Seth Rogen says bad reviews can really be 'devastating': "I know people who have never recovered from it"
Seth Rogen finds bad reviews "devastating".
Speaking on The Diary of a CEO podcast, he told host Steven Bartlett: "I think if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things.
"It's devastating. I know people who have never recovered from it honestly — a year, decades of being hurt by [reviews]
"It's very personal…. It is devastating when you are being institutionally told that your personal expression was bad, and that's something that people carry with them, literally their entire lives, and I get why. It f****** sucks."
Rogen, 40, recalled being hammered The Green Hornet, the 2011 action flick which also starred Cameron Diaz and Jay Chou. The Michel Gondry-helmed movie scored 44 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
He said: "For Green Hornet, the reviews were coming out and it was pretty bad. People hated it. People were taking joy in disliking it a lot.
"But it opened to like $35 million, which was the biggest opening weekend I'd ever been associated with at that point. It did pretty well. That's what is nice sometimes. You can grasp for some sense of success at times."
However, Rogen felt the attacks on his and James Franco's 2014 comedy The Interview were more brutal, "more personal"
He explained: "That felt far more personal. Green Hornet felt like I had fallen victim to a big fancy thing. That was not so much a creative failure on our parts but a conceptual failure. The Interview, people treated us like we creatively failed and that sucked."
But Rogen revealed that the best way to recover from negative reviews is just to keep working.
He said: "That's another funny thing about making movies … life goes on.
"You can be making another movie as your [current] movie is bombing, which is a funny thing. It's bittersweet. You know things will be okay. You're already working.
"If the fear is the movie bombs and you won't get hired again, well you don't have to worry about it. But it's an emotional conundrum at times."
Of late, Rogen has found acclaim as a producer (together with creative partner Evan Goldberg), notably on TV for such shows as The Boys, Preacher and Pam & Tammy. His latest producing effort is the animated feature Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, out in cinemas on Aug 31. Rogen is also in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans, which is up for seven Oscars.
