Lee Daniels still loves The Paperboy, even if it almost made him quit directing
"The ones that were kicked to the curb are the ones that I hold dear to my heart," the director said
Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
If you’ve heard of but haven’t seen Lee Daniels’ 2012 thriller The Paperboy, it’s probably for one of two reasons. First and most notably, it’s the one where Nicole Kidman pisses on a jellyfish-stung Zac Efron. Second, it was an almost Earth-shattering flop for the director, who had released Oscar-darling Precious (starring Mo’Nique and Gabourey Sidibe) three years prior. We’re not talking about a so-bad-it’s-good, Madame Web-type flop. At the time, The A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin gave the film a dismal D-rating, writing, “It’s as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.”
Rabin wasn’t the only one who immediately cooled on the sweaty, Florida-set thriller, which also starred Matthew McConaughey as a reporter covering a death row inmate played by John Cusack, in addition to everything going on with Efron and Kidman. The film received not a single award upon its premiere at Cannes in 2012, and, according to IndieWire, only made $677,000 on its $12 million-plus budget when it arrived in U.S. theaters later that fall.
The fallout was so bad that it almost cost Daniels his career. “That movie doesn’t get any love,” the director said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “I was going to give up directing after that, because it was so trashed, and reviewers didn’t get the world. I felt like it was my Black version of my white version of The Paperboy. I was offered all these Black roles, Black jobs, Black films, and I was like, ‘No, I’m a fucking filmmaker. I’m not just a Black filmmaker. And I really want to work with white actors. How can you label me like this?’”
The fact that the critics “just came for me” hasn’t stopped Daniels from loving his end result, however. The film apparently received a 15-minute standing ovation when it first premiered, which “was incredible,” he notes. “I was expecting that. And then they said people were booing. That was not a boo! I saw more love than I saw for Precious there.” (IndieWire notes that the boos and walkouts came during the film’s critics’ screening the following morning.)
“I love all of my work equally, but the ones that were kicked to the curb are the ones that I hold dear to my heart, and [The Paperboy] is something I hold dear to my heart,” Daniels said.
Luckily, the filmmaker was able to piss on his own metaphorical jellyfish sting and keep on moving forward. He followed The Paperboy with Lee Daniels’ The Butler the next year, and eventually The United States Vs. Billie Holiday and the smash hit show Empire, among others. His latest film, an Andra Day-led exorcism movie called Deliverance, premieres August 16 on Netflix.