The Hollywood ideal is for actors and directors to make magic together. Think Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, or Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. But sometimes, regardless of the quality of the film that gets made, actors can’t stand their directors and vice versa.
What’s interesting about actor-director feuds, though, is that it’s very easy to keep quiet about them. Nobody gets along with everyone, and having many creative people operating in a tiny bubble will inevitably spark tension. So if a bit of off-camera vitriol spills out from the set and into public record, you just know real toxicity must have gone down.
Here are 17 times that movies were blighted by real-life feuding – from David O Russell’s prolific run of actor arguments, to the director who dared to tell Julia Roberts and Dolly Parton that they needed acting lessons.
Jake Gyllenhaal and David Fincher
David Fincher is an infamously exacting filmmaker, often shooting dozens and sometimes hundreds of takes. One actor who particularly struggled with Fincher’s approach was Jake Gyllenhaal, who worked with the filmmaker on 2007’s Zodiac. He said that year that Fincher “paints with people” while working, and that it’s “tough to be a colour”. Asked about Gyllenhaal’s comments in 2020, Fincher said that the former child actor had never “been asked to concentrate on minutiae”, adding that Gyllenhaal was “very distracted” on set.
“When he’d show up for work, he was very scattered,” Fincher told The New York Times. “[He had] his managers and his silly agents who were all coming to his trailer at lunch to talk to him about the cover of GQ and this and that. He was being nibbled to death by ducks, and not particularly smart ducks. They got in his vision, and it was hard for him to hit the fastball.”
Keira Knightley and John Carney
The musical drama Begin Again, starring Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo, was such an innocuous film that it came as a surprise when director John Carney later dubbed Knightley a “supermodel” and criticised her acting while speaking to The Independent. He claimed that “being a film actor requires a certain level of honesty and self-analysis that I don’t think she’s ready for yet”, but later apologised. Asked for her own stance on their relationship, Knightley later said that she had accepted Carney’s apology but admitted that the Begin Again shoot was “very difficult” and that the pair “didn’t get on”. She added: “It’s just a thing that happens sometimes and I say that with no blame. It takes two to tango.”
Gene Hackman and Wes Anderson
It remains unclear what exactly bothered Gene Hackman about his Royal Tenenbaums director Wes Anderson, but he made it clear on set that he did not like him. In 2011, co-star Anjelica Huston claimed that Hackman told Anderson to “pull up [his] pants and act like a man”, while Noah Baumbach recalled Hackman dubbing Anderson a “c***” during filming. As for Anderson, though, he has no regrets about casting Hackman in the film, saying: “He’s a huge force and I really enjoyed working with him. Even though he was very challenging with me, it was very exciting seeing him launch into these scenes.”