Horse of a different color

Matt Damon and Billy Bob Thornton

NEW YORK -- Intrigue has surrounded Billy Bob Thornton and Matt Damon, and not just about their love lives and diets. It seems to have taken forever for Thornton's third film, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, to get released. And his second film, Daddy and Them, has also gone unseen, though it's long been finished (as has his relationship with that film's star, Laura Dern, whom he dumped for Charlize Theron, his co-star in Pushing Tin and now his latest wife). All in all, a lot more has been going behind the scenes than does in the movie itself, and in the meantime he has shown little to fulfill the promise of his Oscar-winning (Best Adapted Screenplay) Sling Blade back in 1996.

"Well, I did several movies in a row, right?" says a gaunt Thornton, his good-old-boy charm set off by his Metallica T-shirt and a set of rosary beads given to him by a friend while he was in hospital recovering from a nutritional problem. "You know, right after Sling Blade, I did [as an actor], gosh, Armageddon, and Primary Colors, and Pushing Tin and A Simple Plan and all that stuff. I kind of booked myself up and, plus, you know, I want to be a director only to see a vision. I'm not particularly someone who just wants to look for the next directing gig. I'd rather do my own things.

"With All The Pretty Horses, however, I loved the book; it's the kind of thing that I might write anyway, not nearly as well. I couldn't pass it up. I did direct another movie called Daddy and Them in between, a smaller movie, but we've always been holding that back to put it out after All The Pretty Horses, so it's been sitting there ready for almost two years. So that'll come out after, but it was actually shot between Sling Blade and this. We don't want to compare it to the hoopla surrounding the bigger movie, you know, overshadowing. I want to give it a chance, it's basically what it is."

Fair enough. But about that vision thing -- isn't Miramax, Horses' distributor, known for taking editing liberties on films it finds overlong? And didn't Matt Damon in Talk magazine remark that the four-hour version (the final cut is under two) of the film was the best movie he's ever been in?

"Well, the four hours wasn't a cut," says Damon. "It was an `assembly.' But a lot of people have been asking about that. I think it was kind of like a misunderstanding. The assembly of The Rainmaker was like six and a half hours, you know? Usually, the assembly of a movie is everything that you've shot, and you kind of put it in and you look at it and you decide what the movie is and what you can lose, and so I just, I loved every scene that we shot in the movie. But, I don't know, I mean, I think the cut we have now is the one that everyone felt good about. And it's the whole movie, there's nothing really cut out except for a couple of scenes that were kind of extraneous. And I was just proud of all the work that was in it, and I've never felt this way about anything I've done before. And it's just my own opinion, and anyone's welcome to disagree with it, but it's the first time in my life that I don't really care."

Thornton points out that this controversy about a four-hour cut is just another example of how rumors get started. "It was in the papers recently that I was in the hospital because I only eat orange food. I was on some entertainment show once because they were doing `What The Stars Eat,' and they said every day the first thing I do is I get up and go to the Sunset Marquis and I eat papaya. That's true. So that became, `I only eat orange food.' Well, I do eat orange food in the morning, but then I eat black food at night."
-- P.K.

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