Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez's flop movie 'Gigli' was a 'bloody mess that deserved its excoriation,' says director

• The director of "Gigli" has reflected on the "ghastly cadaver of a movie," 20 years after its release.
• Martin Brest told Variety that he regrets not quitting the Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez-starring flop.

The director of "Gigli" has said the movie has become such a sore spot for him that he cannot even bring himself to say the name out loud.

Speaking to Variety, filmmaker Martin Brest opened up about the 2003 critically and commercially panned movie, which starred Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, revealing that while he knows his filmography "inside and out," he does not "even know what that movie looks like, frankly, because of the manner in which it took shape."

"Even the name… I refer to it as 'the G movie,'" he said. "Probably the less said about it the better."

The director of "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Midnight Run" went on to say that the movie he originally set out to make was very different from the one audiences watched in theaters.

The film centers around gangsters Gigli (Affleck) and Ricki (Lopez), who are both sent on the same kidnapping mission, but soon begin to fall for each other.

"I wonder if ever a movie had been changed that much… I'm sure it has in the history of Hollywood, but it was changed so radically," Brest explained.

He continued: "The themes of the movie were radically different. The plot was different. The purpose of the movie was different. But I can't escape blame."

"It's so weird — I literally don't remember the movie that was released, because I wasn't underneath it in the way I was under the hood of all my other movies. So it's really a bloody mess that deserved its excoriation," he said.

When asked why the film changed so much from his vision to the final product, Brest said that "extensive disagreements" between himself and the studio behind the movie — Sony Pictures — played a large part, as did "reshooting and re-editing" certain scenes.

According to Brest, post-production was shut down for eight months while he and the studio tried to come to a compromise.

"In the end, I was left with two choices: quit or be complicit in the mangling of the movie," Brest said. "To my eternal regret, I didn't quit, so I bear responsibility for a ghastly cadaver of a movie."

Despite Brest's bad experience with the movie, there are at least two people grateful that "Gigli" exists: Affleck and Lopez, who met on the set of the thriller in 2001 and began a relationship shortly after.

At the time, Lopez was married to Cris Judd, her second husband (she was briefly married to Ojani Noa before that), but by the summer of 2002, she had filed for divorce and gone public with the "Gone Girl" star.

The couple became engaged in November of that year, before calling off their nuptials in 2004. In 2021, the pair reignited their relationship and in July 2022, they finally became husband and wife.