A new memoir has kicked up a storm of controversy about a twenty-year-old movie.
Director Ed Zwick just published a book which, among other things, claims that he and Brad Pitt had a huge fight because, Zwick claims, he was over-aggressive in trying to coax a great performance out of Pitt while making 1994 Western “Legends of the Fall.”
But the tale has so riled insiders that set sources from way back then have come out of the woodwork to defend Pitt. They say that the actor’s angst wasn’t because Zwick was a courageous molder of talent — it was “because he’s an asshole.”
One set source affirmed that it wasn’t just Pitt who had had it with Zwick while shooting the Western. “He screamed at people,” an insider said of Zwick. “He was incredibly hard to work with.”
“Anthony Hopkins [who played Pitt’s dad] got so sick of [Zwick] that he just got in his car and drove to the airport one day,” they added.
Zwick writes in “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood” (as excerpted by Vanity Fair) the director said he’d try to push Pitt past his comfort zone.
“Yet the more I pushed Brad to reveal himself, the more he resisted,” Zwick, 71, writes. “So, I kept pushing and Brad pushed back.”
Eventually Zwick gave Pitt a direction in front of the crew, which he now admits was a “a stupid, shaming provocation.”
“Brad came back at me, also out loud, telling me to back off,” Zwick writes. “… I was angry at Brad for not trusting me to influence his performance.” Also for the reluctance he’d shown after the first table read. … But Brad wasn’t about to give in without a fight ”I don’t know who yelled first, who swore, or who threw the first chair,” Zwick writes, “Me, maybe? But when we looked up, the crew had disappeared.”
But our veteran insider (who, incidentally, says it was definitely Zwick who threw the chair) fumes that the run-in was entirely down to Zwick’s clumsy approach, and that the tale is just a “blatant attempt to drum up interest in a book that nobody would otherwise care about.”
“Legends of the Fall” was based on author Jim Harrison’s novella and featured Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, Julia Ormond and Henry Thomas. The epic followed a father and his three sons as they lived remotely on the plains of Montana in the early 20th century.
