T he 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. 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 Yo.