The two “ridiculous” movies Billy Bob Thornton can’t stand: “I can’t even discuss those”
Even though he’s been critical of a couple of movies that he was in, Billy Bob Thornton has a particular disdain for two semi-related films that he had absolutely nothing to do with.
That’s not out of the ordinary, since he wouldn’t be the first or last actor, filmmaker, or actor and filmmaker to shit on something he wasn’t involved with, and it also speaks to a larger problem he has with how Hollywood approaches stories that he’s got a personal connection with.
One story he definitely didn’t have a personal connection with was Michael Bay’s Armageddon, which the Academy Award-winning screenwriter labelled a “two-hour piece of trash” that he only agreed to star in to pay off one of his many divorces, even if it was the highest-grossing release of 1998 and holds up as a strangely well-cast blockbuster that’s best watched with your brain in the ‘off’ position.
All the Pretty Horses was a different story, with Thornton pouring his heart and soul into his directorial passion project, only to come up against the ogre-like figure of Harvey Weinstein, with the disgraced producer and industry mogul butchering the film beyond belief, although star Matt Damon and his best friend Ben Affleck are adamant that the original cut is a stone-cold masterpiece.
As for the pictures he wasn’t in, it’s all to do with his roots. Born and raised in Arkansas, even if you had no idea who Billy Bob Thornton was, all you’d need to do is hear him open his mouth, and you’d be well aware that he’s a Southern fella. As much as he’d tried not to let it define him as a creative, he still gets pissed off when movies fail to grasp the nuances of the region.
His home state shares an eastern border with Mississippi, and if anybody wants to make a film with the neighbouring state’s name in the title, there’s a very high probability that he’ll fucking hate it. After all, he’s got previous with exactly that sort of thing, and his issues have everything to do with the sensationalising of real-life events.
“I sang in an R&B group, and a lot of my buddies were black,” he explained. “I just hung around across the tracks a lot. I know the people well enough. Sometimes, I’ll watch a Black filmmaker’s movie and go, ‘Naw, that’s not it’. Mostly in terms of dialogue. And these things they make, like Ghosts of Mississippi or Mississippi Burning, are just ridiculous. I can’t even discuss those.”
Rob Reiner’s 1996 courtroom drama, which landed two Oscar nods, was based on the trial of Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist who was finally convicted of the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1994, 30 years after two separate trials ended in hung juries, allowing him to walk free.
Eight years previously, Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning won an Oscar and earned another six nominations, including ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Actor’ for Gene Hackman, but faced backlash and controversy for fictionalising and dramatising the Ku Klux Klan’s murder of three civil rights activists. The latter is vastly superior to the former, but as it turns out, Thornton despises them both equally.
