The “ugly, sick, horrifying” controversy that troubled Billy Bob Thornton: “It really upset me”
As a medium that exists in a constant state of evolution, plenty of movies that caused widespread controversy in decades past wouldn’t even make a blip on the radar of outrage today, which bugged the shit out of Billy Bob Thornton.
William Friedkin’s The Exorcist caused mass hysteria when it premiered in 1973, and was the victim of boycotts, protests, and proposed bans, but there are horror films much more graphic being released into cinemas on a regular basis that don’t cause anyone to bat so much as a single eyelid.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is positively tame, even quaint, when compared to the slasher boom that followed in its wake, but it was jarring for the time. Tod Browning’s Freaks, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and even Life of Brian left many up in arms when they first debuted, but watching them through a modern lens is enough to make anyone wonder what the initial fuss was about.
That in itself is an interesting quandary, since it suggests that audiences are becoming increasingly desensitised to things that had previous generations clutching their pearls, and it remained prevalent as recently as the 1990s, when Carl Franklin’s One False Move raised eyebrows with its depictions of violence.
Scripted by Thornton and Tom Epperson, the former also played a key supporting role as Ray Malcolm in the cult noir thriller. It didn’t take flight at the box office, but it gained enough notices to serve as the springboard to bigger and better things for its co-writer and cast member, which stood him in good stead for his Academy Award-winning feature debut as a filmmaker, Sling Blade.
The brutal opening sequence, which sees Thornton’s Malcolm, Michael Beach’s Pluto, and Cynda Williams’ Fantasia commit six murders over the course of a single night, introduces the film with a bang that was intentionally sadistic and hard to watch. It was supposed to shock, but the Landman star was left frustrated by how much unwanted attention the scenes drew.
“It really upset me how controversial it was for its violence, though,” he explained to Alex Simon. “I mean, here you have these summer action movies where dozens, hundreds of people get killed with squibs going off in every direction, and it’s almost sanitised, like a video game or something.”
One False Move opted for realism, and when it rubbed certain folks the wrong way, they openly decried the movie for glorifying brutality. That wasn’t the case, or the intention, and it was enough to leave Thornton fuming that critics and cinemagoers would happily watch an action hero gun down a small army single-handedly, but apparently drew the line at a low-budget thriller aiming for authenticity.
“We had a couple of scenes of violence in that film that showed violence for what it was: ugly, sick, horrifying, with lasting consequences,” he said. “Which is worse to show to someone with a sick mind? If you’re going to show violence on film, you should be honest about it and not glamorise it. That’s when it becomes dangerous, I think.” He’s making a salient point, especially when there was nothing glamorous about One False Move‘s opening minutes.
