Matthew Broderick says John Hughes called his early Ferris Bueller footage 'boring'
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It wasn't all fun, games, and dancing on parade floats for Matthew Broderick on the set of Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
The actor recalled several instances in which he and late director John Hughes found themselves "head-butting" while filming the 1986 classic during a recent visit on The Hollywood Reporter's "It Happened in Hollywood" podcast. "He was not easygoing in some ways," Broderick said about the famed filmmaker. "He was nervous [the film] wouldn't come out right."
Broderick remembered an early costume test for the film that required him and costars Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, and Jennifer Grey to walk around the streets of Chicago, which ended up becoming quite the debacle. "That was a big drama," he said. "When the footage came back, [Hughes] said none of us were 'fun to watch.' We were 'boring' in our tests."
He amended, "Actually, some of us he did like, but some he did not, and I was one he did not."
©Paramount/courtesy Everett Collection Matthew Broderick in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off'
The negative feedback took Broderick by surprise, who noted that he "wasn't a total newcomer" after starring in 1983's War Games. "To have him say, 'I'm not used to having somebody be so dead,' or whatever he said to me," he trailed off. "I don't think he said 'dead' but, you know, I wasn't really 'in it' or something."
In fairness, Broderick maintained that Hughes wasn't the only director who had criticized his acting by that point. "I do drive people crazy sometimes because I don't appear to be doing anything," he noted. "But, hopefully, eventually, I do. [Hughes] was not the first director to grab me at some point and say, 'What is wrong with you?'"
Still, that doesn't mean Broderick was happy to receive the critique, adding, "So that happened and I said, 'So get somebody you like. If that's what you want, I'm fine.'"
He went on to describe Hughes as "somebody who could get angry at you." He continued, "Not outwardly angry, but you could tell. He would turn dead. Dead-faced. I would say, 'What did you think of that?' And he'd say, 'I don't know.' Just nothing. 'Okay. John doesn't like that.'"
Broderick then recalled another incident in which Hughes tried to give him a note about his facial expressions that quickly spiraled into another on-set disagreement between the pair. "He said, 'I like when your eyes go wide, and then smaller, and then go wide again,'" Broderick explained. "I said, 'If you tell me exactly what my face is doing, I get very self-conscious. Now I'm thinking of my face.'"
In response, Broderick said that Hughes simply stopped giving him any direction entirely. "He was like, 'Well, then, I won't direct you at all,'" he said. "And, for a few days, he didn't give me anything until I finally had to say, 'John, you have to direct me, come on.' That was our worst one."
Thankfully, Broderick noted that the pair's standoffs rarely lasted long, describing the screen test dilemma as "just a little short blip" that "ended that night with a big dinner for everybody and lots of laughing and fun."
"I think he's somebody who took the work very seriously, is what I mean," he continued. "He was not a loosey-goosey person around work. But he also didn't hold a grudge and knew how to get himself out of it and get us out of it. And we always end up having fun and always ended up never letting these fights last longer than a day or half a day."
In hindsight, Broderick teased, "Maybe I was annoying him the way Ferris annoys his own parents? That may be true. John Hughes is like Frankenstein and Ferris Bueller was the monster."
Listen to the full It Happened in Hollywood episode above.
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