Richard Gere just insulted his iconic romantic comedy, Pretty Woman, as silly. From Brad Pitt to Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry, Marlon Brando, and Eddie Murphy, see other stars who bad-mouthed their films.
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He charmed the hot pants off Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, but 22 years after its release Richard Gere acted very ungentlemanly toward the film. “People ask me about that movie but I’ve forgotten it,” Gere told Woman’s Day recently. “That was a silly romantic comedy.” He also went on to say that he regretted the way Pretty Woman glamorized Wall Street types. “It made those guys seem dashing, which was wrong. Thankfully, today, we are all more skeptical of those guys.”
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Winning an Oscar gives an actor plenty of clout—and perhaps the clarity to admit there were some mistakes along the way. In a 2008 interview with Esquire, Charlize Theron looked back unfondly on her film Reindeer Games. “That was a bad, bad, bad movie,” she told the magazine. “But even though the movie might suck, I got to work with John Frankenheimer. I wasn't lying to myself—that's why I did it. I mean, he directed The Manchurian Candidate, which is like the movie of all movies. Fuck regret. Just fuck it.”
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He played an IRA gunmen in 1997’s The Devil’s Own, and Brad Pitt wasn’t afraid to take a few shots at the Alan J. Pakula–directed movie when he was interviewed by Newsweek that year. “It was the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking—if you can even call it that—that I've ever seen. I couldn't believe it. I don't know why anyone would want to continue making that movie. We had nothing. The movie was the complete victim of this drowning studio head [Mark Canton] who said, ‘I don’t care. We're making it. I don’t care what you have. Shoot something.’” As for why he didn’t just walk away from the film, Pitt added, “I tried to when there was a week before shooting and we had 20 pages of dogshit.”
How did Halle Berry follow up winning an Oscar for Best Actress for 2001’s Monster’s Ball? By taking home a Golden Raspberry four years later as Worst Actress in Catwoman. But Berry was a good sport about the honor and even accepted it in person. Holding her Oscar in one hand and the Razzie in the other, she purred, “First of all I want to thank Warner Brothers. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, God-awful movie ... It was just what my career needed.”
While appearing at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Shia LaBoeuf apologized to the press for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the sequel to 2007’s blockbuster Transformers. “When I saw the second movie, I wasn’t impressed with what we did … There were some really wild stunts in it, but the heart was gone … we got lost.” Oddly enough, director Michael Bay concurred. “The real fault with [Transformers 2] is that it ran into a mystical world,” he told Empire magazine. “When I look back at it, that was crap.”
Knocked Up may have been a huge hit at the box office, but that didn’t stop its star, Katherine Heigl, from knocking it. A year after the movie came out, the actress told Vanity Fair: “It was a little sexist. It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie.” Her costar, Seth Rogen, wasn’t exactly flattered by the criticism. “I gotta say, it’s not like we’re the only people she said some batshit crazy things about,” he told Howard Stern. “That’s kind of her bag now."
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Colin Farrell has always been known to speak his mind, and when it came to critiquing his movie remake of the 1980s TV show, Miami Vice, he was loud and clear. “Miami Vice?” he told Total Film. “I didn’t like it so much. I understood that we were trying to paint a relationship with Tubbs and Crockett that was so grounded and familiar that there was no need for them to incessantly talk to each other—or look at each other—over two and a half hours.” And Farrell was also realistic about his expectations. “It was never going to be Lethal Weapon,” he said, “but I think we missed an opportunity to have a friendship that also had some elements of fun.”
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When a movie costs $100 million to make and only grosses $7.1 million globally, it’s considered a bomb of galactic proportions. So When Barbara Walters asked Eddie Murphy what went wrong with 2003’s The Adventures of Pluto Nash, the comedian shed no tears. “I know two or three people that liked this movie,” he said. And based on Murphy’s most recent box-office flop, A Thousand Words, Murphy may be recycling that answer soon.
When an Aussie actress (Nicole Kidman) stars in a movie called Australia with a man from Oz (Hugh Jackman) that’s directed by Sydney-born Baz Luhrman, what could possibly go wrong? Don’t ask Kidman. “I can’t look at this movie and be proud of what I’ve done,” she told an Australian radio station about the 2008 epic. Kidman even turned to her husband, Keith Urban, for support. “I sat there and I looked at Keith and went, ‘Am I any good in this movie?’ But I thought Brandon Walters and Hugh Jackman were wonderful. It’s just impossible for me to connect to it emotionally at all.”
Given Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent marital transgressions, his 1985 movie, Red Sonja, doesn’t seem like a particularly high crime. But apparently the former California governor refuses to pardon himself for it. “It’s the worst film I have ever made,” he once admitted. “Now, when my kids get out of line, they’re sent to their room and forced to watch Red Sonja 10 times. I never have too much trouble with them.”
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You don’t mess with the Godfather. Eighteen years after he portrayed Don Corleone on film, Marlon Brando satirized one of his most famous roles in 1990’s The Freshman, opposite Matthew Broderick. But the notoriously prickly star gave the film an F. “It’s horrible,” Brando told a reporter from The Toronto Globe and Mail. “It’s going to be a flop, but after this I’m retiring. I’m so fed up. This picture, except for the Canadian crew, was an extremely unpleasant experience. I wish I hadn’t finished with a stinker.” The movie did well at the box office and Brando went on to make more movies, but The Freshman’s writer-director Andrew Bergman admitted he should have known better: “Anybody who would write a screenplay for Marlon ought to have his head examined.”
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