'Legends of the Fall' Director Documents Brad Pitt's 'Volatile' Behavior
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Big time movie director Ed Zwick is spilling the tea on his behind-the-scenes experiences with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including none other than Brad Pitt.
Zwick, the director of Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Legends of the Fall, About Last Night and Glory, and creator of the show thirtysomething, tells some of his best stories from the director's chair in his new book, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions—and he isn't afraid to share what some famous actors are really like when the cameras aren't rolling.
As described in an excerpt of the book obtained by Vanity Fair, Zwick talks about his experience directing 1994's Legends of the Fall, starring Pitt, Julia Ormond, Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, and Henry Thomas.
While explaining the casting process, Zwick says he knew he "had found the right actor" when it came to Pitt, but it wasn't always smooth sailing as the project went on.
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After doing a table read of the script, which Zwick admits "didn't play very well in the sterile conference room," Pitt visibly displayed "growing discomfort," and ultimately even questioned staying on the movie at all.
"Hours afterward, his agent called the studio to say Brad wanted to quit," Zwick recalls. "It fell to [producing partner] Marshall [Herskovitz] to talk Brad off the ledge."
While Zwick says the situation was never brought up again as they continued on with the film, he remembers that moment as "the first augury of the deeper springs of emotion roiling inside Brad."
"He seems easygoing at first," Zwick explains in the excerpt. "But he can be volatile when riled, as I was to be reminded more than once as shooting began and we took each other's measure."
He later goes on to explain that Pitt's "anxiety about the movie never quite went away."
"Brad would get edgy whenever he was about to shoot a scene that required him to display deep emotion," Zwick writes. "Yet the more I pushed Brad to reveal himself, the more he resisted."
The tension on set ultimately kept rising, Zwick explains, and after Pitt continued to push back, the director says he decided to try a more stern approach with Pitt—and things eventually got more volatile, with chairs being thrown and everything.
"I started giving him direction out loud in front of the crew—a stupid, shaming provocation—and Brad came back at me, also out loud, telling me to back off," he recounts. "I was feeling bloody-minded, and not about to relent. I was angry at Brad for not trusting me to influence his performance. Also for the reluctance he’d shown after the first table read."
"I don’t know who yelled first, who swore, or who threw the first chair. Me, maybe?" Zwick writes. "But when we looked up, the crew had disappeared. And this wasn’t the last time it happened. Eventually the crew grew accustomed to our dustups and would walk away and let us have it out."
But, Zwick insists that he and Pitt would always make up after each blow up. "It was never personal," he says, stressing that Pitt is a "forthright, straightforward person, fun to be with, and capable of great joy."
He also credited Pitt's behavior on the set to the actor being "never less than fully committed to doing his best."
Parade reached out to Pitt's rep for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
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