Trivia / I Love Trouble

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $45 million. Box office, $30,806,194 (domestic), $61,947,267 (worldwide).
• Creator Backlash: Both Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte have stated their hatred for working on the film, Nolte for considering it the worst of his career and Roberts for considering that Nolte was the worst actor she had ever worked with.
• Dueling-Stars Movie: The film featured the pairing of Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts, which proved to be disastrous for the reasons given elsewhere on this page.
• Hostility on the Set: During filming, 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.
• Money, Dear Boy: Nick Nolte has said that he sold his soul by agreeing to make the film strictly for the money and that it's his worst film, which explains how his attitude on set was so bad that his costar, Julia Roberts, still says he's the worst actor she's ever worked with.
• Troubled Production: No film qualifying for this trope could have had a more apt name. Or a more telling plot MacGuffin... a train wreck:
  • Actually, the writing and casting went well. Especially when they landed Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts as leads. They must have thought they could practically print the money... until they began actually shooting, and very quickly their two stars began to dislike each other (Roberts reportedly could have completely done without Nolte's tough guy act, and was not shy or polite about letting him know; he, in turn, began deliberately engaging in it to piss her off). The reviews would later say they had no chemistry onscreen. Which was actually a testament to their acting skills, because the two of them did have chemistry, if by 'chemistry' you mean the "volatile, explosive throw-things-at-each-other-and-scream" kind. Not what you want to show on screen in a romantic comedy. The antipathy deepened over the course of filming to the point that they refused to shoot their later scenes together, necessitating some quick rewriting and clever editing and camera tricks. By some accounts they did more scenes with stand-ins than with each other. All said and done, the bad taste has stayed in their mouths. Nolte says his attitude on the set was a result of only doing it for the money, that he was selling his soul by doing it and that it's his worst film (see above). Roberts has in turn said he was the worst actor she's ever worked with. In some interviews she's described the petulance and childishness of "a former costar" of hers; it's widely assumed that when she does so she's talking about Nolte.
  • Some accounts from the set, though, suggest that they did occasionally get along—when they were both fed up with Meyers and Shyer insisting on things like endless improvisations on a single line.
  • It didn't end when they wrapped. Due to all the strife between the two leads and the ways the production had had to accommodate it, Disney's marketing department scrambled to recast the film, which it had been teasing as the romantic comedy originally intended, into something more like a conventional suspense thriller. "It's gone from a Hepburn-Tracy Woman of the Year to The Pelican Brief in a very short time span," one competing studio marketing person noted before it was released.
  • Elmer Bernstein had written the score, but with barely two weeks to go before the film hit theaters Meyers and Shyer decided they didn't like it and hired David Newman to write and record a new one. He had to hire other composers to help out, something he didn't normally do, and work almost nonstop to finish it in time. When the film hit theaters, some of the onesheets still listed Bernstein as the composer, and even the soundtrack album failed to credit all the composers involved (the movie credits eleven orchestrators, while the album only lists two).
• What Could Have Been: Julia Roberts wanted Harrison Ford as her costar, but he declined. Warren Beatty was also considered.

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