'I'll Quit,' Vows Gallo After Brown Bunny Boos

Friday May 23 10:11 AM ET

U.S. director Vincent Gallo is so hurt by the scathing reaction to his film "The Brown Bunny" that he has vowed to make it his last.

"I'll never make another movie again. I mean it," Gallo told Reuters, after his road movie had a disastrous reception at the Cannes film festival and he was booed at a press conference.

"Being booed at was not much fun. It's really not very nice that people are so nasty. I'm very disappointed," he said early on Friday at the star-studded amfAR AIDS fund-raiser.

Gallo, going through what he says is the worst week in his life, has also apologized to those who financed the film.

"It is a disaster of a film and it was a waste of time. I apologize to the financiers, but it was never my intention to make a pretentious film, a self-indulgent film, a useless film, an unengaging film," he said.

Critics guffawed openly at the screening of "The Brown Bunny," which Gallo wrote, directed, produced and starred in, and groaned at the highly graphic oral sex scene at the end.

Many found the long driving scenes interminable and monotonous and the symbolic use of a toy rabbit plain just silly.

Screen International has ranked the film the worst of the 20 films competing for this year's Palme d'Or.

"Vincent Gallo's monumental folly has already become a defining moment in Cannes history. Awestruck future generations will ask: 'Were you there the night they screened The Brown Bunny?"' one of the magazine's critics wrote Friday. A clearly depressed Gallo said he had hardly been able to face his friends since Cannes critics, bored by what they say is a miserable harvest of films, started laying into his movie.

"If my film is not comprehensible to people then I have failed in my purpose. I am disappointed that once again, what I like is unpopular. I can only apologize to the people who feel they have wasted their time," he said.

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"There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium number of copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold very few copies, the writer thought he was great. If what the writer wrote never was published and he didn't have the money to publish it himself, then he though he was truly great. The truth, however, was that there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt.

--Charles Bukowski, Women

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