Gigli director Martin Brest calls not quitting the movie an "eternal regret"
Martin Brest accepts some blame for Gigli's failure, but it wasn't the movie he set out to make
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.