The movie Rachel Weisz hated every second of making: “Didn’t work for me”
Actors are never going to be fully satisfied with all of the choices that they make, and even the most accomplished of actors will have some projects that they regret.
Hollywood is a bag of possibilities, some good, some bad. You’re never going to know for sure if a movie is going to turn into an absolute disaster, even if you’ve got some great talent working alongside you. Rachel Weisz can certainly tell you that, because she once found herself working on a project that quickly revealed itself to be less than impressive.
The English actor inevitably took the disastrous project in her stride, but she wasn’t exactly happy to be stuck making the movie. You can’t always remove yourself from a movie though, you just have to admit that it wasn’t your best and move onto something better.
One film in particular that she admitted “didn’t work for me,” (via Associated Press) was Enemy at the Gates, the 2001 film directed by French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud, which certainly had potential. Sadly, that potential was not realised, and the movie received mixed reviews from critics, although Weisz was particularly harsh on the production, appearing to regret it.
The movie also featured the likes of Bob Hoskins, Ron Perlman, Ed Harris, and Jude Law, but this wasn’t enough to carry the film over the finish line and towards greatness. Based on the book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad, it seemed like the project was just too ambitious, with iconic film critic Roger Ebert highlighting that there wasn’t a strong enough focus on war, writing, “The additional plot stuff and the romance are kind of a shame.”
For Weisz, the film just didn’t hit the mark, with her role as Tania Chernova, the real-life ballerina-turned-sniper, leaving her disappointed. “But then, I’m very hard to please. The opening 20 minutes were amazing, [but] the script was a bit dodgy,” she added.
Sometimes that’s just the way a film goes – it starts off really strong before petering out into an underwhelming mess, and you can’t do much to stop it. That’s in the director’s hands, not yours – you just have to let it be. It’s one of the few movies that Weisz has appeared in that was an undeniably bad decision, although if we’re picking out the worst movie she’s ever made, it would probably be the animated Eragon.
Luckily, it was just a voice role, so she probably got away with a decent number of viewers watching the whole thing without realising she was involved. Still, it was a pretty poor excuse for a film, with the reviews that came out being so bad that the sequel was scrapped.
For Weisz, though, it’ll always be Enemy at the Gates that stands out as one of her least favourites. When you’ve got a “dodgy” script, you really have to work with what you’ve got, and it seems like the actor did her best, but this couldn’t stop her from being dissatisfied with the final product.
