Fussy Eye: Ed Zwick

This is Anne Thompson's rebuke of Brad's PR's very foolish effort to discredit Ed Zwick.

Why Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts Behaved Badly: Ed Zwick Interview – IndieWire https://t.co/GnV0xJUjdT
— Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck) February 10, 2024

About 20 notebooks are socked away in producer-director-writer Edward Zwick’s office in no particular order, full of odd magazine clippings and notes. During the pandemic he rooted through them and rewatched his work, looking for the nuggets and details that would become his memoir “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.”

He chronicles a television career with longtime Bedford Falls partner Marshall Herskovitz — together they created “Thirtysomething,” “Once and Again,” and “My So-Called Life” — but much of the book tracks Zwick in the movie business, from Demi Moore and Rob Lowe in “About Last Night” in 1986, “Legends of the Fall” with Brad Pitt in 1994, “The Last Samurai” with Tom Cruise in 2003, “Blood DIamond” with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2006, and his last outing with Cruise, “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” in 2016.

Zwick and I have talked many times over the years; we reconvened over Zoom to parse his book, which lays bare the highs and lows of his varied career.

Anne Thompson: What were you initially trying to achieve? When did you decide to take off the gloves?

Ed Zwick: There were these relationships that have meant an enormous amount to me. You’d spent hours together and rainy wet nights and fights and tears and love affairs. I was trying to try to find some meaning in what these years had been to me. When I started writing, I didn’t even know I was writing a book. You keep a file on your computer and I would write “b–k,” not to defy the literary gods by saying, actually, it was a book. To take a little pressure off myself.

But once I started getting into it, and I showed it to a couple of friends who are serious writers who I count on to tell me when I’m full of shit, they were encouraging. But they also said, “Look, what you would say to an actor, or to a writer at this point is, ‘Where are you? You’ve got to dig deeper.'” And once I began to do that, I had to make a determination. If I was going to be authentic about what my memories were, and what I believe happened, that earned me the right to be equally so about these people. It’s a case-by-case thing, but there seemed to be a dividing line for me. If people behaved badly, professionally, that felt to be fair game, but to embarrass someone, personally, for the sheer sake of dish seemed to be out of bounds. That might have been the line that I was drawing there.

The first time you had trouble with an actor on a movie was post-“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” Matthew Broderick, who played the lead in the 1989 Civil War drama “Glory.” Not to mention his interfering mother.

I also went to great lengths, in that case and in a couple others, to try to be compassionate to understand what it is to be those people at that moment. He was 24 years old. He was surrounded by handlers and fluffers. And, his parent. That’s a lot of responsibility to put on the hands of a young actor, who’s not necessarily trained to be in that position and who then takes on the feeling and the anxiety of being responsible in this way. I tried to be mindful of what I would have been at 24. And at least showing some empathy, which at the same time, allowed me to be brutally honest.

I don’t think your memoir is like any other memoir that I’ve ever read. It lays bare how Hollywood actually works. How ugly it is.

I had an agenda: If only I could have had this book to read when I was starting out. There are going to be people who read this book because of the dish, and they’ve liked the movies, and they want to see the inside baseball. But my notion is there are going to be young filmmakers reading it, who are going to get something as to the rough-and-tumble of this process, and how failure plays a role and how to not think, “What’s going to happen if I get knocked down,” but when I get knocked down, how do you get up? How do you hold on to those things that were part of your dream, as everybody comes after you to tell you what your dream is supposed to be? The values of this place, and some of the toxicity of this place, is a strong force. It’s an entropy that you have to try to hold back.

You have a few mentors. One was Nina Foch at the AFI Conservatory.

She was extraordinary. She was an heir to a whole generation of Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen and Stella Adler. She was confrontational, too. She didn’t take any shit from a presumptuous 22-year-old.

Sydney Pollack saw something in you and took you under his wing at TriStar.

I had done a thing for television called “Special Bulletin” [1983], and it got a lot of attention. I got a call from my agent saying Sydney Pollack would like to meet you because he’d seen it. He had just finished some movies, the TriStar studio had just been formed, and they’d hired Sydney to be a consultant. And Sydney said, “Come on over and have lunch.” He liked to cook in his own kitchen at lunch. He said, “So kid, you want to make movies? How about if we give you enough money to not have to work for six months, figure out what you need to pay your mortgage, and whatever, trying to think about what you might want to do, you can develop a couple of scripts, you could read a lot of scripts.” That led to to “About Last Night” and that was the game-changing moment. It was an investment in an artist by another artist who sensed his possibility.

I don’t believe that would ever happen now.

If anybody were to take the aggregate of the P&L of all my movies, and say, “Well, should we make this bet over 25 years?” The answer is, “Yeah, you should have.” But ever since that time, everything has become a one-off. The idea of investing in a laboratory where you bring in artists, and try to give them at least some grace to figure out what they want to do? I was the beneficiary of it.

They just don’t have those budgets any longer.

Not at all, and they want to give you a thing that is already finished. A thing is never really finished until you’ve gone through that process. “Glory” began as one movie and became another movie as it was made. They have to allow for a certain amount of improvisation, a certain amount of openness to what’s happening in the whole process.

Your movies, more than most, were organically grown. One of them was “Shakespeare in Love.” You ended up being the producer and on stage on Oscar night. But that was a torturous, unpleasant story with Harvey Weinstein. You developed it, you started it. You went to playwright Tom Stoppard and convinced him to do the rewrite.

I got to work with one of my idols in a delicious experience. I remember Hitchcock saying that you make the movie in prep, and by the time you’re shooting, it is already made. In that sense, I had already made the movie in my head. But I just never got to make it in the flesh, and I had to accept that disappointment. Heartbreak, as in life, is part of being in the movie business.

So you had already built sets, everything was going forward. And Julia Roberts crumbled.

There again, she was very young, there was a lot of pressure on her. She might have feared how she might have done in the role. But for whatever reason, she behaved badly. And [Universal chairman] Tom Pollock — whom I adored, who had been a supporter to me, he’d been my lawyer earlier on — chickened out, didn’t hold her feet to the flame. Whether there was another agenda there about other things with the star, or Mike Ovitz, or God knows who, it just went away. I had to say, “Okay, what now?” Had that not happened, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to make “Legends of the Fall.”

Pitt on “Legends of the Fall” was not easy, either. You called him “volatile” on set. What makes a movie star behave badly or act out?

You have to understand the anxiety, the level of fear and dread to be out there, fronting a movie. Actors have come into this more from a state of hunger than from abundance. They’ve been shunted aside. They’ve been waiting to get into rooms; their whole life has been about reaching some perch and some purchase on a career. There’s this notion that the failure of a thing or the possible failure is a judgment, on their viability, on their bankability.

One of the actors that you had the most pleasurable experiences with, early in his career, was Denzel Washington. You got to see the emergence of his talent in “Glory.”

It was like discovering a Ferrari. And all you have to do is just put your hand on the steering wheel and go like this, and the car will go screaming around the corner. His abilities to be present, and to be creative in a moment, so exceeded anybody I’d ever worked with. He saved my ass countless times with scenes that wouldn’t have worked. The number of times that I recall him saying to me, “I can act those words.” In other words, “Those words suck, don’t worry, I can do that.” And he didn’t mean that cruelly. His instincts about scripts, like Tom Cruise’s — there are reasons why these guys have careers with that kind of longevity. It’s not because of some play of light and shadow on their face. They are every bit as smart and as gifted as any director or any writer. They don’t necessarily have the same language, but you ignore their contribution at your peril.

Tom Cruise and “The Last Samurai,” another project you developed from scratch. I love that moment where you’re rewriting John Logan in your Colorado winter cabin.

John had written a wonderful first draft, but he was then not available to do more work. I made the mistake of actually submitting it to Tom. I’d met Tom years before several times. Graciously, he passed. I was disappointed and realized I had made a stupid rookie error, which is say, give something to somebody before it’s absolutely the best it could be.

I rewrote the script in two weeks. I locked myself in there for hours and hours and hours. I walked back into [Warner production chief] Lorenzo di Bonaventura’s office, put the script on his desk, and said, “Here, I’ve rewritten it, you don’t have to pay me. What I want you to do is get this so that we can show this to Tom Cruise again.” He said, “Okay.” It is so rare for an actor to turn down something and then read it again.

You confessed your anxieties to Tom Cruise at one point. What happened?

At first I thought, “Oh God, he doesn’t want to hear it.” I realized later he had been in this situation so many times before. He wanted me to be that person who he could count on, who had these things handled. It was a teachable moment for me, which is to say that you have to own your size in those moments.

Brad Pitt Wasn't 'Volatile' on Set, Says Source, Slamming Director as 'Desperate for Attention' (Exclusive) https://t.co/07sBGR1cyj
— People (@people) February 8, 2024

An industry insider is pushing back on director Edward Zwick’s memories of working with Brad Pitt.

According to a source familiar with the filming of the 1994 Western hit Legends of the Fall, Pitt, who starred in the film, was not the “volatile” one on set, as Zwick claims in his upcoming memoir, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.

“They had disagreements,” a source involved with the film tells PEOPLE. “But Brad was not volatile.”

"It's sort of sad that he's so desperate for attention that he would talk trash about people like Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt and others, when he's the one whose behavior, kicking over chairs and throwing things, got so bad that it upset the cast and crew," says the source.

Reps for Zwick and Pitt did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Without going into detail, which presumably is forthcoming, Brad has talked about embracing his mistakes and weaknesses -- including losing his temper. It serves as his personal rebuke of his own PR.

Anthony Hopkins for Interview Mag
HOPKINS: I’ve read you had a struggle with booze and all that.
PITT: Well, I just saw it as a disservice to myself, as an escape.

HOPKINS: And you’re as easy going as ever.
PITT: Pretty much, it’s my gliding speed. But I lose it at times. I get sucked into something, and I can lose it. I take my hands off the wheel.

Discussing (Bullet Train) on Australian TV show Sunrise on Wednesday, the 58-year-old said he can relate to Ladybug's tendency to lose his temper, no matter how hard he tries to stay calm

'I mean, I'm pretty laid-back but I can lose it and lose my s**t, and I can certainly step in s**t and put my foot in my mouth,' he confessed, adding: 'So, [the film is] just making fun of all of that, where the big laugh is.'

"I think I spent years with a low-grade depression, and it’s not until coming to terms with that, trying to embrace all sides of self—the beauty and the ugly—that I’ve been able to catch those moments of joy.”

it’s really not till recently that I have had a greater embrace of my friends and family.

And he explains, as if to a friend, something he has learned about effective communication in a relationship, emphasizing that a healthy self begins with taking “radical accountability.”

According to a source close to Pitt, “Brad was drinking, and the confrontation got out of hand. He was absolutely wrong in how he behaved but immediately apologized and acknowledged that he had crossed a line, which he will always regret, and right away took steps to address this and try to make amends.”

“This case has been covered as a celebrity divorce; it is really a story about abuse,” says a source familiar with the matter.

“I hope you’ll give some grace to somebody who had a breakdown,” says one person who knew the family.

His reps are doing him a disservice trying to discredit an Oscar-winning director who has worked with many big stars. It was an ill-advised effort to use the same playbook they used to shift blame to Angelina right after the incident.