John Goodman has admitted the scathing reviews aimed at Digger “hurt”.
John Goodman is ‘proud’ of Digger
The 74-year-old actor has a supporting role as a fictional United States President in Tom Cruise’s latest movie, which has grossed just $50 million on a budget reported at over $160m, and he has insisted the negative reaction “kind of killed us before we opened”.
Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he said: “Yeah, it, uh, it hurt.”
He added that criticism levied at the movie told film fans that it was a “good reason for people to avoid it”.
However, Goodman argued: “I’m proud of it, and I had a ball doing it. It was a good six months out of my life.”
The film stars Cruise, 64, as an oil tycoon confronting a global catastrophe after a malfunction at one of his Greenland drilling rigs threatens Europe, and it’s split critics with a 53 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Goodman, who admitted he likes a “big-engine car” insisted the story is a “nice wake-up call” to himself and others to be conscious about their place in the world.
And he insisted that the negative reaction doesn’t mean Digger can’t find its audience in the future.
He said: “I think everything I’ve done for the Coen brothers flopped, initially, so, who cares?”
“I’ve still got people running up to me in the streets about Barton Fink, and, naturally, [The Big] Lebowski.”
Meanwhile, the reaction hasn’t been all bad, with Guillermo del Toro – a friend of director Alejandro G. Iñárritu – speaking out to defend the project, which he hailed as “daring, bold and Cinematically complex”.
He wrote on social media: “The film delivers in scale, ambition and reach at a theatrical screen level.”
Comedian Bill Burr suggested “critics are out of their minds” on his Monday Morning podcast, Anne Hathaway has also praised the film.
Taking to Letterboxd, she wrote in her review that it’s “brilliant”, as well as “smart and trippy and aggressive and funny and ambitious”.
Ben Affleck compared the situation to a “high-school bullying thing”, when people who haven’t “even seen” certain films getting in on the pile-on.
He told the Happy Sad Confused podcast: “Everybody wants to celebrate this bomb as if it’s the most exciting thing to happen. And you think like, it’s a pretty ambitious, interesting movie made by interesting people who have talent.”
The Oscar-winning filmmaker, who has experienced commercial disappointments during his own career, questioned the industry’s growing emphasis on financial performance as a measure of artistic achievement.
He said: “Everybody wants to count the money, what it lost or whatever. To me, I just think, if you punish movies that take risks, guess what you’re going to get? A bunch of s***** homogenized movies.”
He added: “You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing. And that means you’re going to sometimes look bad.”