Now that the cat’s been out of the bag for a good while, it seems everyone has there own Harvey Weinstein story to share. Thankfully Julia Stiles‘ personal anecdote regarding the convicted sex offender isn’t as bad as others, but nonetheless speaks to the former producer’s bad taste in all situations.
During a recent interview on Brett Goldstein‘s “Films to Be Buried With” podcast, Stiles discussed her early 2000s heyday, when she had her pick of any teen rom-com being put one the market, but fell into one project that was “executed very poorly.” The film was called “Down to You” and co-starred another hot actor of the moment, Freddie Prinze Jr.
“It was a time when teen rom-coms were really popular,” said Stiles. “The director wrote the script. He was a first-time director and he was a very, very intelligent, capable guy. The script was very good. And then Harvey Weinstein got his hands on it and decided to capitalize on this trend. And it just became dumb.”
Rather than try to expand and doing something new with the genre, Weinstein instead wanted to rehash an element from Stiles’ past successes despite it having no logical place in the film.
“They’re pouring money at it in stupid ways,” she said. “So when we went and did reshoots, and I’m told that he decided that because of the success of ‘Save The Last Dance’ or the success of ’10 Things I Hate About You’ with me dancing on the pool table, he needed to have me dancing in the film.”
The issue in Stiles’ mind was not that he wanted her to dance, but that it wasn’t necessary to the story and it didn’t bring anything new to the characters’ dynamic.
“I’ll make a whole movie dancing. I love to dance, but it was dumb. It was like, ‘Okay, let’s get her on a pool table.’ It wasn’t even imaginative,” Stiles told Goldstein. “And I felt so slimy doing it the whole time. I don’t know if that actually made it in the film, but it was annoying.”
