Directors Who Publicly Dissed Their Actors

Nobody likes being trash-talked, but it's especially unpleasant when you and your trash-talker are both high profile celebrities, ensuring a large, eager audience dying to witness your catfight. Add in that we're essentially talking about workplace disputes—between directors and actors—and it becomes a multilayered personal and professional attack. Normally, HR would step in, make both parties watch some ethics tutorials, and write up a report, but this is Hollywood where pride and ego are everything. Here are some of the directors who took their on-set gripes off the lot and into the public eye.

No other director has gone out of his way to trash an actor like Kevin Smith did with Bruce Willis. Smith has taken to podcasts, a book, live stage shows, Twitter, and probably one of those banners flying behind planes you always see at the beach. Calling Willis all manner of things like "unhappy," "mean," "bitter," and some choice expletives just to drive the point home, essentially Smith's beef is this: while filming Cop Out, Willis couldn't have cared less and went out of his way to make the production difficult for everyone. On Marc Maron's WTF podcast, Smith said the experience was "soul crushing," which, coming from the guy who directed Mallrats and Jersey Girl, is quite a statement. Squeezing usable performances out of Jeremy London and Jennifer Lopez was painless, but dealing with Bruce Willis killed your soul? You might want look up "hyperbole" in the dictionary before your next Bruce-bash session, dude.

Paul Schrader took a real chance casting Lindsay Lohan in The Canyons, a low-budget film that was supposed to be a campy, noirish thriller, but turned out to be the disaster everyone predicted. Fortunately for us, Schrader let a New York Times reporter embed with the production and document everything that happened on and off the set. At every opportunity, Lindsay, who was only making $100 a day, held up production with insane demands and erratic behavior. She disruptively clashed with co-star James Deen and even forced Schrader to strip naked in front of the crew before she would shoot a love scene. In the end, Schrader wouldn't admit to regret over her casting, but he did throw a jab over whether he'd cast her in something else, musing, "If it doesn't involve a co-star. She would be perfect for it." Even though he's no elementary school teacher, that was a clear "does not work well with others" on the report card right there.

Sometimes actions speak louder than words, which is precisely the case in the fallout between Stephen Norrington, director of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Sean Connery. Bad luck plagued the ill-fated production of the graphic novel adaptation, and reports of feuding so bad that it nearly came to a physical altercation only fanned the flames of this trainwreck of a movie that ended the careers of both men.

That's right, Connery, who endlessly told the press what an idiot he thought Norrington was, never acted again, and Norrington vowed to never direct another film. Connery was 72 years old at the time, so maybe he was already looking for an out, but Norrington? This was only his fourth film, following the massive success of Blade, which means he also directed Wesley Snipes, a known egomaniac and notoriously difficult actor. If Norrington handled Snipes and kept going, but walked away from the business post-Connery, that's a more of a public statement than any mean tweet could ever make.

On paper, Julia Roberts starring as Tinkerbell in Steven Spielberg's Hook looked like a perfect combination. America's sweetheart, in front of the cameras playing a classic character for one of the greatest directors of his generation—what more could film fans want? The reality, however, apparently left a lot to be desired. Coming off a grueling stretch of back-to-back filming and the end of her engagement to Kiefer Sutherland, Roberts wasn't even sure she wanted to commit to Hook until the last minute, and once production started, she reportedly clashed with Spielberg behind the scenes. Spielberg alluded to the tension between the two during an interview for 60 Minutes after Hook hit theaters, admitting he wouldn't work with Roberts again and politely concluding, "It was an unfortunate time for us to work together."

For her part, Roberts later refuted rumors of her misconduct, telling Vanity Fair, "Hand to God: not a thing I read about that was truthful, and it really hurt my feelings. Because not only did it make me sound mean, but it was a situation where people who knew the truth talked about it in a way that wasn't untruthful."

In Val Kilmer's defense, his behavior was far from the only problem plaguing The Island of Dr. Moreau's infamously troubled set—the production was so beset with difficulties that it later inspired its own documentary. On the other hand, if Kilmer wasn't alone in making Moreau a living nightmare, he seems to have been responsible for some of the bigger behind-the-scenes difficulties; in fact, original director Richard Stanley openly blamed the star's antagonistic behavior for getting him fired after a few days of filming.

If Kilmer wanted Stanley fired, he seems to have been just as prickly with his replacement. The studio brought in director John Frankenheimer specifically to ride roughshod over the increasingly out-of-control set, and although he survived his time with Kilmer, Frankenheimer was typically blunt about his feelings after the production wrapped. "I don't like Val Kilmer," he told Entertainment Weekly. "I don't like his work ethic, and I don't want to be associated with him ever again."

In the massive hit Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman plays a talented actor who takes his work so seriously that no one can stand to work with him—and according to director Sydney Pollack, that element of the gender-bending comedy was a bit of fiction imitating reality.

"Dustin feels that his job as an actor with any integrity is to dig his heels in and fight as hard as he can for what he believes in," Pollack told the New York Times. "For whatever reason, I think Dustin feels that directors and actors are biological enemies, the way the mongoose and the cobra are enemies. He sees every picture as what he calls a 'silent war.' And he's fought with most of his directors."

While it's hard to argue with the end result, which made nearly $200 million in 1982 and went on to be nominated for 10 Academy Awards, the tension between Hoffman and Pollack spilled over in front of the cameras (where Pollack played Hoffman's beleaguered agent) and onto the set. In a behind-the-scenes featurette filmed during production, co-star Bill Murray quipped, "I never realized they got up early when they didn't feel like getting up... This is a challenge, to have everyone really upset with you."