Gigli director Martin Brest calls not quitting the movie an "eternal regret"

Is Gigli still Hollywood’s most infamous flop? The Flash flopped more egregiously; Morbius flopped twice! Yet Gigli lives on in the cultural consciousness synonymous with “bad movie.” So bad, it drove director Martin Brest right out of the business. To this day, he doesn’t even like to think about it: “Even the name… I refer to it as ‘the G movie,’” he says in a new interview with Variety. “Probably the less said about it the better.”

Brest will say a bit about it, though; namely that the film was altered so much from the project he originally began working on that it was functionally unrecognizable. “Extensive disagreements between the studio and myself got to the point where post-production was shut down for eight months while we battled it out. In the end I was left with two choices: quit or be complicit in the mangling of the movie. To my eternal regret I didn’t quit, so I bear responsibility for a ghastly cadaver of a movie,” he laments.

“For the first time in my career I had become a true collaborator—not in the benign, creative sense, but rather that of one who, in violation of their true allegiances, cooperates with occupying forces,” the filmmaker reflects, rather dramatically. “And for that kind of compromise, self-castigations far exceed any possible public ones.”

By the time the film hit theaters, “The themes of the movie were radically different. The plot was different. The purpose of the movie was different. But I can’t escape blame,” Brest says. “[But] it’s so weird—I literally don’t remember the movie that was released, because I wasn’t underneath it in the way I was under the hood of all my other movies. So it’s really a bloody mess that deserved its excoriation.”

The experience of losing, or at least compromising, his creative freedom was unique to Gigli and ultimately so traumatic that it led Brest to leave Hollywood (after a career that includes successes like Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, and Scent Of A Woman). “I had a good run, and I enjoyed success and freedom, and that was fantastic. I would’ve liked it to go on longer, but everybody likes everything to go on longer,” he says. “But I feel very grateful for what I experienced. So I just figured I’d put an end to all that movie stuff, but then a script burnt its way out of me that I felt very passionate about. But I couldn’t make any headway with it, so I reprimanded myself and said, ‘Don’t stick yourself out there again.’”

Weirdly, though Gigli essentially made one man quit directing, it made another man start directing. And, by the way, if Bennifer can have a happy ending after Gigli, why shouldn’t Martin Brest?