Today must be “Disgruntled Artist Day”. I just finished writing about how (rightfully) pissed off Clive Barker is at Lionsgate for treating his baby MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN like it’s got syphilis, and now here we have director Matthieu Kassovitz getting his panties in a twist over 20th Century Fox’s treatment of his Vin Diesel epic, BABYLON A.D. Let’s just say Kassovitz wouldn’t spare two drops of piss if Fox’s studios were on fire.
“I’m very unhappy with the film,” he says. “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.”
The film, about a mercenary (Diesel) transporting a woman and her guardian from Eastern Europe to New York, got massacred in the editing room, according to the exasperated director, and is now an apparently baffling 93 minutes… No wonder it’s been dumped in late-August, eh?
Kassovitz calls the final cut “pure violence and stupidity” and basically goes on to ensure he’ll never get a Christmas card from Fox again…
“I should have chosen a studio that has guts,” he says. “Fox was just trying to get a PG-13 movie. I’m ready to go to war against them, but I can’t because they don’t give a s–t.”
I, for one, am at a loss, because I’ve always been under the impression that 20th Century Fox was an artist-friendly environment, not known for being completely out of touch with top-tier talent and quality-hungry audiences (see the AvP “franchise”). How silly of me!