Ben Affleck has said the Joss Whedon-helmed reshoots of Zack Snyder’s “Justice League” were a ‘low point’ for him – and essentially killed his desire to direct a standalone Batman movie.
Out promoting his new Netflix thriller “Animals,” Affleck appeared on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast and touched upon his anger at how Warner Bros. Pictures handled Snyder’s departure during production on “Justice League” after his daughter’s death.
Affleck had planned to helm a Batman film in which his take on the character would have visited Arkham Asylum while Joe Manganiello’s Deathstroke would serve as the primary villain. But that came to a halt after what happened with “Justice League”:
“I was considering at a time directing a standalone Batman movie after that and did not feel like ultimately I wanted to do that. I liked playing that character, particularly this sort of older, broken, very much derived from – wholly derived from Frank Miller’s book. That’s what we were trying to do with that ‘Batman v Superman’.
But, you know, the truth is that the experience of ‘Justice League’ for me was so, so negative for lots of different reasons. Some of which had to do just with where I was personally, some of which having to do with some of the tragedy that happened during that time. I really saw how not to make a movie like that, which is when the studio is at odds with the filmmaker. You know, starting at the worst possible, you’re really making a mistake. And, you know, that was what really doomed that.”
He then calls Snyder being taken off that project and replaced by Whedon a “low point of my career” because of the way it was done:
“Boy, that was sh-tty, that him being taken off that movie and the reshoots that we did. That was the low – if you want the low point of my career, was that. The personal thing, you know, somebody’s death by suicide, that eclipses everything. And then the way in which that was, I thought frankly, used as an excuse, I just thought was one of the sh-ttiest things I’d ever seen. And then the whole environment and vibe, much of which I wasn’t privy to, but that I sort of heard about secondhand in terms of Ray and Gal and other people’s experiences. It was just like, ‘Wow, this is about as gross as it gets.’”
Snyder eventually got a chance to revisit the film after the theatrical version received a largely negative response with the studio providing additional funding for the filmmaker to finish the longer and much better received “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” cut.
