(Credit: Warner Bros)
Wed 20 August 2025 18:15, UK
Passion projects have always been one of Hollywood’s sharpest double-edged swords; when done right, they justify the actor or director’s decision to hold on to the project for so long, but as Gene Hackman discovered, the opposite can also be true if the picture doesn’t live up to expectations.
The two-time Academy Award winner wasn’t exactly the sentimental type, and he spent most of his career going where the work was. He rarely developed anything from the ground up, and the one and only time he was credited as anything other than an on-camera performer, he wasn’t happy with the results.
Admittedly, that’s an oversimplification of Hackman’s contributions to cinema, because he was always working closely with screenwriters and filmmakers to fine-tune his dialogue and ensure he delivered the best possible performance. When he finally put on another hat, though, his two decades of persistence didn’t quite justify the commitment.
In a filmography spanning more than 70 movies, including several of the greatest ever made, Stephen Hopkins’ 2000 thriller, Under Suspicion, is the outlier. It was the only thing Hackman ever produced, and he’d been sitting on it for almost 20 years after acquiring the rights to remake its spiritual predecessor, Claude Miller’s 1981 French feature, Garde à Vue.
“I had the project 18 years ago, and I sent it to everybody I knew, and nobody wanted to do it,” he told Cigar Aficionado. Never one to do things the easy way, Hackman refused to abandon his dream until a chance encounter with his Unforgiven co-star, Morgan Freeman, finally set the wheels in motion.
“I told him about the project and sent him the French version of the film,” Hackman explained. “And he liked the film a lot, and I told him I’d play either role. I’d leave the decision up to him.” In the end, Freeman opted to play the veteran cop Victor Benezet, with his opposite number set as the shady lawyer, Henry Hearst.
Despite its pedigree, which included a Cannes Film Festival premiere, Under Suspicion was barely given a theatrical release to speak of and ended up earning less than $1.5 million against a $25 million budget. Reviews were disappointingly muted, especially when the marketing leaned heavily into the Hackman/Freeman face-off, and the French Connection icon thought he might have been at fault.
“I wanted to see if I could play that multilayered kind of sophisticate,” he mused. “I never really got to where I liked my work in this film, probably because we shot the film in seven weeks under pretty tough conditions, and somehow I feel we just never got to it. I felt pretty good in some scenes, but I’m not sure if the film works or not.”
Under Suspicion is far from being the worst movie Hackman ever made, but neither is it anywhere near the upper echelons. It’s a decent enough potboiler (barely) elevated above mediocrity by the wattage of its two legendary leads, but it hardly justified Hackman’s near-20-year odyssey toward bringing it to the screen.
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