Anyone have any stories of film directors that were abused and prevented from work by an impossible diva (I’ll include male actors here, too).
On the flip side, how about directors that put the brat actor/actress in their place?
I don’t know why, but this morning I was thinking about how tough it must be to be a film director and deal with the overbearing and entitled attitude of some actors. I’d like to hear stories of that (especially of strong willed directors taking charge and getting their way).
The juicier, the better!
PS: My brain is farting me on the correct word to describe this type of person since a diva is technically a woman, right? Damn you brain!
Well, there are tons of actors/actresses who are considered “difficult” to work with. Many later have difficulties getting work with big name directors, as word spreads quickly, but they can usually find some independent films or the occasional TV guest starring role. Plus, sometimes they mellow out with age, sometimes they get more difficult with age - so casting directors never know for sure how much those “rumors” are true or not.
Often, it is bad chemistry - they might be great with one director in one film, but be a real pain in the ass with another director on a different film.
Charlie Sheen is currently the poster boy for being a bad-boy diva, but from all reports from members of the cast of Two And A Half Men, he was never late for the show, knew all his lines and was fun to work with…not so much for the creators of the show - but the cast had no complaints. So, is he a diva?
Almost every movie and TV show has stories about certain actors/actresses who come close to ruining a show/film - but often that doesn’t show up on screen and they keep getting work. I could list some names I have heard, but again - those were just examples on one particular project; maybe they were going through a divorce, maybe they were going through some other family crisis, or drug addiction, etc. During those periods, I am sure many thought they were divas. But on the next project, they were the perfect professional to work with.
George Cukor was replaced by Victor Fleming as director of Gone With The Wind at the insistance of Clark Gable. Gable did not want to work under a director with whom he’d had sex with years earlier when he was doing what he could to get established (this according to Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, widely understood to be a pack of lies).
Dennis Hopper had been influenced with James Dean’s style of acting, but when he attempted it on Henry Hathaway’s set, Hathaway broke him like a horse, forcing him to run a scene more than 80 times over several days.
That was the direct, all-American way of dealing with temperamental actors. Burt Landcaster was notorious for telling his directors how to do their jobs. But when he went to Italy to earn actor cred (as opposed to “movie star”) and pulled his usual crap on the set of Luchini Visconti’s The Leopard, handled it more suavely. Visconti announced that he and the crew would break for lunch until Senior Lancaster was prepared to take direction. Eventually Landcaster realized that an Italian “break” could last days or weeks, and that he was the one who had sought the part for its prestige rather than Visconti’s courted him for his star power.
The word you’re looking for is, “divo”. Calling someone a divo/diva used to be quite a compliment. Then people started using the word ironically to the point where folks forgot about the ironic usage and the word became an insult. Shame, really.