Bk, I just couldn't bear to listen to the commentary so I never have...for the very reason you state. The director from the first day of pre-production started taking credit for everything. Forget that both the producer and I and the original director spent four years of our life on it before he ever came aboard. If you listen to him, you'd think he taught the actors how to act, fed the crew, built the sets, designed everything, took the tickets at the box-office. He is a vicious, venal, vile, virtuperative little blowhard of a human being (and I use the word "human Being" in its minimal, basest biological sense), IMHO, who if he couldn't take credit for everyone else's talent would try to diminish it. Not an ounce of poetry in his soul and a thoroughly nasty piece of work. I have never seen a cast and crew so united in their antipathy for a director before. But he is merely a man who cannot rise above his mediocrity.
The producer who actually had knew what she had is really at fault. She abandoned her passion and power to capitulate to the director's petty ego and descend to his mediocrity. She told me once in Bratislava at dinner, "Rob pisses around on your script because he is jealous of your talent and he is afraid of you." Which was true, but when I asked her very sensibly then why did she allow him to piss around on the script (at one time she told him, he'd "butchered" it), she said: "It's the process." One needs a producer who knows the difference between collaboration and compromise and keep firm in the fray and not become the Queen of Capitulation.
The worst cast member...almost despised as much as the director was the actress playing the girl...so many of her scenes (and more important, Dennis' good scenes) got cut because of her performance. Dennis was a hard-working trouper and a consummate professional. Can't say enough good about him. Pete Posthlethwaite, Jason Isaacs, and David Thewlis were all great, but hampered by such bad direction. The funniest breakfast I've ever had was with Pete and David bitching about the director. Thewlis said, "I feel like I'm shouting all the time." Pete's comment about the director was: :"Just figure out where to put the camera, mate, and let us do the thinking."
I have avoided the commentary because I knew it would be a pack of lies. The reason there is only ten seconds of me is because they were desperately trying to muzzle me. I wasn't even going to be included until I raised a stink to the WGA. They filmed an hour's interview with me of which you get just that one clip.
Worst things about the movie are all the nuances are gone, the connective tissue, emotional subtlety, and what one critic called "the plough-horse direction". No poetry of soul, no delicacy. Oh, and, of course, the pigs scene. This was an inspiration of the director's he thought it would be funny if a village of starving peasants was full of pigs, despite the fact that once the villagers think the dragon is dead they rush it saying "Meat, Meat, Meat." We all told him it made no sense, but he's the type of person that rather than admit he's wrong would entrench more adamantly into his position. He thought we were trying to make him look stupid, we kept saying: "No we're trying to make you look smart!" One astute reviewer noticed this glaring inconsistency of idiocy. I write about what went wrong with this and other things in my forward of the published screenplay (which has no pigs in it). But this idiotic gap of logic that everone let slide rather than force the director to get rid of it tells the tale of DRAGONHEART. Let's knowingly do something that's wrong rather than put of with the aggravation of reining in a childish, egomaniacal direction.
One last story. One day the producer was commenting on how much she like the storyboard artist's work. The director, full of umbrage, immediately piped up: "But I told her what to draw!"
Ugh! Bad Karma! Oh, now you made me dredge all this shit up again. I need an acid reducer.
