David Gordon Green addresses his fantasy film flop Your Highness. Featuring a star-studded cast of Natalie Portman, Danny McBride, James Franco, Toby Jones, Justin Theroux, and Zoeey Deschanel, Your Highness is a comedic action-adventure-fantasy following the (mis)adventures of a royal crew on a mission to save a prince’s kidnapped bride. Often cited as Green’s worst film, Your Highness was loathed by critics of the time, and received a paltry worldwide box office gross of only $28 million, losing money on its estimated $49.9 million budget.
Green stands up for Your Highness in a recent interview with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
When making the movie, Green jokingly says that he “was going to win an Oscar.” While Green does not endorse all of his past works, the director maintained that he still thought that Your Highness lived up to his positive memories when rewatching it with his children.
Check out the full quote from Green below:
“When I was making Your Highness with Danny McBride, I thought I was going to win an Oscar. I was like ‘who wouldn’t want to watch this movie?’ They’re letting us film my opus, and this is my Fitzcarraldo, this is my Lawrence of Arabia, this is going to stand among the classics of all time. And uh, boy was I wrong. But I showed it to my 12 year old kids now, I showed it to them a few months ago, and I was like ‘I still don’t know what anyone was thinking. Why would you…why would Roger Ebert write a bad review of that movie? Because it’s a masterpiece.’ And I don’t stand by everything I did, and I don’t say that. There’s certain things, like I had a hard time rewatching Undertow recently. There are some things that I’m really passionate about in it, but there are some things that I’m look at and I’m like ‘that was a choice you made, bud, should have taken a cold bath before that one.’
So those realities certainly are there, and I don’t revisit movies super often, but there are no regrets I guess. And so, I think the only reason I have no regrets is because there’s not an outside force, a studio, a benefactor, saying ‘do this, don’t do this, second guess yourself.’ There’s a group of people that I trust saying ‘that’s a bad idea,let’s reevaluate or sleep on that idea before you do it.’ And when someone I really trust says that, I do do that, and when someone double dog dares me sometimes I’m ballsy enough to do that anyway.”
David Gordon Green’s Career Has Taken Interesting Turns Since Your Highness
Though the extent to which Green is joking in this interview is unclear, the director’s unapologetic, “no regrets” attitude towards Your Highness is surprising. After all, Your Highness received a 27% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, making it among Green’s lowest-rated films. Still, Green is a staunch defender of the unfunny 2011 flop, for better or for worse.
Your Highness is also a fascinating inclusion within Green’s career. After debuting his intimate first feature George Washington in 2000, Green’s career has seen a constant push and pull between mainstream features like Pineapple Express and quiet indie films such as Prince Avalanche, which is a quirky remake of Icelandic film Either Way. Now, Green’s career has pivoted again as the director has gone on a horror streak, directing 2018’s Halloween, Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends, and this year’s The Exorcist: Believer.
As such, Green’s career has also unfortunately pivoted back to some poorly-received works. Save Halloween, the aforementioned horror films have had negative Tomatoemeters, with The Exorcist: Believer suffering with critics. With these scores, Green has shown that even since Your Highness, his ventures into genre films still often do not pay off.
