Hostility On The Set / Live-Action Films

• Rex Harrison didn't get along 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. The troubled production of Doctor Dolittle also did not do any favors to Harrison's prima donna behaviour, and the film failed at the box office, was one of the films that killed the family musical, and ensured that his career would never recover.
• 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.
• Bette Davis got on well with all her castmates on All About Eve, except Celeste Holm. As she put it:
  Celeste Holm: I walked onto the set on the first day and said, 'Good morning,' and do you know her reply? She said, 'Oh shit, good manners.' I never spoke to her again - ever.
  • Davis intimidated Marilyn Monroe so badly that Monroe went into the bathroom to Stress Vomit after her scenes with Davis. After one particular scene, Davis whispered to her other co-stars— within poor Marilyn's hearing— "That little blonde slut can't act her way out of a paper bag! She thinks if she wiggles her ass and coos away, she can carry her scene— well, she can't!"
• 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.
• James Franco and Tyrese Gibson didn't get along 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 Franco 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.
• The independent action film Assassins 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.
• Tommy Lee Jones and Sally Field disliked each other immensely while making Back Roads in 1981. Field later admitted on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that they reconciled years later and apologised for being so difficult. They later appeared in Lincoln.
• Back to the Future had at least two cases of this:
  • During the first few weeks of shooting Eric Stoltz was cast as Marty McFly, and took the role so seriously to the point where he insisted on being called "Marty" at all times, refusing to break character. As a result, during the filming of the scene where Marty confronts Biff Tannen in the cafeteria, Stoltz left Thomas F. Wilson with actual bruises. As such, Wilson resented Stoltz for this, and planned to return the favor in the scene where Biff pulls Marty out of the car, but he would never get the chance, as Stoltz had been replaced by Michael J. Fox before said scene was filmed.
  • By the accounts of director Robert Zemeckis and several producers, Crispin Glover's eccentric behaviour made him difficult to work with. He clashed with the crew on-set over various things, with one of them being a refusal to perform a scene within the camera frame, leading to Zemeckis asking the grips to build a wall to prevent Glover from doing this again. He also had a tendency to defy the script, at one point getting chewed out by producer Neil Canton for not getting in costume during filming. By some accounts, one reason that Glover was recast for the sequels is because he wanted a paycheck as big as Fox's, plus script approval and director approval, something that writer-producer Bob Gale naturally refused to go along with.
• 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.
• Batman Forever: Multiple:
  • 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 cannot sanction your buffoonery.", which is funny considering Jones would spend his entire screentime trying to out-ham the ham master Carrey.
• Black Sheep (1996) director Penelope Spheeris told David Spade to his face she wasn't a fan of his comedy and forced the film's writers to change scenes featuring his character and remove others. Spade in turn felt Spheeris received too much credit by the studio for the success of Wayne's World and went so far as to leave a message on her answering machine yelling that “[She] spent this whole movie trying to cut my comedy balls off.”
• 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 were already friends, 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. 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 Fun T Shirts that had "Yes, guv'nor ... my ass!" on the front and either "Will Rogers never met Ridley Scott" or "You soar with eagles when you fly with turkeys" on the back had been printed and worn on the set by a few dozen crewmembers. Scott's sympathizers printed up and wore shirts of their own written "Xenophobia sucks". (Scott later said it was meant as a joke, and to defuse the situation; he thought that people would be confused by the word "xenophobia" and had to ask what it meant.) Scott wore one with a hat reading "Guv'nor" for extra mockery; the so-called T-shirt war actually helped defuse tensions on what remained a very challenging shoot.
  • Among the actors, Sean Young's inexperience made Harrison Ford comfort her after she started crying following a difficult take, but otherwise he did not like how the actress kept on breaking character and ruining takes. (In one documentary, as soon as Scott yells "cut" on their love scenes, Ford gives Young a strong disapproving look.) Looks like Ford has made up with her over the years, though.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• During the filming of Blue Steel, lead actress Jamie Lee Curtis was often at odds with director Kathryn Bigelow.
• 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. He even managed to get Rami Malek angry with him, which everyone says was a real accomplishment as Malek is known for being good-natured and agreeable to work with.
• 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.
• In a case of sad irony, Daniel Franzese, who played Derek Dvirko in the 2001 film Bully which was based on 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 gay^note which he later came out as over a decade later, but he just reluctantly said he was bisexual at the time to get her off his case 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 (1975) 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.
• 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.
• 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, saying that it was to be called Basement and would include such features as "Rodent of the Month" and "Toe Rag of the Year".
• 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.
• Carry On... Series:
  • Carry On Screaming!:
    • When filming the opening scene where Albert tries to court an increasingly frightened Doris, Angela Douglas would scream louder and louder in Jim Dale's ear with each take. While Douglas wasn't doing this on purpose, Dale got quite frustrated during the scene.
    • Another example involving Dale - during a late shoot at 2 in the morning it was pouring with rain, and he joked to Norman Mitchell that they should all go on strike for more money. News of this made it back to Peter Rogers who thought it was an attempt to challenge his authority and demanded an apology from him, which Dale had to do over the phone.
  • Carry On Camping:
    • Trisha Noble proved unpopular onset due to her diva-like behaviour and constant lateness, which saw most of her scenes cut from the film, at the expense of Julian Holloway's screentime. In 1991, Barbara Windsor recalled that she "didn't join in with us and she wasn't fun".
    • Kenneth Williams didn't want to let Elizabeth Knight eat with the rest of the cast on one occasion, looking down on her for not being one of the Carry On regulars. Joan Sims was outraged at this, called him a "demonic little sod", and chose to leave him and sit with Knight instead.
    • Windsor went through a period of hostility with Peter Rogers due to his decision to shoot the film in such dreadful weather; At one point while trudging through the mud in the freezing cold, Windsor complained to Williams, calling Rogers all sorts of dreadful names, without realising he was still wearing his throat mic, which meant everything she said was being recorded. The next day, Rogers looked at the rushes and heard her slagging him off. He showed it to the cast the next day, causing Windsor to worry she would be sacked for what she had said. When Windsor found out that Rogers was only trying to wind her up, she was even more angry at him and said even worse things.
  • Carry On at Your Convenience:
    • Patsy Rowlands recalled on the DVD Commentary for Carry On Behind that Kenneth Williams didn't like Renée Houston.
    • Williams also clashed with Hugh Futcher during the filming in Brighton, as he believed that others on the set found him funnier. Once, after Futcher told a funny story, Williams walked up to him, pinched his cheek, and told him "You will remember I'm the funny one, dear, won't you?".
  • Carry On Abroad: Kenneth Williams refused to speak to David Kernan throughout the shoot. Kernan recalled in 2003:
    He ignored me completely during the entire six weeks of filming. Even afterwards when I got chummy with Hattie, who would invite me every year for Christmas Day and Kenneth was always there and he still never spoke to me. He totally ignored me and then to my complete surprise, he wrote some very sweet things about me in his diaries.
  • Carry On Dick: Penny Irving did not get along with Gerald Thomas, after she had given him trouble over the skimpy outfits she and the other Birds of Paradise had to wear.
  • Carry On Behind:
    • Kenneth Williams couldn't stand Elke Sommer due to her bad breath and lack of experience filming comedies (going as far as to refuse to look at her at times), was furious with George Layton after he accidentally sliced his toe, and didn't want to have Jenny Cox sit on his knee during the strip tease scene.
    • Liz Fraser had a small falling-out with Patricia Franklin. During filming, they had appeared in different episodes of the same series, and Franklin's episode was getting more publicity than Fraser's, which made Fraser rather cross.
    • Joan Sims was rather fed up by the end of filming due to the constant schedule hold-ups and poor weather on set and refused to attend the wrap party. After Jenny Cox told everyone that she had gone home, Kenneth Connor drove after her to bring her back.
• 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.
• Anthony Hopkins and Shirley MacLaine didn't get along while making A Change of Seasons. He described her as, "The most obnoxious actress I've ever worked with".
• 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.
• 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, though Johnson didn't truly have his bridges burned with Derek until after giving an interview on Youtube which Derek tried to take down for making him look bad. Bad blood continues to exist between Savage and Johnson when Savage made another "movie" that was mostly stock footage of Johnson in the Cool Cat suit, only overdubbed with Savage himself and Johnson not given any credit or compensation.
• 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 "the unhappiest, most bitter, and meanest emo-bitch I’ve ever met at any job I’ve held down" in his autobiography and vowing never to work with him again. Smith himself was publicly criticized by Willis for "smoking too much pot" on set- though if Smith's own claims are true, you couldn't exactly blame him.
• 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". Also, Brando and Sophia Loren didn't get along, especially after the day they were doing a love scene and he commented, "Did you know you have black hairs up your nostrils?"
• David O. Russell:
  • The director got into 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.
  • Russell also had a fallout with Lily Tomlin on the set of I ♡ Huckabees which was caught on camera and leaked out to the Internet.
  • He was abusive on the set of American Hustle with Amy Adams copping a lot of it, and Christian Bale having to defend her and then act as mediator. She's since said she won't work with him again.
• The late Nigel Hawthorne loathed the filming of Demolition Man, saying Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes routinely kept the cast and crew waiting and going as far as to call Stallone "rude and arrogant." It turned out he'd wanted to reprise his The Madness of George III role as the titular George III for The Madness of King George and took the role of Raymond Cocteau to prove he could work on film — with the "unnecessary case" part coming in as Nicholas Hytner already wanted him for the role, so he put himself through misery for something he was ultimately already a lock for.
• Patrick Swayze had opposed Jennifer Grey being cast as one of lead characters in Dirty Dancing due to tensions between them from when they had worked together on Red Dawn a few years before. After she was cast anyway, the two had a long talk that mostly worked things out. But some tension remained, most notably in one scene where the two are practicing in closeup as he reaches for her arm, only for her to pull it away at the last moment. It looks playful in the film, but in actuality, it was one of the times the tension resurfaced, and the director decided to keep it.
• 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.
• Even before its release, Don't Worry Darling has already become notorious for the widespread rumors that the cast and crew did not get along during production, which the people involved did little to counter. Some observers remarked that, no matter how the film turned out, the behind-the-scenes drama from it was already a more compelling story in its own right.
  • According to Olivia Wilde, who directed the film and played the main character's best friend, the film's lead star Shia LaBeouf was combative during production, and tensions between the two combined with his substance abuse problems led her to fire him from the film and recast the role with Harry Styles. However, in August 2022, LaBeouf countered this assertion and claimed that not only did he leave the film under his own volition due to a lack of rehearsal time, but that Wilde in fact begged him not to — and produced a video call and text messages from Wilde backing up his claim.
  • Moreover, it has also been asserted that Wilde herself was at the center of a lot of the hostility on set, most notably with co-star Florence Pugh. In an interview with Harper's Bazaar, Pugh expressed her frustration with the intense focus that Wilde was putting on the film's sex scenes in its promotion, feeling that they were overshadowing what the film was actually about. Wilde, in an interview with Variety, countered Pugh by arguing that the sex scenes were integral to the story. According to accounts by Page Six, Pugh was also frustrated by Wilde's Romance on the Set with Styles, which she felt was unprofessional, especially since Wilde was still engaged to Jason Sudeikis at the time.^note According to one rumor that went viral on TikTok, both the cinematographer and Pugh herself had to step in to direct some scenes because Wilde was busy having sex with Styles backstage. It was also rumored that Styles' paycheck for the film was three times larger than Pugh's despite their equal roles, a rumor that, if true, would have badly undermined the film's feminist message. (Wilde dismissed the report as false, calling it "clickbait".) Finally, in the messages that LaBeouf released, Wilde mentioned that his presence on set made Pugh uncomfortable due to his reputation,^note Shortly after leaving the film, LaBeouf's ex-girlfriend FKA twigs sued him for abuse, and he checked into rehab soon after. but asked him to stay anyway in the hopes that they would be able to patch things up, contradicting her previous assertion that she fired him for that reason. Notably, Pugh, who was initially excited to work with Wilde, had little involvement in the film's promotion despite being its star and having a reputation for quickly responding to tabloid rumors she believes are false, fueling speculation that she had a falling out with Wilde and wanted nothing to do with her or the film.
• East of Eden:
  • During production, 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.
• 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. It all went on to abruptly end Trank's meteoric rise to blockbuster director status, and it took him five years to make and release a new, much smaller scale film.
• 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, that trick editing was employed to create the illusion of the two of them in the same room, and before the film's release, Johnson would also post on his Instagram that there were some scenes where his visible anger is plot-appropriate but isn't him acting ... he was genuinely angry with Diesel.
• Fifty Shades of Grey: Director Sam Taylor-Johnson and author/producer E. L. James reportedly got into a lot of arguments over the first film, including arguing on-set. James vetoed many of Taylor-Johnson's attempts to change the plot and characters, while the director originally aimed for a more Pragmatic Adaptation. As a consequence, Taylor-Johnson refused to direct the sequels and expressed regret over making the film at all, citing her issues with James and their Creative Differences.
• It was reported that Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon didn't get along 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.
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum had a few:
  • Director Richard Lester got into repeated arguments with Phil Silvers, who was cast in the role of Lycus and complained about many aspects of the film, particularly being forced to abandon his trademark glasses in the name of historical realism. This, and Silvers apparently not being recognized by anyone in Spain (something which annoyed him greatly), culminated in Silvers refusing to perform^note According to Jon Pertwee in a later interview, Silvers apparently locked himself in the room he was staying in at the producers' villa, and repeatedly jumped up and down on the bed chanting the Lord's Prayer refusing to come out or otherwise be reasonable.. Lester was able to contact Jon Pertwee (whose played Lycus in the original London production) and soon had him on the set, in costume, ready to step in. When Silvers learned he had been replaced so quickly, he emerged from his trailer in a much more agreeable mood. Pertwee was recast in the smaller role of Crassus as compensation.
  • Lester and the film's writer/producer Melvin Frank did not see eye to eye, as Lester disliked the wisecracking verbal comedy of the script and the original musical, and pushed to include more visual humor in the style of classic silent movies.
• Get Carter: Ian Hendry, who plays Eric, was in line for the title role and never forgave Michael Caine for taking over it. The onscreen hatred he displays onscreen is very real.
• Gorilla, Interrupted: This No Budget bit of juvenalia by the future founders of RedLetterMedia had an extremely troubled production. A lot of that was due to hostility between Garret Gilchrist and the rest of the cast. He squabbled with director Mike Stoklasa by coming to the shoot with a rewritten script, filled with what Stoklasa called "pointless dialogue" that could never get filmed in the time permitted. He ultimately confronted Gilchrist to reassert creative control of the project. The cast generally spent the week-long shoot grumpy, tired, and suffering from colds. In the making-of documentary, How Not to Make a Movie, none of the other cast members had anything good to say about Gilchrist, whose absence from the doc is not addressed. Gilchrist has also made disparaging comments about the others during a livestream.
• 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.
• Among many critical complaints about Grease 2 is the obvious lack of chemistry between leads Maxwell Caulfield and Michelle Pfeiffer, which was likely because the two didn't like each other ... Caulfield saw her as stuck-up, while she in turn has remarked that he was rather self-absorbed.
• Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood had previously costarred on two films (Kings Go Forth and Sex and the Single Girl) and had a very acrimonious relationship on the set of The Great Race. Part of the reason that Wood was unhappy on the film was that she felt she was being sexually harassed by both Curtis and Jack Lemmon.
• Richard Harris and Julie Andrews co-starred in 1966's Hawaii. She disapproved of his rambunctious behavior and he greatly disliked her in return.
• There was plenty of strife on the set of the film version of Hello, Dolly!. Barbra Streisand was the diva, clashing regularly with director Gene Kelly and her costar Walter Matthau, a particularly heated^note literally as well; it was a very hot day standoff coming between the two on the day after Robert F. Kennedy was shot. Behind the camera, choreographer Michael Kidd also had a hate triangle going on, with costume designer Irene Sharaff and Kelly; his feud with the latter resulted, as many of these do, in the two not talking for most of the production.
• The World War II film The Heroes of Telemark was hit by clashes between Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris, constantly arguing as to who the star was.
  • Things got off to a bad start when Harris visited Douglas at his home and saw that he'd hung all his film awards up in his hallway. "Do you have to remind yourself how great you are", Harris asked. "Are you that sad?"
  • Co-star Ulla Jacobsson recalled:
    It was a battle from beginning to end. They were both fighting for camera position and neither was prepared to give way to the other. I have never known anything quite like it before. Even when this battle for supremacy did not result in an explosion, tension remained.
  • Douglas' constant bragging about his latest girlfriend annoyed Harris. Upon the revelation that she'd once been Miss Norway, Harris quipped, "Oh yeah, what year?"
  • Harris taunted Douglas that he was too old to start anything with him:
    Twenty years ago you could have handled me - maybe - but not now. So don't press your luck.
  • According to publicist John Willis, their demands became ridiculous to the point of seriously affecting production. Harris arrived at the studio one day with a tape measure, measured Douglas' trailer and then announced that he was going home, as it was a few inches bigger than his, leaving the cast and crew with nothing to do until a longer trailer could be found. On another occasion, Douglas fired his chauffeur after an argument and Harris turned round and hired him on the spot.
  • One day, the British press ran a story detailing the rivalry and bad behaviour, infuriating Harris. At the film's premier in Rome, he spotted Willis in the cinema foyer, pushed everyone out of the way and demanded to know who leaked the story. Willis remained silent, so Harris threatened to hit him and had to be pulled away from him.
  • On the last day of shooting at Pinewood Studios, both stars met each other in a corridor and walked towards each other like a Wild West showdown. According to Willis, they shook each other's hands like old friends and walked off to their dressing rooms.
• 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.
• By the time Martin and Lewis made their last film Hollywood or Bust, their relationship had deteriorated to the point where they weren't speaking to each other. Jerry Lewis couldn't even bring himself to watch the film because it brought back painful memories of their breakup.
• 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.
• John Wayne and William Holden didn't get along 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.
• Before filming the lay-by scene in Hot Fuzz, Simon 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.
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas!: According to Jim Carrey's makeup artist, Kazu Hiro, Carrey spent a good chunk of the film's production being "really mean to everybody" and constantly going AWOL, (after all, really uncomfortable make-up that included full eyeball lenses and a mask that covered his nose led to a full-fledged breakdown) stalling production to the point where they could only get three days' worth of filming done. Ron Howard eventually confronted Carrey when Hiro attempted to quit, and got him to keep his anger in check for the remainder of filming. (part of the treatment involved hiring an interrogation expert specialized in training special forces to endure torture!)
• Hunting Scenes from Bavaria: Due to the film's unflattering portrayal of small-town life and controversial subject matter involving homophobia and Slut-Shaming, the film crew often had to deal with hostile reactions from the residents of the real-life Bavarian village where the film was shot.
• 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.^note What happened during the interim, you may ask? During the 1963 Academy Awards, Davis was nominated for Best Actress for her role in Baby Jane but lost to Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker. Because Bancroft was not at the ceremony (she was performing on Broadway at the time), Crawford volunteered to accept the award on her behalf. Davis — and the press — interpreted this move as Crawford hogging the spotlight for herself while rubbing Davis's loss in her face. Davis remained bitter about Crawford's actions that night for decades afterward. 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 (whom Davis actually liked, fortunately for all concerned).
• 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.
• 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.
• Intruder in the Dust: Producer Louis B. Mayer and the film's star, Juano Hernandez, didn’t get along during the filming because, like his character, Hernandez was a black man who refused to treat white men as his superiors. This rubbed Mayer the wrong way, with him also being unimpressed with the final cut and taking minimal steps to distribute the film widely.
• The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996):
  • Both Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando made things difficult to the point where Richard Stanley 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.
  • For his part, Kilmer denied having a feud with Brando. He shared some of the behind-the-scenes footage of friendly moments he had with Brando as well as him and David Thewlis complaining about Frankenheimer's work ethic in the documentary Val. In his memoir I'm Your Huckleberry, Kilmer said:
  John Frankenheimer went on to blame me publicly for ruining the movie. I always thought it an odd thing to try to do, blame me for his failure to make an entertaining film, because my character dies halfway through, and the last half of the film sucks as bad as the first.
  • Screenwriter Ron Hutchinson said that "everybody behaved monstrously to each other" and that Brando had "poisonous" relations with most actors.
  • Nelson de la Rosa was instantly loved by Marlon Brando, and essentially replaced Daniel Rigney as Moreau's assistant. de la Rosa lorded it over Thewlis, once punching Rigney in the balls in an elevator.
• 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."
• 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 Claudette Colbert 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.
• This is quite the common occurrence for James Bond films, Eon Productions or otherwise:
  • Co-producer Harry Saltzman was notoriously difficult to work with, while Albert R. Broccoli was very easy-going and fatherly.
  • From Russia with Love:
    • There was real conflict between the fighting girls. Martine Beswick recalled that Aliza Gur was jealous of her friendship with Terence Young and accused her of sleeping with him.
    • Vladek Sheybal got so frustrated of Saltzman's instructions on his acting that he stormed off the set. He only returned on the assurance that Saltzman be barred from the set.
  • 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 by the press at the time that George Lazenby and Diana Rigg didn't get on. However, according to director Peter R. Hunt, these rumors are untrue and there were barely any difficulties, and the only real ones were minor. For example, during one lunch break before a kissing scene, Rigg jokingly shouted across the cafeteria, "Hey George, I'm having garlic for lunch. I hope you are!" and the press reported it as "Diana ate garlic before she kissed 007" to imply they weren't getting along. Rigg later admitted that she found Lazenby immature, but expressed sympathy for his situation.
    • Lazenby 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". Their relationship got off to a bad start when on the first day when Lazenby was asked by a crewmember to clear the set with a loudspeaker. Those ushered off the set were friends of Hunt. A furious Hunt said, "Don't forget who got you this job! Never speak to me again. Just speak to the first assistant". Hunt even left his own birthday party when he saw Lazenby there.
      One time, we were on location at an ice rink and Diana and Peter were drinking champagne inside. Of course I wasn't invited as Peter was there. I could see them through the window, but the crew were all outside stomping around on the ice trying to keep warm. So, when she got in the car, I went for her. She couldn't drive the car properly and I got in to her about her drinking and things like that. Then she jumped out and started shouting 'he's attacking me in the car!' I called her a so-and-so for not considering the crew who were freezing their butts off outside. And it wasn't that at all in the end, as she was sick that night, and I was at fault for getting in to her about it. I think everyone gets upset at one time.
    • Saltzman made the mistake of telling Lazenby, "You're a star now, so act like one". This caused his ego to swell significantly and soured his relationship with the producers. Broccoli joked that "he acted like the superstar he wasn't". For his part, Lazenby said:
      The producers made me feel like I was mindless. They disregarded everything I suggested simply because I hadn't been in the film business like them for about a thousand years.
    • According to Bernard Horsfall (Campbell), the film's stunt co-ordinator had to be restrained from physically attacking Lazenby after he was so rude to a barmaid that he made her cry.
    • Stuntman George Leech recalled:
      He was a bit of a flash character. He got into a bit of trouble with Cubby because he bought himself a gun in Switzerland and also drove around on this motorcycle which was thought to be a bit of a hazardous endeavour. Cubby had to put a block on that.
    • For her part, Rigg said that Lazenby "was just difficult. He kind of thought he was a film star immediately". Following the film's completion, she said:
      I can no longer cater for his obsession with himself. He is utterly, unbelievably...bloody impossible.
    • Rigg wrote a letter to Lazenby around 1970, calling him out on incidents including his dresser threatening to hand in his notice, three chauffeurs leaving him within a week and an outburst he released on a barmaid, before accusing him of concocting the Garlic story. She even bought up a time where Lazenby apparently threatened to bash her face in as she failed to reverse a car on an icy road. Lazenby wrote back, accepting responsibility for his dresser and some outbursts, but denying that three chauffeurs left him, as one was his guest in Portugal, the second drove "like a lunatic" and the third arrived late after a party, and George took some frustration out on him after being heckled by a gang of fishermen. A later interview had him say that the press made up the garlic tale and not him. According to Tom Mankiewicz, on Rigg's last day of shooting, she kept asking if it was the last take and when she filmed her last scene, spat at Lazenby and walked off the set.
    • Desmond Llewelyn also didn't care for Lazenby, citing him as not an actor and claiming that he "acted like an idiot on set".
    • Even John Barry disliked Lazenby:
      [He] came down to one of the sessions. He stood at the back and listened to the score for one of the scenes. Then he came up to me and said," It fits!" as if it was the greatest compliment I could ever have hoped for. I thought, "Christ, we've got a real brain going here. What do you think I do for a living?
    • Broccoli's wife Dana suggested suggested that the producers throw a party to cheer everyone up. With just a day to put it together, Broccoli arranged for food to be brought over from nearby hotels and placed a notice about the party on the morning's call sheet. With everyone having a good time, Lazenby showed up late and stood sulking in the corner. Broccoli went over to him and asked what was wrong. Lazenby was replied that he should have had an invitation to the party, as he was the star of the film. Broccoli explained to him that nobody had an invite, it was a spur of the moment thing. He told him that "You're not a star until the public makes you one" and walked off.
    • The final straw came when Lazenby disobeyed Broccoli's instructions and showed up to the premier with shoulder-length hair and a beard ("It was my way of saying - I'm myself, I'm not James Bond"). Following his decision to leave the series after just one film, Lazenby claimed that Broccoli told people that he was difficult, resulting in him being blacklisted. In 1978, Broccoli described casting Lazenby as "my biggest mistake in 16 years. He just couldn't deal with success. He was so arrogant. There was the stature and looks of a Bond but Lazenby couldn't get along with the other performers and technicians".
    • Lazenby later claimed that he was given very bad advice by his agent, who convinced him that with New Hollywood and the counter-culture, James Bond would be archaic in The '70s. As a result, he turned down a seven picture contract. 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 Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery was lured back into the role with the heaviest pay cheque for an actor at the time, but that didn't make things any easier. Relationships between Connery and the producers were acrimonious at best since at least You Only Live Twice. He outright refused to act whenever Harry Saltzman showed up on the set. He might have reprised the role in the non-EON rival Bond film Never Say Never Again partly out of spite.
  • Guy Hamilton didn't get on with Yaphet Kotto on Live and Let Die, finding him difficult:
    Yaphet Kotto, I regret bitterly. I did not enjoy working with him at all. Originally it was to be a very distinguished American black actor. Suddenly Harry Saltzman announced he's out and UA say Yaphet Kotto is really hot property. We were forced into Yaphet Kotto. I'd never met him until he turned up on the set. He starts off thinking he should be playing Bond - quite seriously. He was very badly behaved, he would try and make life difficult. I am tremendously pro-black and I was determined because of having a big black cast that they all be treated properly - it wasn't us - it was the American crews that treated them like shit.
    • Roger Moore wrote in his diary:
      When Yaphet Kotto came to New Orleans and gave the Black Power salute there were those who said he had a chip on his shoulder. As a black actor in a predominantly white industry perhaps he believed he had to assert himself.
    • Kotto later resonded to Moore's comment:
      I don't think that was fair. [But] I can see how he would have arrived at that opinion because I was very aloof and removed from everyone. It may have appeared I had a chip on my shoulder because I was quiet. I am not there to socialise. I think method actors are misunderstood. Maybe he wasn't used to method actors. I don't know what his problem was. It didn't bother me then, it doesn't bother me now.
    • Moore elaborated on the Black Power incident:
      [Publicity director] Derek Coyte pointed out that the pictures would rouse resentment from the rabid whites and would be seen as an endorsement of black power by militant blacks. We are making anything but a political picture, but Derek said the photographs syndicated far and wide would involve us in a controversy, which could do nothing but harm. Yaphet was incensed. At midday he and the black stuntmen lunched together and during the afternoon, Derek Coyte was ostracised by blacks [with whom he] had previously been pally.
    • According to Moore, Saltzman was so jealous of Moore's friendship with David Hedison that he had the latter moved to a different hotel.
  • According to John Glen, Barbara Bach was very uptight on The Spy Who Loved Me and considered Moore's sense of humour "schoolboy - they weren't the best of buddies I don't think".
  • According to Broccoli, Carole Bouquet caused problems on the set of For Your Eyes Only when her then-boyfriend Jean-Pierre Rassam was arrested for drug offences caused her to be late to the set. She also tactlessly told Moore that he reminded her of her father.
  • 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:
    • Moore made it no secret that he didn't get along 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 behaviour. 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 "Pity you couldn't find one 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.
  • Tomorrow Never Dies: Judi Dench got so fed up with the constantly changing script that she complained to Roger Spottiswoode. She later recalled an altercation with the director during an ADR session. Arriving late due to gridlocked traffic, Dench recounted Spottiswoode standing in the doorway calling to her to hurry as she briskly walked through Soho.
    I simply couldn't shake hands with him. So I said, "Did you see me the other day? in Streatham?" "Did I?" You know you did, I nearly ran you over". At that moment, Barbara Broccoli came out of the back and said, "Pity you didn't accelerate and do the job for us".
• Jaws: The relationship between Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss was notoriously antagonistic, which of course carried over into their characters. Roy Scheider described Shaw as "a perfect gentleman whenever he was sober. All he needed was one drink and then he turned into a competitive son-of-a-bitch." The feud, along with the film's generally troubled shoot as a whole, inspired the comedic stage play The Shark is Broken, which was co-written by Ian Shaw, the son of Robert.
  • On one occasion, Shaw was having a drink between takes, at which one point he announced, "I wish I could quit drinking." Much to the surprise and horror of the crew, Dreyfuss simply grabbed Shaw's glass and tossed it into the ocean.
  • Dreyfuss claimed that although Shaw could be very nice to him in private, such as the time he read Dreyfuss his entire play, The Man in the Glass Booth, while the two were sitting in the hold of the Orca, publicly he was brutal to him, telling him things like he thought Dreyfuss would only have a career "if there's room for another Jewish character man like Paul Muni." At one point, Shaw, remarking loudly on what he said was Dreyfuss' cowardice, dared him to climb to the top of the Orca's mast (about 75 feet) and jump off into the ocean, for which he would pay him upwards of $1,000 (the price rising with each taunt). Steven Spielberg finally intervened by telling Dreyfuss, "I don't care how much money he offers you, you're not jumping off the mast, not in my movie."
  • Another time, Shaw drenched Dreyfuss with a fire hose. Dreyfuss yelled at him, "That's it, I don't want to work with you anymore, go fuck yourself" and stormed off the set for the day.
• Director John Ford:
  • Tensions between Henry Fonda and 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.
  • Ford also managed to antagonize co-star James Cagney on set as well. When meeting Cagney at the airport just prior to filming, he started out remarking that he and Cagney would "tangle asses" at some point during filming. The next day, Cagney was slightly late for his call time, to which Ford proceeded to berate him. Cagney cut him short by loudly and belligerently proclaiming "When I started this picture, you said that we would tangle asses before this was over. I'm ready now - are you?" Ford, knowing Cagney's reputation a a scrapper, backed down and left him alone for the remainder of the shoot... or at least the portion he was present for. The hostility was too much, even for Ford, and he began to drink more than usual, ending up with a case of alcohol poisoning and gallstones. In the end, he was replaced by an uncredited Mervyn LeRoy to finish the film.
    • Due to this experience, Cagney recalled Ford later thus: "I would have kicked his brains out. He was so goddamned mean to everybody. He was truly a nasty old man."
  • Ford was later forced to cast John Wayne in the title role of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. He thus took it out on the Duke throughout production, referring to costar Woody Strode^note who had actually played in the NFL while injuries ended Wayne's college career as "the real football player" on set, sometimes resulting in Wayne in turn taking it out on Strode.^note Near the end of the production, Wayne apologized to Strode, blaming his mood on the way Ford was treating him. Strode said later that the whole production was "miserable" most of the time. Ford also contrasted James Stewart's war service as a bomber commander and his own as a combat documentarian for the Navy^note which got him wounded at the Battle of Midway with Wayne's having stayed in Hollywood to get rich making movies in which he played war heroes.^note Which was rather against Wayne's will at the time ... the studios and the War Department both agreed he was better utilized as a propaganda asset Wayne never gave it back to Ford, who had made him the big star he was, but he regularly wondered aloud to Stewart why Ford was never so abusive to him. Until the day, late in shooting, when Ford casually asked Stewart what he thought of Strode's costume for the scene in the funeral parlor. After Stewart said it looked a little "Uncle Remus-y" to him, Ford loudly implied to all present that Stewart might be racist. "Welcome to the club", Wayne told him afterwards.
• Following the announcement of Zack Snyder's Justice League, Ray Fisher (who played Victor Stone/Cyborg) came forth with accusations against Joss Whedon on social media, saying that his behavior on the set during the reshoots that resulted in the 2017 theatrical version was "abusive and unprofessional". This was backed by Jason Momoa, Gal Gadot (who was on the receiving end of threats by Whedon), and several film crew members. Fisher also criticized Geoff Johns and Jon Berg (then-heads of DC Films) for allowing Whedon's behavior and singled out Johns in particular for "making thinly veiled threats" to Fisher's career when they were filming the reshoots in Los Angeles. The affair was apparently serious enough for WarnerMedia to conduct an investigation on it. Fisher would then expand his accusations to Walter Hamada, current President of DC Films, whom Fisher alleges has sabotaged the investigation, vowing never again to work with him as long as he was President. Whether it's related to this or not, Whedon dropped from showrunning the HBO series The Nevers shortly afterwards.
• Karla: Director Joel Bender was apparently very creepy on set, with Misha Collins referencing a time where, after he had finished acting out a horrific rape scene, Bender had apparently called it "hot" in a tone that implied he wasn't joking. Collins later filed a restraining order against Bender to ensure they would never work together again.
• Kill Bill:
  • Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah did not get along on set, an animosity that reportedly continued for some time after the film was done. Given that their characters are trying to kill each other, their real-life tension ultimately made their on-screen relationship feel more authentic.
  • Thurman was also furious with Quentin Tarantino after he pushed for her to do a dangerous vehicular stunt even though she had raised concerns about its safety beforehand, which ended with her suffering a bad neck injury that left her with chronic pain for years after. While Tarantino eventually apologized and the two of them reconciled, the incident destroyed their working relationship.
• During Kindergarten Cop, Penelope Ann Miller apparently acted like a diva and the crew disliked working with her. Peter Kent, Arnold Schwarzenegger's stunt double, decided to get back at her by giving Arnie, unbeknownst to the actor, pasta with tomato sauce made with juiced vegetables on a day when he knew Arnie and Miller would be shooting in an enclosed space. Miller had no choice but to endure Arnie's uncontrollable farting and, as an unintended consequence, Arnie had to deal with the discomfort of trying and failing to hold it all in.
• The hostility between Klaus Kinski and director Werner Herzog is legendary, as they each had great respect for each other's work, collaborated several times and each considered the other his muse. However, they were both completely insane in their own unique way and drove each other mad. (they illustrate the main page for a reason!) During their first collaboration, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog brandished a rifle and told Kinski that both of them would die if Kinski tried to walk off the film. The legend of their encounter was later inflated to Herzog directing Kinski at gunpoint, but it never got that far. During their penultimate collaboration, Fitzcarraldo, their fights got so extreme that the local natives who were serving as extras asked Herzog if he wanted them to simply kill Kinski. Herzog said that he actually considered it for a moment. In fact, the trope picture —and a widely-circulate picture at that — is from their final film together, Cobra Verde, where Kinski held a machete to Herzog's neck, while the crew tried to restrain the former. Herzog would later immortalize their combative but creatively fruitful partnership in the documentary My Best Fiend.
• There was loads of hostility between the leads of Kramer vs. Kramer.
  • By all accounts, Dustin Hoffman has been widely reported in different media to have harassed Meryl Streep during the making of the movie, and the two had a contentious working relationship as a result. In a 1979 Time magazine interview, Streep claimed that Hoffman groped her breast on their first meeting. When Streep advocated for herself, wanting to portray Joanna as more sympathetic and vulnerable than she was written, she received pushback from him. Attributing the behaviour to his commitment to being a method actor, he would also hurl insults and obscenities at Streep, taunting her with the name of her recently deceased fiancé, John Cazale, claiming this was designed to draw a better performance out of her. He famously threw a wine glass against the wall without telling her (although he did inform the cameraman beforehand), which shattered and sent glass shards into her hair. Her response was: "Next time you do that, I'd appreciate you letting me know."
  • Hoffman was hearing lots of advance publicity about newcomer Streep and how she was mastering the role and Hoffman felt he was being upstaged. When Streep wanted to change around the dialogue in the restaurant meeting scene, Hoffman became furious. As Hoffman recalled, "I hated her guts. Yes, I hated her guts. But I respected her." He accepted that Streep wasn't arguing for what was best for her character but what was best for the movie. Streep decided never to work with Hoffman again after he hit her to get her into character.
  • The stars would often, jokingly, try to get Justin Henry to pick one of them over the other. One day on the set, Hoffman asked Henry who he'd rather be with. Henry said, "Her. She's nicer", to which Hoffman replied, "Oh yeah? Work with her five weeks then see what you say."
• During the production of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the scenes with Angelina Jolie and Jon Voight were filmed separately as both were still estranged at the time.
• 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."
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: 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.
• Richard Gere clashed so much with Sylvester Stallone on the set of The Lords Of Flatbush that Gere was fired, with all his scenes reshot by Perry King, and had to wait a year to make his feature-film debut in Report To The Commissioner. Gere has gone so far as to accuse Stallone of spreading the "gerbil" story around due to their animosity, something Stallone has always denied.
• 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 along 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.
• 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.
• 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 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."
• The Married Couple of the Year Two: Jean-Paul Belmondo had a Romance on the Set with Italian actress Laura Antonelli and tried to have her role expanded, to no avail since it would have reduced that of Marlène Jobert, who was very angry at him because of these attempts.
• 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. Feige is reported to have been on Wright's side and was willing to give him more creative freedom. This would be the final straw for Feige and the last movie before he put his foot down.
  • The tension finally came to a head on the 2015 set of Captain America: Civil War when the infamously penny pinching ^note So much that at the press junket for The Avengers (2012), reporters who were there all day weren't fed lunch, were given a quota of two bags of chips and a can of soda, and then had to resort to "stealing" food from another movie’s press junket. 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 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. Although he stayed on as a member of the board for several years, Perlmutter was among a large group of executives who were laid off from Disney in March 2023.
  • Subverted in Avengers: Infinity War and a rather harmless one, where Benedict Cumberbatch originally ignored Tom Holland, thinking he was an overeager crew member and fan, until he found out he was a co-star. Some found this strange as they did The Current War together the previous year.
  • Kevin Feige would later admit that due to past issues and disagreements, he would not want Edward Norton or Joss Whedon to return to the MCU in the future.
• For production of Medicine Man, Lorraine Bracco, who was just coming off GoodFellas, complained non-stop about everything from the food to the weather to the script. Bracco also came with a massive entourage (nannies, hairstylists, makeup artists, acting coach, etc). In a nutshell, she soon drove Sean Connery and the director John McTiernan insane and was loathed among the crew. At some point it was arranged that McTiernan would convey any direction he had for her to her acting coach, who would in turn pass it on to Bracco, because McTiernan refused to deal with her anymore. Connery stopped speaking to her as well.
• Tommy Lee Jones' inability to get along with Linda Fiorentino is, 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.
• Miami Vice:
  • During pre-production, 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 Caribbean, 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.
• Mike Myers, while not as bad as Chevy Chase has a reputation of being hard to work with:
  • According to Penelope Spheeris, while making Wayne's World, he arrived on set one day to discover that the snack table only had butter and not margarine for his bagel. Myers reportedly became enraged, flipped the table over, stormed off the set, and did not come out of his trailer for hours. She assigned her daughter to be his assistant. She told Entertainment Weekly:
  He (Myers) was emotionally needy and got more difficult as the shoot went along. 'You should have heard him bitching when I was trying to do that "Bohemian Rhapsody" scene: 'I can't move my neck like that! Why do we have to do this so many times? No one is going to laugh at that!' To this day, I have this image of my daughter sitting on this little cooler, looking at me, like, "Mom, I f-ing hate you".
  • In an interview for the AV Club's "Random Reviews" feature, Amy Hill said that he was terrible to work with on The Cat in the Hat because he refused to talk to any of the cast and crew members aside from Bo Welch, and during filming breaks, he isolated himself from the cast and crew by hiding in his trailer. Hill also noted that the film ended up having long and pointless additional retakes of scenes because Myers overruled Welch on whether they were good or not. In addition, he always showed up on set late and there were scenes he would downright refuse to do unless he was given a chocolate bar, which led to one of the producers setting up a Tupperware full of chocolate bars.
• 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.
• As production for The Night Strangler began to wrap, director Dan Curtis (best known as the creator of Dark Shadows, who had also produced the preceding film The Night Stalker) began directing undeserved anger towards the crew, which led Darren McGavin to confront Curtis before deciding to quit, saying, "You've got enough film. Make your movie. Goodbye." Lingering tension between Curtis and McGavin led to the production on the planned third Kolchak movie, The Night Killers, stagnating and ultimately evolving into the Kolchak: The Night Stalker series (without Curtis's involvement).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Production on Over the Brooklyn Bridge was shut down for one day after Elliott Gould and The Cannon Group head Menahem Golan (also the director) got into an argument over the scene where Gould confesses to Margaux Hemingway that he loves her. The end result was Gould calling Golan a cocksucker during the argument and storming off the set to the shock of cast and crew. Gould apologized two days later to Golan personally and filming then resumed.
• 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?")
• 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.
• 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.
• 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."
• During rehearsals for Raising the Wind, Jim Dale delivered one of his lines doing an impression of Kenneth Williams. Everyone laughed, while Williams stalked off to Gerald Thomas to talk about Dale. Dale was worried that Williams hated him, and he would never work with him again. Luckily, Williams saw the funny side, and actually told Thomas, "For God's sake, use him. If he can take the mickey out of me and make me laugh, he's a godsend", leading to Dale joining the Carry On... Series.
• 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 production of Red Planet, Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore began feuding. 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 At a crewmember's request, he avoided Kilmer's face The two never worked together again.
• RoboCop:
  • Peter Weller's attempt at Method Acting during the first few weeks on RoboCop (1987), insisting that he be called "Murphy" or "Robo" (depending on the scene) while on set, didn't earn him brownie points, but the collective ire of director Paul Verhoeven and co-stars Kurtwood Smith (Clarence Boddicker) and Miguel Ferrer (Bob Morton). Verhoeven found it silly and told Weller that he couldn't bring himself to humor Weller, Ferrer actively mocked it by intentionally addressing Weller by his real name, and Smith chose to ignore him for the majority of that time.
  • Nancy Allen and director Irvin Kershner didn't get along during the filming of RoboCop 2 and even four months before Kershner's death, Allen stated she outright hated him and working with him.
• 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.
• Tommy Wiseau made life on the set of his directorial debut The Room (2003) a nightmare. 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 on-screen love interest, were treated poorly. The former was harassed and goaded into taking part in 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 and an award-winning film based off of the book about the film, its production remains among one of the most infamous.
• 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.
• James Woods and James Belushi frequently clashed during the filming of Salvador. Their competitive rivalry was secretly encouraged by Oliver Stone.
• Al Pacino and Gene Hackman didn't get along 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.
• Scream:
  • It has long been rumored that Wes Craven did not get along with Sarah Michelle Gellar on the set of Scream 2, feeling that she had a tendency to Wag the Director. Allegedly, the character of Sarah Darling in Scream 3 was a Take That! at Gellar.
  • Scream 4 was made while Courteney Cox and David Arquette were going through a very bad patch in their marriage, and the two split up shortly after the film was finished. Ironically, they had first fallen in love on the set of the first film.
• 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. The franchise would eventually continue on streaming television with And Just Like That..., with which Cattrall has no involvement, and her character's absence explained by a falling-out with Parker's character.
• On the set of Showgirls, There was considerable competition between Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon off-screen, which was subtly encouraged by Paul Verhoeven to help them portray their on-screen feud better.
• 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.
• Sliver: Sharon Stone and William Baldwin disliked each other and demanded that their scenes be filmed separately whenever possible. During a kissing scene, she bit his tongue with such force that he couldn't talk properly for days.
• Casting Stewart Granger and Pier Angeli as Lot and his wife Ildith in Sodom and Gomorrah was unwise given the enmity that had developed between them when they made The Light Touch together ten years earlier. Their on-screen chemistry was adversely affected, and in her autobiography, Angeli recalled telling Granger to his face that she was sleeping with some of her co-stars - except him.
• 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.
• Solo:
  • When it was announced on-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 Notwithstanding that there's still a fair amount of funny in the movie
  • Originally, it was reported the tone was specifically the reason they were canned, which fans of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse wore as a rallying cry when that film had critical and commercial success off their signature rapid-fire comedy (Lord co-wrote, both produced). However, sources later confirmed the two were constantly late to show up and not begin filming until around 11 a.m., very late for a non-location daily shoot, and their penchant of improvising new dialogue away from the script meant the movie was tracking very off-schedule to a release date that could not budge, which was weighing on cast and crew. While Ron Howard was noted as a "safe" replacement by the industry, it was because Howard had a long-standing reputation of being able to finish a film on time with minimal complications.
• 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.
• While it's well-known by now that Spartacus ended any remains of the friendship between producer-star Kirk Douglas and substitute director Stanley Kubrick,^note At one point Douglas admits, in his memoirs, that he threw a folding chair at Kubrick out of sheer frustration. it's not as well known that Laurence Olivier and his fellow co-star Charles Laughton were barely on speaking terms for much of the picture. That apparently wasn't enough discord for him,^note He was distracted by his divorce from Vivien Leigh. because at one point he went to Douglas and suggested, in all apparent honesty, that he should play the title role.
• 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 co-screenwriter, 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"
• During production of Steel Magnolias, Sally Field and Shirley MacLaine said in an interview that director Herbert Ross was very difficult to work with, telling the main lead actresses they couldn't act, and singling out Julia Roberts in particular, to the point that she would be left in tears.
• Christopher Reeve had problems 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". On Superman IV, actor Mark Pillow (who played the villain Nuclear Man) also described Reeve to be, while not exactly hostile, very intense and not particularly approachable.
• 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.
  • Having to play referee was almost certainly the last straw for Reeve when it came to this film. He was going through a divorce at the time, and originally agreed to do the movie because he thought doing a comedy would be fun, and his friend Michael Caine was originally scheduled to star. However, when he showed up, he quickly found out Caine had been dropped, and almost immediately discovered that he had to separate his two costars constantly. Finally, as if that weren’t bad enough, Reeve himself in his autobiography said this film's failure knocked him off the A list, and he had to audition for the rest of his career. To put things in perspective, even after Superman IV, he was still considered a star. This film did what that one couldn’t.
• 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 Voice Clip Song, forcing Bale to issue an apology.
• Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger^note heavily using cocaine at the time 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.
• 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.
• Jack Reynor hated his time on Transformers: Age of Extinction, where allegedly Mark Wahlberg bullied him relentlessly. Notably he didn't return for Transformers: The Last Knight. T.J. Miller also didn't get on well with director Michael Bay.
• Up the Front: Producer Ned Sherrin had an uneven relationship with Frankie Howerd; when Howerd returned from Elizabeth Taylor's legendary 40th birthday party in Budapest, Sherrin had no sympathy for his hangover and sent him straight back to work.
• The Usual Suspects:
  • In the "making of" documentary, both Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Pollak acknowledge that their long-standing feud with each other began on the set of this film. Though neither actor directly states what caused their animosity towards each other, Pollak does mention that Baldwin, in an attempt to stay in character as MacManus, would go around acting tough and sometimes bully the other actors. Baldwin does admit that he was bullying towards Pollak on film (their numerous "standoff" confrontations with each other on-screen).
  • 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.
• While making the B-movie Venom (1981), 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.
• The plentiful alcohol consumed on the set of The V.I.P.s 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).
• On the set of Wall Street Sean Young pissed off Charlie Sheen so much that he covertly taped a sign to her back saying "I am a cunt" during one scene. It says much about how everyone else on set felt about her that no one told her about it. The animosity between the two was enough that Stone abandoned a subplot where the two characters had an affair; this explains why Gekko is so angry with Fox in their final confrontation.
• On the western The Way West, Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark reportedly did not get along with Kirk Douglas because of his tendency to usurp control of the project from director Andrew V. McLaglen.
• Frank Oz admitted in interviews that there was tension on the set during the making of What About Bob?. In addition, both Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss have confirmed in separate interviews that they did not get along with each other during filming:
  Murray: It's entertaining—everybody knows somebody like that Bob guy. (Richard Dreyfuss and I) didn't get along on the movie particularly, but it worked for the movie. I mean, I drove him nuts, and he encouraged me to drive him nuts.
  Dreyfuss: How about it? Funny movie. Terribly unpleasant experience. We didn't get along, me and Bill Murray. But I've got to give it to him: I don't like him, but he makes me laugh even now. I'm also jealous that he's a better golfer than I am. It's a funny movie. No one ever comes up to you and says, "I identify with the patient". They always say, "I have patients like that. I identify with your character". No one ever says that they're willing to identify with the other character.
  • In subsequent interviews, Dreyfuss reiterated what he said of his experience working with Murray, notably when he guest appeared at Fan Expo Canada in 2017. Dreyfuss further alleged in 2019 that at one point during the production, Murray screamed at him while intoxicated, telling him "Everyone hates you! You are tolerated!" and then threw an ashtray at him. When Murray guest appeared on The Howard Stern Show in 2014, Howard Stern asked him if he intended to annoy Dreyfuss. Murray responded: "I really try to make the other actor look good whenever I can (...) In this particular film, annoying Dreyfuss, which I kind of got to enjoy I gotta confess—but I didn't try to annoy him off the screen". Although neither of them have crossed paths since the release of the film, Dreyfuss confirmed in a 2020 interview that he has forgiven Murray.
  • Producer Laura Ziskin recalled having a disagreement with Murray which led him to toss her into a lake. Ziskin confirmed in 2003:
  Bill also threatened to throw me across the parking lot and then broke my sunglasses and threw them across the parking lot. I was furious and outraged at the time, but having produced a dozen movies, I can safely say it is not common behavior.
• Witchfinder General: Vincent Price and director Michael Reeves loathed each other from the start. Much of the problem was that Reeves thought Price was inappropriate for the role (he supposedly wanted Donald Pleasence) and saw his main task on set as preventing Price from hamming or camping it up. Price, on the other hand, had signed up for the film without reading the script, expecting it to be a campy horror-swashbuckler, and was genuinely disturbed by the brutality of the film and the sadism of the character he was supposed to play. Price eventually admitted that the end result was good, though.
• 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.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • Despite Alan Cumming's highly-praised performance as Nightcrawler in X2: X-Men United, he opted not to return for X-Men: The Last Stand. At the time, Cumming said it was because he hated the hours-long makeup process, but in 2022, he revealed that that was only one of his reasons. Another reason was the oft-repeated claim that Bryan Singer was abusive and unprofessional on-set, but the studio sided with Singer when Cumming complained to them.^note His third reason was a general dislike of starring in blockbusters, preferring smaller roles that make less demands of his time.
  • In 2017, Elliot Page revealed that he had to put up with homophobic bullying from director Brett Ratner while filming X-Men: The Last Stand. Anna Paquin later backed up his claims.

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