Ben Affleck has made it clear he is not a fan of the “high school bullying”-type celebrations over “Digger” and its box office struggles, warning that moviegoers and critics should not “punish movies that take risks.”
Affleck participated in a wide-ranging conversation about his career during his guest appearance on Monday’s episode of the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast hosted by Josh Horowitz. At one point, the actor reflected on his decision to make his directorial debut with 2007’s “Gone Baby Gone,” revealing that part of his pitch for the film at the time was that it would not star him.
“It’s one thing to be unknown. It’s another thing to be like, ‘No, we know who you are. We just don’t like you,’” Affleck said of the public perception of him in the mid-2000s as a movie star. He said that perception of him began to slowly change with “Gone Baby Gone.”
“Even the reviews for that movie were, like, I remember one that was like, ‘Well, now I know what my hat tastes like,’” Affleck remembered, adding, “It wasn’t even a rave. It was just like, ‘Fine, this isn’t the worst piece of s—t you’ve ever seen.’”
“It’s a little bit like the high school bullying thing,” Affleck continued. “You see it happening now, frankly, with ‘Digger.’ Everybody wants to celebrate this bomb as if it’s the most exciting thing that happened and you think like, ‘This is a pretty ambitious, interesting movie made by interesting people that have talent.’”
You can check out Affleck’s full “Happy Sad Confused” interview below.
“Digger,” director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ambitious black comedy starring a physically unrecognizable Tom Cruise, hit theaters on Oct. 2. The film divided critics and has wildly underperformed at the box office.
To date, it has made just over $35 million at the worldwide box office and is poised to lose $250 million by the end of its run. Assuming that projection holds, it would make “Digger” one of the worst box office bombs in recent memory.
Despite that, Affleck cautioned against celebrating the movie’s failures, even among those who most vehemently disliked it.
“Everybody wants to count the money — what it lost or whatever,” the actor-director noted. “To me, I just think, if you punish movies that take risks, guess what you’re going to get? A bunch of s—tty homogenized movies.”
“You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing,” he concluded. “That means you’re going to sometimes look bad.”
The post Ben Affleck Blasts ‘High School Bullying’ of ‘Digger,’ Says We Shouldn’t ‘Punish Movies That Take Risks’ appeared first on TheWrap.
