(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Any Hollywood director worth their salt will experience their fair share of hits and misses, with some of the most acclaimed filmmakers in the business having their reputations stained by some colossal flops and creative risks that don’t quite stick the landing. Whether it be Damien Chazelle and his sorely underrated 2022 film Babylon, which was ripped apart by critics and known as the box-office bomb of the year, or the blind enthusiasm with which Francis Ford Coppola approached Megalopolis, despite it being lauded as a catastrophic failure.
However, failure can often be the experience that weeds out the true cinephiles from the phonies, with those who are truly enamoured with the medium becoming relentless in their creative pursuit and continuing to make films, even if there is no audience or nobody seems to care. Those who love it will keep making films, even if no one understands them. This is something that Al Pacino experienced in a unique way after working with Sydney Pollack, with the pair joining forces to create something that was completely mediocre at best and widely labelled as a total mess.
Pollack is somewhat known for his work within the romance genre, with his 1973 film The Way We Were becoming the definitive love story of the decade and adding to the ‘will they, won’t they’ genre that continues to be the Hail Mary of the Hollywood love story. However, while this film was hugely successful, with Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford becoming the ultimate unexpected movie couple, he attempted to foray into this genre again just a few years later, and was not with the same warm reaction.
Bobby Deerfield, directed in 1977, follows an American race car driver who falls in love with a terminally ill woman. It seems as though Pollack has a personal preference for doomed love stories, with the on-screen couple going through tragic motions as they try to sustain their relationship while dealing with Lillian’s crumbling health. But while it sounds like a promising story on paper, Al Pacino and Pollack had wildly different opinions on how the story should be approached, which led the film to become confused and very directionless as both creatives pulled at it from opposite directions.
When asked about his strained relationship with Pollack, Pacino said, “It’s because we’re different. Sydney had a genuine idea for the movie; it meant something to him. We had different views, and in a movie like that you need to be together on it. It was a very delicate subject. On that film it was necessary to be in sync with each other, and we were just a mess. Maybe we would have been better off had I listened to him more; it would have been consistent. I didn’t quite understand his point of view. There are aspects in the picture that are really good, but it was one that missed for me”.
The actor expanded on the scenes that they were divided over, explaining, “In a scene that takes place in the shower, I’d say, ‘Let’s have it in the bathtub with steam.’ I meant something by that. He meant something by the shower. It’s a different thing… We couldn’t get together; we just couldn’t. It’s unfortunate, because he’s such a good director”.
Ultimately, the picture floundered as a result of these conflicting ideas, with critics ripping it apart after its release and denouncing it as the worst from Pacino’s filmography, something that Pacino found very painful after saying, “You know something? Bobby Deerfield was my favourite film, even though nobody liked it, and it got terrible reviews.”
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