason why the read-through dragged on for so long. Once they’d reached the end, Freeman was borderline incredulous. “And at the end of it, finally we finish the damn thing,” Jane continued. “Morgan Freeman closes his script and goes, ‘What the fuck was that?’ That’s a true story.”
The answer, unfortunately for him, was a terrible film. It was too late to back out, and it must have been miserable for the star to know fine well that not only was he part of a woeful literary adaptation, but he was being dispatched to the snowy wilderness of Canada in the middle of winter to shoot the damn thing in the knowledge that Dreamcatcher was already well beyond saving.
