The 2000’s crime against cinema Billy Bob Thornton will never forgive: “That ranks as my biggest disappointment”
Music and movies go together like fish and chips, Ant and Dec, and Fifa and corruption; they’re inseparable bedfellows, one inspiring and feeding off the other, creating magic. So when a director doesn’t get the soundtrack he wants, like Billy Bob Thornton on his 2000 movie All the Pretty Horses, it can leave a bad taste in the mouth.
Between the mid-1990s and 2000, Thornton was arguably the most exciting writer-director working in Hollywood, while being an actor of considerable talent too. He was coming off the back of several critical and commercial hits, winning an Oscar for writing and directing 1996’s Sling Blade and being Oscar-nominated for 1999’s A Simple Plan and starring in blockbusters like the Bruce Willis action sci-fi Armageddon alongside Ben Affleck.
So to say hopes were high for All the Pretty Horses would be putting it mildly. Adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy, it was the story of a 16-year-old Texan farmhand who loses the family ranch and decides to head into Mexico with his best friend to live a cowboy’s life, only to get in trouble with police when one of them falls for a wealthy local’s daughter.
Starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz, Thornton had the cast he wanted and the major studio backing, with a sizable budget of around $57million, but it was once filming was complete that the trouble began. Thornton’s original cut was three hours and 40 minutes long, which the studio head Harvey Weinstein said was unacceptable, demanding it be trimmed to less than two hours. Another casualty due to Weinstein’s intervention was the film’s score, which had been created by Canadian composer and producer Daniel Lanois, of U2’s The Joshua Tree fame.
According to Damon, Lanois’ sparse soundtrack had informed all the actors’ performances while making the movie, but Weinstein insisted it all be replaced with epic orchestras, and ironically released a trailer for the film with Bono singing over it. When the film eventually came out, Weinstein had his way; the soundtrack was completely different, and the runtime was one hour and 55 minutes. Both Thornton and Lanois were left devastated by the changes, and many years later, the two spoke about the movie, with the latter asking the actor, “Do you have it? Do you have the film with my score on it?”
Thornton replied, “I have it in the house; I’ve actually shown it to people before. I have it on VHS tape. I’ve got every tape; I’ve got the dailies, I’ve got every tape all along the way of all the footage, with the score in it, and I’ve got the complete movie with the score. I actually have the whole assembly with your score. The three hours and something. I’ve got that, too.”
Some time later, Miramax offered to release Thornton’s director’s cut of the film, complete with Lanois’ soundtrack, but both men refused, with Thornton recalling: “We were feeling a little beat-up and you weren’t real keen on giving them your score to put on the DVD when they didn’t put it in the fucking movie on the big screen. I agreed with you and said ‘No, I stand with my pal Dan. I won’t do it unless his score is in it’.”
Lanois spoke about being greeted by Cruz at the Cannes Film Festival, where she told him how sorry she was that his ‘beautiful’ music, which featured vocals from country star Emmylou Harris, wasn’t in the movie, something that Thornton described as a crime. The director himself believed all involved had produced a classic, but one that nobody would ever get to see.
Thornton has, however, screened the full version of All the Pretty Horses to a select number of people at his house, but said it was heartbreaking to experience the beauty of the extended cut with Lanois’ music, knowing it wouldn’t be enjoyed by the wider public. He said, “The movie came out, it was a good movie, but it wasn’t what we made. That ranks as my biggest disappointment”.
