Harrison Ford accepts blame for Brad Pitt tension on Devil's Own set: 'I was imposing my point of view'

Harrison Ford is finally dishing on the drama that went down between him and Brad Pitt while they were shooting the 1997 film The Devil's Own. 

The Indiana Jones star admitted to Esquire that he was partially at fault for the long-rumored tension that swirled between him and Pitt on the set of the cop drama.

"First of all, I admire Brad. I think he's a wonderful actor. He's a really decent guy. But we couldn't agree on a director until we came to Alan Pakula, who I had worked with before but Brad had not," Ford explained, referencing his work on Pakula's 1990 film Presumed Innocent.

everett Brad Pitt & Harrison Ford

In addition to not seeing eye-to-eye on a director, Ford said that his desire for his character to have a more complex storyline like Pitt's also drew pushback. In the film, Ford stars as NYPD Sergeant Tom O'Meara, whose family takes in an Irish construction worker named Rory Devaney (Pitt) only to discover that Devaney is an undercover IRA terrorist attempting to purchase a cargo of missiles.

"Brad had this complicated character, and I wanted a complication on my side so that it wasn't just a good-and-evil battle," he said. "And that's when I came up with the bad-shooting thing."

As a result, a subplot for Ford's character in which he's conflicted over what to do after witnessing his partner, Eddie Diaz (Rubén Blades), fatally shoot a thief was worked into the film. However, the process of weaving it all together — while the film was still shooting— proved to be a serious challenge.

"I worked with a writer — but then all the sudden we're shooting and we didn't have a script that Brad and I agreed on," Ford said. "Each of us had different ideas about it."

Now, in hindsight, Ford knows his requests were largely responsible for the pair's standoff. "I understand why he wanted to stay with his point of view, and I wanted to stay with my point of view — or I was imposing my point of view, and it's fair to say that that's what Brad felt," he said. "It was complicated. I like the movie very much. Very much."

In 1996, EW's Chris Nashawaty detailed the breakdown that Pitt and Ford's feud had on the film, noting that its budget ballooned from $70 million to almost $100 million. It also caused Pitt to push back filming his upcoming project, 1997's Seven Years in Tibet, for an additional two months after Devil's Own did not wrap at its June deadline.

At the time, a Columbia-based producer told EW that Pitt and Ford "seem to have had different versions" of the film in their minds. However, Ford's agent denied "all these ugly rumors" surrounding The Devil's Own in a statement and claimed that there was no fight for its leading role between the actors.

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