“I hate that it got all put on me… that it’s my failure,” says Catwoman star Halle Berry, 20 years after the film’s calamitous release.
Readers with long memories may remember the derision that greeted the release of Catwoman in 2004. Directed by French filmmaker Pitof, it starred Halle Berry – then on a run of success, having won an Oscar for her work in Monster’s Ball – as new imagining of the titular superhero.
It was clear from the finished film that there were problems behind the scenes, and to mark its 20th anniversary, several of the main people involved in making it have spoken to Entertainment Weekly about its troubled production.
One obvious issue, going by producer Denise Di Novi and screenwriter John Brancato’s comments, is that the film went into production without a finished script. Di Novi and Brancato had initially thought of their Catwoman as a “lower-budget origin story”, but this gradually evolved – to use the word loosely – into something much larger and action-heavy.
Brancato recalls that one studio executive in particular had a major hand in tinkering with the screenplay, making changes to its structure and deleting scenes.
“They’d been through so many writers and versions,” Brancato said. “There was exhaustion at the studio. You get punch-drunk. We’d come up with ideas, and they’d say, “No, we tried that in drafts 7 and 11.” Well, what can we do? It was an odd process.”
The resulting film followed Patience Philips, a quiet, bookish graphic designer working at a cosmetics firm run by the evil Laurel Hedare (Sharon Stone). Philips one day discovers that the company’s makeup has potentially deadly side effects; Laurel has her minions to dispose of her, and Philips becomes Catwoman as a result. It’s a plot that, Berry now concedes, “is a bit soft.”
“I always thought the idea of Catwoman saving women from a face cream felt a bit soft,” Berry said. “All the other superheroes save the world; they don’t just save women from cracked faces. I always knew that was a soft superhero plight, but at that time in my career, I didn’t have the agency I have today or belief that I could challenge that, so I went along with it.”
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The rewrites continued right into editing, according to Pitof, while Brancato and Di Novi were reportedly fired from the production twice. Little wonder, then, that the resulting film was a bit of a muddle. As critics rounded on the film, Berry handled the backlash classily – even turning up at the Razzies to pick up her award for worst actress in person. Two decades on, though, she rightly points out how unfair it was that she was the focal point for so much of its derision.
“Growing up as a Black woman, that’s two strikes against you,” Berry said. “There’s an innate resilience. I hated that it got all put on me, and I hate that, to this day, it’s my failure. I know I can carry it. I still have a career 20 years later. It’s just part of my story. That’s okay, and I’ve carried other failures and successes.”
About eight years ago, your humble writer spoke to Andy Armstrong, who was a unit director on Catwoman He was at least one voice who not only praised Berry’s performance, but argued that with a decent script, she could have been at the centre of a genuinely good superhero flick.
“The movie could have been fantastic,” Armstrong told me in 2016. “Halle Berry – in the outfit, she could stop traffic. And she was such a perfect choice for Catwoman – she had all the abilities. The movement down, the whole thing. It was such a waste, because the script got crappier and crappier. There was a rewrite every week or so. Each one was worse than the last one. It was like someone was drinking and writing worse and worse versions of it. I feel sorry for Halle as well – I don’t think it did her career any good. She’s such a trooper anyway.”
You can read the full story of Catwoman's troubled making over on EW.
