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Hostility On The Set / Live-Action Films

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  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Prior to August 2015, the movies were made under Marvel itself rather than Disney's live-action group. At Marvel, the leadership was made up of CEO Isaac "Ike" Perlmutter and his creative committee (big writers/editors at Marvel). As the years went on, the tension between Perlmutter/Marvel and MCU chief Kevin Feige only continued to grow. Perlmutter overrode many of Feige's creative decisions. Maya Hansen was supposed to be the villain of Iron Man 3 but Perlmutter changed it because he felt like she wouldn't sell toys. Feige had wanted to make Black Panther and Carol Danvers movies for quite some time but was shot down under the same toy pretenses. Both movies didn't happen until 2018 and 2019 respectively, a decade into the franchise. Perlmutter is also believed to be the reason Edgar Wright left Ant-Man at the eleventh hour. Wright had been working on the project since before the MCU was formed and wanted to make the movie more standalone whereas the people at Marvel wanted it to be in the formula.
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    • Feige is reported to have been on Wright's side and was willing to give him more creative freedom. The tension finally came to a head on the 2015 set of Captain America: Civil War when the infamously penny pinching note  Perlmutter wanted to drop Robert Downey Jr. from the project because of his salary. Feige went to Alan Horn (head of Disney's live-action group) and threatened to quit there and then if they didn't get him out from under Perlmutter. Disney acquiesced, the creative committee was disbanded (Feige got to pick his own team), Marvel Studios was split off from Marvel Entertainment (Marvel still makes the tv shows) and put under the Disney umbrella, and Horn is now Feige's boss. Perlmutter stepped down as CEO of Marvel Entertainment in 2018 but remained chairman of the board until late 2019 when Disney kicked Perlmutter out of Marvel permanently and put Feige in his position.
  • Batman Forever:
    • The working relationship between director Joel Schumacher and actor Val Kilmer was said to be very, very bad. Tellingly, Joel does not talk much about Val in his audio commentary for the film.
    • There were also reports that Tommy Lee Jones disliked Jim Carrey, so much so that he wouldn't even have lunch with him. According to Carrey, the first time he met Jones, the veteran actor growled, "I do not sanction your buffoonery.", which is funny considering Jones would spend his entire screentime trying to out-ham the ham master Carrey.
  • Another infamous case for Val Kilmer (who many have stated as hard to work with) is The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), where both he and Marlon Brando made things difficult to the point the original director got fired, and John Frankenheimer was hired partially because he had a history of controlling inflated egos. Frankenheimer was reported to have shouted "Cut! Now get that bastard off my set!" once Kilmer had no more scenes left, and stated after release that "There are two things I will never do in my life. I will never climb Mount Everest, and I will never work with Val Kilmer again. There isn't enough money in the world." Even Brando got fed up with Kilmer, telling him, "You're confusing your talent with the size of your paycheck". There was one reported incident where the actors playing Moreau's creations, having spent hours in makeup, were kept waiting because Brando and Kilmer refused to come out of their trailers until the other did.
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  • Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte had a very heated feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. While they had been able to work together on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? despite this, on this film it was too much. Joan Crawford checked herself into the hospital, claiming she fell ill, but in reality just did not want to work with Bette Davis again. This led to her being replaced with Olivia de Havilland.
  • Invoked by Alfred Hitchcock on Rebecca. Laurence Olivier treated Joan Fontaine horribly, feeling his wife Vivien Leigh should have had her part instead. Hitchcock told Joan that everyone else hated her too, in order to create an authentic feeling of isolation for her.
  • During the filming of Black Swan, director Darren Aronofsky would try to pit Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis against each other to make their antagonistic scenes together more authentic. Unfortunately for him, both of them caught on to what he was doing very early and instead sent congrats to each other by phone when Darren told one of them the other was doing great.
  • The crew of Blade Runner had already had it up to here with Ridley Scott's demands, like showing up on the very first morning of filming and deciding that he wanted the columns in the temple-like Tyrrell Corporation set flipped upside down, which took the swing gang four hours, when an interview he did with a British newspaper trickled back to L.A. Asked about the difference between British and American crews, Scott said semi-jocularly that the American crews were not as compliant as the British crews he had worked with, whose attitude he characterized as "Yes, guv'nor". Within a day a whole run of "Yes, guv'nor ... my ass!" T-shirts had been printed and worn on the set by a few dozen crewmembers. Scott's sympathizers printed up and wore shirts of their own; the so-called T-shirt war actually helped defuse tensions on what remained a very challenging shoot.
  • During the production of Fantastic Four (2015), director Josh Trank was abusive with the cast, crew and the producers, and this was one of the major contributing factors to its Troubled Production. There were accounts that Kate Mara took the brunt of the hostility due to being a studio-mandated casting. Ironically, there were also reports of hostility between Trank and his mandated casting Miles Teller, with at least one report of the two nearly getting into a fistfight on set.
  • Actress Claudia Christian got along with nobody on the set of Maniac Cop 2, and single-handedly turned the shoot into a Troubled Production. Christian couldn't get along with lead actor Robert Davi, refused to take direction from William Lustig, and threw a tantrum when she had someone take measurements of her trailer and found it was ten feet smaller than Davi's. She also failed to inform Lustig and the producers that she was three months pregnant, even though she was taking a physically demanding role in an action slasher flick. This led to her suffering a miscarriage in the middle of the shoot, grinding production to a halt and ruining the movie's insurance. Unable to recast her, the producers reluctantly allowed her back with an agreement that they wouldn't sue her, even though her antics cost them $200,000. When she returned to the set, Davi reportedly told her, "Maybe now you won't be such a hormonally-imbalanced bitch."
  • During the filming of I Love Trouble, Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts began to dislike each other, and it got to the point that reviews of the film said that they had no chemistry on-screen. Roberts eventually stated that Nolte was the worst actor she had to work with; Nolte has been similarly dismissive of her.
  • The Lord of the Rings: There was something of a rivalry between the extras playing Elves and the extras playing Uruk-hai. The Uruks coined the nickname "cupcakes" for their Elven counterparts. This apparently started because the Elven extras (who were largely local college students) weren't getting into character as soldiers, so the Uruk-hai (largely played by members of the New Zealand armed forces) decided to start taunting, jeering, and otherwise acting like actual members of an opposing army. This got the Elven actors riled up enough to be in character.
  • Mad Max: Fury Road: Charlize Theron claimed that Tom Hardy and George Miller "went at it" over the direction of the movie. Hardy would later apologize to Miller at the film's Cannes premiere, after seeing and enjoying the end product. For that matter, Theron and Hardy didn't get on either, due to his Method Acting putting her off - which, later on, both actors stated helped pepper Max and Furiosa's untrusting, initially hostile relationship.
  • It's a miracle that Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams had great chemistry in The Notebook, as they did not get along well on set. However, unlike some other cases, they were able to patch over their differences enough to become a real-life couple for some time.
  • By all accounts, Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones were so hostile on the set of Ocean's Twelve that they eventually had to be kept completely separate, never even being on the set at the same time. It's perhaps one of the reasons the film is a Sophomore Slump, and why neither actress returned for Ocean's Thirteen.
  • Likewise, after Paulette Goddard had the script of the wartime movie So Proudly We Hail rewritten so her part would be as prominent as Claudette Colbert's, the two didn't get along on set.
  • And speaking of Colbert, while the tension between Frank Capra and Clark Gable (who wasn't the director's casting choice) on the set at the beginning of It Happened One Night eventually eased as he got to know and like him, Capra and she remained at odds throughout the production, since one of her terms of taking it was a four-week production schedule so she could take a long-planned vacation afterwards.
  • Actress Loretta Young was notoriously high-maintenance and had several examples of this with her costars, especially due to her insistence on using a Swear Jar on-set due to being devoutly Catholic. After shooting his final scene with her in Rachel and the Stranger, Robert Mitchum dropped a $20 bill into the jar, saying "This should just about cover everything I've been wanting to say to Loretta."
  • When it was announced on the Solo set that directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had been fired, applause broke out and continued for some time. Alden Ehrenreich in particular had been exasperated by their attempt to make things Lighter and Softer, since he hadn't expected that when he took the part and didn't feel he did comedy well.note 
  • Director David O. Russell got in conflict with several crew members and extras on the set of Three Kings. George Clooney tried to alleviate the situation, but when Russell violently threw an extra on the ground, Clooney scolded him for his treatment. Then, things got ugly when they ended up beating each other. Though the movie is a success, Clooney vowed that he would never work with Russell ever again. Fortunately, in 2012, they made up.
  • This is quite the common occurrence for James Bond films, official or otherwise:
    • In You Only Live Twice, the atmosphere during the production was reportedly chilly. Sean Connery had grown bored with the Bond role and frustrated with the public fascination with the franchise. The posters declaring that "Sean Connery IS James Bond" didn't help. Furthermore, Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell were appearing in the knock-off film Operation Double 007 with Neil Connery, Sean's younger brother, and the elder Connery let them know he was not happy about it. Furthermore, Connery's relationship with EON Producers Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had also deteriorated to the point where he refused to act if either of them were on the set. The hostility between the men would continue upon Connery's return in Diamonds Are Forever.
    • Reportedly, there was so much friction between Peter Sellers and Orson Welles on the set of Casino Royale (1967) that the two of them were rarely on the set together. This is especially noticeable during the baccarat duel—their characters are supposed to be interacting, but the two of them never appear in the same shot.
    • On Her Majesty's Secret Service is a rather infamous example. It was reported at the time that George Lazenby and Diana Rigg didn't get on. While they weren't exactly friends, they had their good days and bad days. The rumours started when it was reported that Rigg ate garlic before a love scene (which wasn't true - she said to Lazenby as a joke that she was having garlic for lunch). She later admitted that she found Lazenby immature. Lazenby for his part claimed that he got on with everybody - except director Peter R. Hunt. He claimed that he didn't receive any coaching despite his inexperience and that Hunt asked the rest of the crew to keep a distance from him, as "Peter thought the more I was alone, the better I would be as James Bond."
    • Lazenby overall was reported to be quite a prima donna on the set, sure that he would become just as big a star as Connery with the role. This probably contributed to his not doing any more Bond films. He later went on record as saying that it was mainly him listening to very bad advice by his agent that made him behave that way, including his decision to stop making Bond films. The fact he always said in later interviews that this was one of the worst decisions he ever made but that he also fired his agent just a couple of years later really does not come as a surprise if this, in fact, is true.
    • For Never Say Never Again, Kim Basinger did not get along with director Irvin Kershner at all, and told Movieline magazine this was the worst experience she had on a film until The Marrying Man.
    • Regarding A View to a Kill, Roger Moore made it no secret that he didn't get on with Grace Jones:
    "If you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything. So I will say nothing about Grace Jones."
    • He and the crew also did not get along with leading lady Tanya Roberts due to her diva-like behavior. For example, when she and Bond have to steal a set of miner's overalls in order to infiltrate the Big Bad's operation, Roberts refused to film the scene until she had a pair of custom-made overalls that flattered her figure. When Bond sees her and says "Lucky you could find a pair that fits," that was an ad-lib from Moore, lampshading the unlikelihood of there being many petite-framed women working in a mine. The dirty look she gave him was real, and the producers kept the scene as a Take That! to her entitled attitude.
    • Flared up briefly in Tomorrow Never Dies. Pierce Brosnan and Teri Hatcher feuded briefly during filming due to her arriving late onto the set one day. The matter was quickly resolved though and Brosnan apologised to Hatcher after realizing she was pregnant and was late for that reason.
  • During the filming of the Charlie's Angels (2000) movie, there was apparently so much hostility between co-stars Bill Murray and Lucy Liu that it actually became violent. After Murray repeatedly called her acting skills into question she attacked him, forcing the crew to intervene and separate the pair. Director McG also claimed that Murray headbutted him, which Murray denies.
  • The feud between director Kevin Smith and star Bruce Willis on the set of Cop Out has been remarked on numerous times by Smith. They had previously worked together on Live Free or Die Hard (where Smith was a guest star) when Willis called him on July 4th and offered to do another movie. However, after filming started, Smith was dismayed when he realized that Willis was only there for the money, was prone to Wag the Director, and very temperamental, going so far as to call Bruce "emo" and vowing never to work with him again. Smith himself was publicly criticized by Willis for "smoking too much pot" on set.
  • Bette Davis and Errol Flynn disliked each other while making The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. For one scene where Elizabeth slaps Essex, Davis really slapped Flynn and his reaction was genuine. She was against his casting from the beginning, claiming that he couldn't read blank verse very well. According to Olivia de Havilland, she and Davis screened the film again a short while before Davis suffered four strokes in 1983. At film's end, Davis turned to de Havilland and declared that she had been wrong about Flynn and that he had given a fine performance as Essex.
  • Bette Davis also didn't get along with Celeste Holm when they were making All About Eve. Years later she said Celeste was "the only bitch in the cast."
  • W.C. Fields and Mae West starred in the Screwball Comedy My Little Chickadee, even though they greatly disliked each other (Fields once called her, "A plumber's idea of Cleopatra"). Co-star Dick Foran, who was being paid by the week, would go to West and tell her that Fields was rewriting his lines to give himself more screen time and to try to steal the film from her. Then he would go to Fields and tell him the same thing about West. In this manner, he was able to extend his employment from a few weeks to several months, as both stars would hold up production while they would rewrite their scenes.
  • John Wayne and John Huston collaborated just once in 1958's The Barbarian and the Geisha. They didn't see eye-to-eye on the production, and Wayne at one point yelled for all to hear, "Huston can't direct a damn story without his father or Bogart in it!" But the director was not around to hear that. Legend has it that they got into a brawl.
  • John Wayne and William Holden didn't get on while making The Horse Soldiers due to their differing political beliefs. Following the wrap, each actor vowed to never again work with the other and they didn't.
  • Rex Harrison didn't get on with Charlton Heston while making The Agony and the Ecstasy. Fittingly, they played antagonists in the film. Years later, they were both in Richard Lester's The Prince and the Pauper and Harrison deliberately avoided Heston.
  • John Huston and Errol Flynn were constantly at odds while filming The Roots of Heaven, partly due to the latter's alcoholism. At one point, Flynn provoked Huston into a fight; while Flynn was a former amateur boxer, the years of fast living had taken a heavy toll on him, and Huston, himself a former professional boxer, flattened Flynn with a single punch.
  • While making the film version of Gorky Park, Lee Marvin was so disgusted with William Hurt's drunkenness at one point that he punched him out in front of the entire crew.
  • Anthony Hopkins and Shirley MacLaine didn't get on while making A Change of Seasons. He described her as, "The most obnoxious actress I've ever worked with".
  • In turn, MacLaine and Debra Wingernote  grew deeply antipathetic to each other very quickly on the set of Terms of Endearment. At one point Winger reportedly pulled down her pants and farted in MacLaine's face.
  • Charlie Chaplin's last film A Countess from Hong Kong was, by all accounts an unhappy film to make.
    • Marlon Brando had always greatly admired Chaplin's work and looked upon him as "probably the most talented man the [movie] medium has ever produced," in his autobiography, Brando described Chaplin as "probably the most sadistic man I'd ever met, a fearsomely cruel man...He was an egotistical tyrant and a penny pincher." According to Brando, Chaplin frequently berated his son Sydney Chaplin and when Brando arrived onset fifteen minutes late, Chaplin gave him a dressing down in front of the cast and crew. An embarrassed Brando demanded — and received — an apology. Chaplin, for his part, described directing Brando as "impossible".
    • Brando and Sophia Loren didn't get on, especially after the day they were doing a love scene and he commented, "Did you know you have black hairs up your nostrils?"
  • Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner feuded throughout Switching Channels, which led their costar Christopher Reeve to describe it as an unhappy film to make, as he had to mediate between them.
  • Reeve himself had to deal with Sarah Douglas (Ursa) and Jack O'Halloran (Non) in Superman II, to the point where O'Halloran once pushed him against a wall and prepared to beat him. Douglas would later describe Reeve at the time as "difficult" and "caught up in his own image".
  • In a video on her YouTube channel, Ashley Tisdale featured Lucas Grabeel and they discussed how they "hated" each other during filming of the first High School Musical. In a Heartwarming Moment they then went on to discuss how they love each other now and to cover the first song they sang together in the film.
  • While making the B-movie Venom, Oliver Reed and Klaus Kinski absolutely hated each other. The jovial, fun-loving Reed would often provoke the intense, humorless Kinski into losing his temper (which wasn't a difficult task). The pair came to blows at least once.
    • Virtually every collaboration with Kinski and director Werner Herzog results in this. Their penultimate collaboration, Fitzcarraldo, got so tumultuous that an extra offered to kill Kinski ... and Herzog seriously considered it.note 
  • Richard Harris and Julie Andrews co-starred in 1966's Hawaii. She disapproved of his rambunctious behavior and he greatly disliked her in return.
  • Paul Schrader's Blue Collar had a very tense shoot.
    • The three lead actors, Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel argued constantly. There were fights, verbal abuse, walk-offs, and Mexican stand-offs. According to Schrader, Pryor punched Keitel and hit Kotto with a chair during filming.
    • Kotto for his part claimed that the only problem he had with Pryor was that Pryor would improvise frequently causing Kotto to lose his place.
    • Schrader suffered a nervous breakdown that caused him to quit the film industry for a while. This was the result of an incident where Pryor pulled a gun on him and said there was no way in hell he was doing more than three takes of a scene.
    • Actor George Memmoli filed a $1-million lawsuit against Pryor, claiming that Pryor hit him with a chair during filming and fractured his skull.
  • Al Pacino and Gene Hackman didn't get on while making Scarecrow due to their different personalities. According to director Jerry Schatzberg, Hackman was hard to work with and argued with everyone on the set including his brother, Richard Hackman, who was working as his stand-in. To get back at Gene, Schatzberg gave Richard a part in the film. But Gene ended up being delighted that his brother was in the film.
  • It was reported that Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon didn't get on while making Four Christmases. They clashed over differing working methods - she wanted to practice and prepare before a scene, while he preferred to jump right in and ad-lib. Tellingly, they didn't walk the red carpet together.
  • James Franco and Tyrese Gibson didn't get on while making Annapolis, due to Franco's Method Acting. In a 2007 interview with Playboy, Gibson said that he never wanted to work with Franco ever again, and claims that he feels the same way. Franco responded in an interview with Complex that he and Gibson had made up, or in his case, tried to make up with him after production wrapped, saying that he had nothing personal against Gibson, but guessed that there were a lot of misunderstandings.
  • Rosanna Arquette disliked Jean-Claude Van Damme immensely while making Nowhere to Run, and stated in many interviews that she only took the role because good parts were few and far between.
  • Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer didn't get along on the set of Magic Mike which is why the latter doesn't appear in the sequel.
  • In 2017, Ellen Page revealed that she had to put up with homophobic bullying from director Brett Ratner while filming X-Men: The Last Stand. Anna Paquin later backed up her claims.
  • By the time Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made their last film Hollywood or Bust, their relationship had deteriorated to the point where they weren't speaking to each other. Lewis couldn't even bring himself to watch the film because it brought back painful memories of their breakup.
  • Caligula: While Malcolm McDowell got along well with director Tinto Brass, Peter O'Toole immediately disliked him, while John Gielgud and Helen Mirren were indifferent; they focused on their own performances. O'Toole did not endear himself to producer Bob Guccione when he told the producer that he planned to launch his own magazine to rival Penthouse. It was to be called Basement and would include such features as 'Rodent of the Month' and 'Toe Rag of the Year'.
  • Bryan Singer was fired from the production of the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody due to being absent on multiple occasions and getting into conflicts with the cast and crew.note 
  • Production on The Fate of the Furious was dogged by rumors that Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel did not get along on set, after Johnson sent out a tweet saying that one of his co-stars (who went unnamed, but was figured by everybody to be Diesel) was unprofessional and a "candy ass". Johnson later confirmed that he and Diesel did not shoot any scenes together, and that trick editing was employed to create the illusion of the two of them in the same room.
  • Edward Norton was in a bad mood when Paramount made him do The Italian Job (2003) for less than his usual salary at the time due to a longstanding contractual obligation from earlier in his career. He quickly formed a low opinion of director F. Gary Gray and clashed with him to an even greater extent than normal for him throughout the shooting. After the film was done he refused to do any media for it; when the producer sent gifts to the cast and crew to congratulate them on the film's better-than-expected box office, Norton returned his with the note "Send this to someone you actually like, or someone who actually likes you."
  • In a case of sad irony, Daniel Franzese, who played Derek Dvirko in the 2001 film Bully which was based off of the real-life murder of Bobby Kent who was killed due to his alleged bullying, revealed in 2018 that co-star Bijou Phillips, who played Ali Willis in the film, subjected him to a lot of homophobic and fat-shaming bullying while they were on the set. He claimed she kept trying to goad him into admitting that he was gaynote  and that she laughed at his appearance when he removed his shirt at a pool party and had even twisted one of his nipples. Even more troubling, he said the producers just looked the other way on the behavior (potentially due to the fact that she came from a famous family; her father was "Papa" John Phillips from The Mamas & the Papas and her older half-sisters were actress Mackenzie of One Day at a Time fame and singer Chynna of Wilson Phillips fame and he was just an up-and-coming actor) but said that his fellow co-stars Brad Renfro, Michael Pitt and Nick Stahl (who portrayed Kent himself) openly and repeatedly defended him and the latter, who was dating Phillips at the time, even tried to convince her to apologize to him.
  • The Usual Suspects:
    • After Kevin Spacey's career was torpedoed in 2017, Gabriel Byrne stated that he very much acted like a sexual predator on set, making the other actors so uncomfortable that filming was completely halted for a while. Kevin Pollak claims that Spacey ended up raping the much younger boyfriend (possibly 17 years old) of Bryan Singer. After that, Singer refused to direct Spacey any further (leaving an AD to take over) and the two did not speak again for 10 years.
  • In yet another Val Kilmer example, he and Tom Sizemore began feuding during production of Red Planet. According to reports, it all began when Kilmer got annoyed about a fancy exercise machine that Sizemore wanted to be shipped from England to the set in Australia. Eventually, the two hated each other so much, Kilmer would not come out of his trailer if Sizemore was on the set. Many of their scenes together were filmed over the shoulders of photo doubles. Kilmer reportedly refused to say Sizemore's character's name, saying instead "Hey, you!" At one point, they got into a confrontation that escalated into them throwing weights at each other until Sizemore knocked out Kilmer with a punch to the chest.note  The two have never worked together again.
  • The tension within Pink Floyd during the recording of The Wall followed Roger Waters to the film adaptation, with Alan Parker filling in for David Gilmour as Waters' sparring partner (On the DVD commentary, Gerald Scarfe mentions Waters' relationship with Parker, and Waters immediately responds "What relationship?")
  • At one point during reshoots on World War Z, relations between Brad Pitt and director Marc Forster, whom Pitt himself had chosen for that job, had deteriorated to the point that they kept their distance to a maximum extent possible when not shooting scenes and communicated only through an intermediary.
  • By all accounts, Julia Roberts made life on the set of Hook a nightmare. Already going through a messy breakup with her then-fiancé Kiefer Sutherland which led to her suffering from depression and caused her to go and hide out in Ireland in the middle of production; she only came back because Steven Spielberg threatened to fire her if she didn't. Upon returning, she proceeded to complain about everything from the script to her outfit (which at one point was to more closely resemble Tinkerbell's appearance, complete with a blonde wig, only for it to be changed after she became furious with it.) Also, her final scene where she was full-size came about from a Wag the Director moment where she demanded to appear onscreen with at least one other actor due to her frustration at having filmed all of her previous scenes in greenscreen. The end result led to her career being stunted for a while, the crew to nickname her "Tinkerhell" and for Spielberg to vow never to work with her again. She later apologized for her behavior.
  • Richard Gere clashed so much with Sylvester Stallone on the set of The Lords Of Flatbush that he was fired and replaced with all his scenes reshot by Perry King. He had to wait a year to make his feature-film debut in Report To The Commissioner.
  • During the preproduction for Miami Vice, Jamie Foxx won an Oscar, which he leveraged into a higher salary than his costar Colin Farrell, so high in fact that Farrell had to take a slight pay cut. Needless to say this was not conducive to them working together, much less getting along off camera.
    • Some very real hostility, in the form of gunfire on the set when shooting somewhere in the Carribbean, led Foxx to walk off the set, go back to the U.S. and tell the studio he would no longer be going anywhere abroad to shoot the film. Michael Mann had to rewrite the ending and make it less dramatic than he had originally planned as a result.
  • Tensions between Henry Fonda and John Ford on the set of Mister Roberts over the way Ford had softened the film to get the Navy's assistance, changes Fonda felt weakened not only the work but the title character he had played on Broadway for six years, led to the director punching his star out. Despite his swift apology, the once-productive relationship between the two was irreparably damaged; they rarely talked for the rest of the production and never worked together again.
  • Jimmy Stewart and Paulette Goddard co-starred in the 1941 comedy Pot O' Gold, and the studio publicists had a field day trying to generate the impression that there were sparks flying between the two. The truth was the polar opposite. Goddard thought Stewart too boyish, even though he had a reputation around Hollywood as a real ladies' man. She also dismissed his acting, saying "anyone can swallow." Stewart didn't think much of Goddard's talent either and said she had to fall back on a wisecracking tone to get by.
  • Before production began the next year on I Married a Witch, Fredric March publicly dismissed his costar, Veronica Lake, as a brainless sexpot who couldn't act; she responded by calling him, equally publicly, a "pompous teapot". On set she frequently played mean pranks on him, like hiding 40-pound weights in her dress prior to scenes where he had to pick her up and grinding her foot in his crotch during scenes where they embraced and were shot from the waist up.
  • The animosity between Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker from Sex and the City continued on the sets of the movie and its sequel. When they spilled over into the public eye following a tweet by Cattrall in 2018, it was widely seen as having permanently scotched Sex and The City 3.
  • During production on Terminator Salvation, Christian Bale infamously went off on a furious and profane rant directed against director of photography Shane Hurlbut, telling him to get off the set because he was blocking the shot and calling him unprofessional. The audio of the incident went viral and memetic to the point where it was remixed into a Stupid Statement Dance Mix, forcing Bale to issue an apology.
  • The cast and crew got along pretty well during the making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. However, behind the scenes, producer Gene Roddenberry was clashing with his coscreenwriter, Harold Livingston. Livingston had been hired to finish the script Roddenberry had started as the pilot for the never-produced Star Trek II TV series; knowing Roddenberry's penchant for rewriting others' work he had it in his contract that Roddenberry could do no more work on the script than he already had. That didn't stop Roddenberry from doing it anyway, and Livingston was absolutely furious at Roddenberry for the notes he kept getting on things he knew he hadn't written. It got so bad that Leonard Nimoy had to mediate between them, sometimes with William Shatner's help, after each day's filming was done; the film's production was well underway before the basic outlines of the third act were agreed on. Shatner, in his memoirs, titled the chapter about this movie "Star Trek: The Emotional Picture"
  • Kelly McGillis clashed repeatedly with both Abel Ferrara and Peter Weller while making Cat Chaser. The experience of the film's production was such a miserable one for McGillis that she stopped acting for three years.
  • Dogma: According to Kevin Smith, there were days where Linda Fiorentino wouldn't even speak to him while shooting, which is understandably frustrating, and that he hugely regrets having fought to get her in the movie.
  • Tommy Lee Jones' inability to get along with Fiorentino is also, supposedly, the reason that despite her character joining the Men in Black at the end of that film, she's not in the sequel, her absence explained away with one line at the beginning.
  • The Sound of Music started off with this. Christopher Plummer disliked the film itself and didn't like Julie Andrews at first - calling her "Miss Disney". But they became good friends over time.
  • The plentiful alcohol consumed on the set of The VI Ps by almost everyone—led by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor—led to regular harangues by Burton against director Anthony Asquith, about the one person on the film who stayed sober (because he was in recovery).
  • Scream:
  • Burt Reynolds claimed that while making the western 100 Rifles, he spent a lot of time mediating fights between Jim Brown and Raquel Welch. Then Reynolds and Welch fell out. Three years later, they both starred in Fuzz. However, Welch only agreed to do the picture after it was agreed that she would not have to appear in any scenes with Reynolds. They would remain enemies until 1982 when the producers of Cannery Row fired Welch claiming she was unprofessional and replaced her with Debra Winger. Reynolds testified on her behalf, stating "Although Raquel and I don't like each other, she was always on time, well-prepared and thoroughly professional." She ended up winning $10.8 million.
  • Before filming the lay-by scene in Hot FuzzSimon Pegg and Nick Frost reportedly had an argument. Pegg claimed Frost was getting cocky and making the Assistant Directors get him coffee, whereas Pegg wanted him to get his own. As a result, they took four hours to do that scene, and they didn't talk to each other at all, except when acting.
  • Robert Mitchum and Rock Hudson reportedly did not get along with each other while filming The Ambassador. A life-long alcoholic, Mitchum was said to have been frequently drunk on and off camera, and often verbally clashed with Hudson who was in poor health which held up production for days.
  • Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes did not get along during the production of William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Danes felt that DiCaprio was a nuisance and "very immature" because he pulled pranks on crew members and generally had a "goofball attitude." DiCaprio felt that Danes was stuck-up and too serious. Tellingly, they rarely spent time together off-set.
  • Wesley Snipes really didn't like the script for Blade: Trinity or writer David S. Goyer being the director, and proceeded to refuse to interact with Goyer or any of his co-stars personally (using either assistants or notes which he signed as "Blade"), refusing to film several scenes, getting high on marijuana, and accusing Goyer of racism. He annoyed Parker Posey so much that she slipped in a Take That! which ended up on the Gag Reel, Ryan Reynolds' line "He doesn't like me, does he?" was actually a Throw It In! in regards to Snipes. Patton Oswalt dished quite a bit of dirt in an interview with The AV Club. There's also a magazine article still rolling around the net that outlines just how much trouble Wesley Snipes cause the production, which basically states that the movie got made only because everyone but Snipes dedicated themselves to making it work.
  • Despite making four movies together, Silver Streak, Stir Crazy, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Another You, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor hated one another. Wilder thought Pryor was too lackadaisical, while Pryor thought Wilder was too uptight.
  • Tommy Wiseau made life on the set of his directorial debut The Room a nightmare. While he was generally a Prima Donna Director who refused to compromise, was often stingy and showed his lack of professionalism on the first day by arriving late and yelling at the crew for being lazy, specific incidents peppered the already uneasy atmosphere. Arguments with his first two directors of photography ultimately lead to them quitting, with the first one, Raphael Smadja, leaving after he refused to hire a proper Line Producer instead of forcing Wiseau's costar and best friend, Greg Sestero, to do all of the work and his second one, Graham Futerfas, quitting in anger over escalating frustrations with the director's attitude with the final straw being him lying about calling for a much-needed generator. He also ostracized costar Kyle Vogt after he needed to leave production for a prior commitment (and which Tommy knew about and was reminded of several times), refused to allow him to seek medical attention after he hit his head on the set and also didn't invite him to the premiere due to his "betrayal".

    Even the costars who spoke in defense of the man in later interviews, such as the aforementioned Sestero and Juliette Danielle, who played his onscreen love interest, were treated poorly. The former was harassed and goaded into taking apart of some of the more ridiculous parts of the script, including shaving his beard (with him watching and dictating how to do it) and lunging at him for using French, which--along with any language but English--was apparently forbidden on the set. The latter was condescended to on a regular basis and even humiliated by him pointing out some acne she had loud enough for all to hear, which reduced her to tears. While the film ended up a Cult Classic that spawned a book about the experience an award-winning a film based off of the book about the film, its production remains among one of the most infamous.
  • On the production of East of Eden, Raymond Massey was rude and condescending to everyone - especially to his co-star James Dean. Elia Kazan took advantage of this, as the tension was good for their characters. Ironically Raymond Massey would later call Adam Trask his favorite role.
    • Timothy Carey who played the bouncer at Kate's saloon drove Kazan so nuts, he actually punched him. The only time he'd ever done such a thing.
  • Dustin Hoffman managed to resolve the tension between him and director Sydney Pollack on the set of Tootsie by suggesting that Pollack play his agent; the exasperation Pollack shows with Hoffman in the part is genuine and improves the film.
  • Ralph Brown revealed that during Alien³, Sigourney Weaver was aloof at best and outright rude at worst to most of the crew—especially to him, Charles Dance, and the late Brian Glover, though they made up after the premiere and Brown believed it to be the result of the film's Troubled Production.
  • Caddyshack had to deal with this as part of its Troubled Production:
    • Cindy Morgan was constantly thrown off by Chevy Chase's continuous improvising during their scenes and the two came to blows.
    • Ted Knight did not get along with Chase and Rodney Dangerfield due to their style of comedy and constant improvisation and was dismissive of the teens playing the caddies due to their on-set shenanigans.
    • However, it was miraculously subverted with Chase and Bill Murray. The studio executives demanded that a scene between the two be added, but the crew was terrified of shooting it because the two infamously almost got into a brawl backstage on Saturday Night Live. Amazingly, the two were completely professional about it and showed no sign of their previous feud, so filming the scene went smoothly.
  • Raven-Symoné admitted that the reason why she didn't appear in the third movie of The Cheetah Girls was because there was drama between her and the other three girls. She didn't get along with them and they had catfights.
  • The independent action film Assassin's Fury experienced this thanks to Willa Ford. She was cast as the villain, and in short, she acted like one on set, with co-writer and executive producer Fabio Soldani saying that she was "a nightmare to be around and it made the shoot a really sad place." After only five days, Soldani fired Ford and replaced her with Cynthia Murell, and things progressed far more smoothly.
  • While filming The Last of Sheila, Raquel Welch not only clashed with director Herbert Ross but alienated most of her castmates, leading James Mason to call her "the rudest, most unprofessional actress I've ever had the displeasure of working with," which led to his infamous statement of "If I could, I would spank her from here to Aswan."
  • James Woods and James Belushi frequently clashed during the filming of Salvador. Their competitive rivalry was secretly encouraged by Oliver Stone.
  • Reports say that Dennis Miller, who had only agreed to do the film once he got paid a million dollars, did not get along with anyone on the set of Bordello of Blood, even as far as being accused of stealing a set van to leave. He not only alienated castmates by improvising all his dialogue and then getting permission to skip out of shooting for the rest of the day, leaving them to try to work out how to react and act around lines he probably never said, he alienated the crew because all this forced them to work weekends. Apparently heat between him and Corey Feldman got so bad that the producers had to enforce a distance between the two on set in between takes.
  • Richard Dreyfuss's antagonism towards Bill Murray later in What About Bob? is genuine; the two did not get along while making the movie,note  and Murray also had issues with producer Laura Ziskin.
  • According to Jason Johnson, the production of Cool Cat Saves the Kids was plagued by Derek Savage being an unprofessional creep who made constant unwanted advances on Momma Cat's actress, April Ann Reese, culminating in him furiously screaming at Johnson and Reese in a jealous rage because she let Johnson use her shower. Both actors refuse to ever work with Savage again.


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