Cusack: Studio Ruined The Frozen Ground

You might remember a movie from last year called “The Frozen Ground” starring Nicolas Cage and John Cusack.  It was sort of decent, almost.  But it felt like it was almost a good movie that tripped up at the same time somehow.  John Cusack blames the studio for this.

I did that movie with a young director and they took it from him and they didn’t even call him.  Just started re-cutting.  Then they got him back and said “just make the best, shortest version that you can”, and he didn’t have a say in the music.  So, you know, he wrote it, he directed it, and somewhere in there there’s a good movie… and then it becomes an auctioned off commodity where no-one involved in the making of the film is cutting it.  It can be a clusterfuck.

This is probably a perfect example of how to ruin a movie.  It was as Cusack said, probably a good movie to begin with, then turned on its head but also marketed poorly.  I hope that this is not what has happened with “Maggie” starring Schwarzenegger, that it has not become a “commodity” that the studio is afraid of selling in a certain way.

Source: [Total Film Magazine/October 2014]