Director Ed Zwick candidly recalled his time filming legends of the fall with Brad Pitt in his next book Successes, failures and other illusionsin which he confessed that he and the actor often clashed and yelled on set.
In an excerpt published in vanity fair, Zwick said he finally felt like he “had found the right actor” to play Tristan Ludlow after meeting Pitt, who seemed to really connect with the character. But they clashed on set when Pitt refused to follow Zwick’s instructions, resulting in more than one heated argument, the director alleged.
“[Pitt] He seems calm at first, but can be volatile when angry, as I was reminded more than once when filming began and we sized each other up,” Zwick writes. He later adds that the actor’s “anxiety about the movie never quite went away” once they started filming.
The director claims in his book that their clashing personalities really came to light when he pushed Pitt to show more “deep emotions” while acting.
“Brad had grown up with men who controlled their emotions; “I thought the point of the novel was that a man’s life was the sum of his sorrows,” he writes. “However, the more I pushed Brad to reveal himself, the more he resisted.”
In the excerpt, Zwick recalls a specific altercation they had after he gave Pitt a performance grade in front of the team.
“In his defense, he was pressuring him to do something he thought was wrong for the character or more ’emo’ than he wanted to appear on screen,” Zwick writes. “I don’t know who shouted first, who cursed or who threw the first chair. Maybe me? But when we looked up, the crew had disappeared.”
The director adds that it was not the first time, nor the last, that they argued on the set. So much so that the crew “would walk away and let us out.” Zwick writes that one team member even joked, “We hate it when parents fight.”
Even so, he defends the actor, whom he praises for being “a frank, simple, fun person and capable of having a lot of fun.” The arguments “were never personal,” just the result of his “total commitment” to the film.
legends of the fallwhich also starred Anthony Hopkins and Julia Ormond, earned $160.6 million worldwide.
Zwick notes that he and Pitt’s agents negotiated a clause in their contracts that promised them “double” salary if the film did well at the box office. “It turned out to be one of the best bets any of us had ever made,” Zwick writes.
