Director Mathieu Kassovitz’s Babylon A.D. is about to arrive in theaters and he wants nothing to do with it. In fact, he badmouthed about how poor it is to AMCTV.com and laid blame squarely on the shoulders of Fox.
In France, Kassovitz is a heralded director for his work on La Haine and had some moderate success stateside with Halle Berry in Gothika. He’s setting up Babylon A.D. for failure in response to negative reviews swirling around cyberspace.
Here are some choice quotes from Kassovitz when asked about his latest effort:
“I’m very unhappy with the film.”
“I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be. The script wasn’t respected. Bad producers, bad partners, it was a terrible experience.”
“It’s pure violence and stupidity.”
“The movie is supposed to teach us that the education of our children will mean the future of our planet. All the action scenes had a goal: They were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters… instead parts of the movie are like a bad episode of 24.”
“Fox was sending lawyers who were only looking at all the commas and the dots. They made everything difficult from A to Z.”
“…I know what I had — I had something much better in my hands but I just wasn’t allowed to work.”
“Babylon will probably have a good first weekend, but the second weekend we’re going to lose 30%.”
“I don’t see how people who went through all these amazing blockbusters like The Dark Knight and Iron Man this summer will take it.”
Kassovitz also complains about the running time being trimmed down to a skimpy 93 minutes. Vin Diesel echoed the sentiment but more as a joke, “Am I even in the movie any more, or am I on the cutting room floor?”
Fox has proven a history in recent years of meddling in big tentpole films to make them more “consumer friendly.” But does whatever they did warrant Kassovitz lashing out like this right after bad reviews appear?
Sounds to me like Kassovitz needs to take a look in the mirror and stop blaming everyone else for “his” work. He was behind the camera, not anyone else. And if Fox did meddle in the production, so what? He agreed to work with them.
The kicker is Kassovitz has removed himself from the film’s publicity events and holed up in the Caribbean on vacation. That’s sending a great message to all the folks who worked multiple years on the film.
