Director Ed Zwick revealed details of his tense relationship with Brad Pitt while filming Legends of the Fall in his memoir, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.
Zwick claimed he even got a call from Pitt's agent saying "Brad wanted to quit" after the first table read of what would become an award-winning '90s flick.
"It fell to [producer] Marshall [Herskovitz] to talk Brad off the ledge," the director penned in an excerpt of the book. "It was the first augury of the deeper springs of emotion roiling inside Brad."
"He seems easygoing at first, but he can be volatile when riled, as I was to be reminded more than once as shooting began and we took each other’s measure," he continued. "Sometimes, no matter how experienced or sensitive you are as a director, things just aren’t working."
Zwick claimed the Troy actor "would get edgy whenever he was about to shoot a scene that required him to display deep emotion," and noted Pitt's ideas for the character clashed with his own.
"Brad had grown up with men who held their emotions in check," he clarified. "I believed the point of the novel was that a man’s life was the sum of his griefs. […] Yet the more I pushed Brad to reveal himself, the more he resisted. So, I kept pushing and Brad pushed back."
Zwick also recalled a moment of frustration when he gave Pitt direction on set, admitting it was a "stupid, shaming provocation."
"Brad came back at me, also out loud, telling me to back off," he wrote in the book. "The considered move would have been to tell the crew to take five and for the two of us to talk it out. But I was feeling bloody-minded, and not about to relent."
Zwick confessed he'd been "angry" with Pitt for not trusting him to "influence his performance" as the director, as well as "for the reluctance he’d shown after the first table read."
"Who knows, I might even have been acting out my own inability to be vulnerable," he added. "But Brad wasn’t about to give in without a fight. In his defense, I was pushing him to do something he felt was either wrong for the character, or more ’emo’ than he wanted to appear onscreen."
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"I don’t know who yelled first, who swore, or who threw the first chair. Me, maybe?" he continued. "But when we looked up, the crew had disappeared. And this wasn’t the last time it happened. Eventually the crew grew accustomed to our dustups and would walk away and let us have it out."
Despite their occasional "blow up" arguments, Zwick revealed they would "make up and mean it" in the end. He also praised the Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood star as a "forthright, straightforward person," who was "fun to be with and capable of great joy."
"He was never anything less than fully committed to doing his best," Zwick said.
Variety reported the excerpts of Zwick's memoir.
