Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  The subject matter didn’t lighten the atmosphere much, either. For six days they shot scenes of people trying to grab food off a truck. Then for three days they shot a scene of a woman being shot in the head. Then they’d shoot a scene of a gas attack. Then a scene of treating Pfc. Conrad Vig’s injured eye. “None of it was fun,” recalled Goodman.

  Many felt, and probably Russell would even admit, that he was in over his head; he’d never made a movie remotely this ambitious. But things were made incalculably worse by a culture clash between his way of working from independent film, and the Warner Brothers tried-and-true studio machine. Russell wanted to work improvisationally, changing dialogue and devising new shots as he went along. The crew wanted more preparation and didn’t know what to expect with Russell. “David is a painter, not a technician,” observed Goodman. “They’re used to technicians.” Often Russell would give new instructions as the cameras were still rolling—“Okay, don’t say that line, say this instead …”—an unstructured method of getting his actors to keep pushing, keep honing. Eventually it led them to reveal the emotional truth of the scene, but it required focus and flexibility from everybody on the set.

  And the director was nervous, to put it charitably. On the very first day of filming Clooney had a scene with a French actor. The French actor, who was trying to do what Russell wanted, called for the line and the script girl gave it to him. Russell turned to her and snapped, “You don’t talk to the actors.” She burst into tears. It was a sign of things to come.

  More fundamentally there was a gulf between director and crew. For a big Hollywood studio, Warner Brothers can be a very provincial place. The hundreds of technical craftspeople who work on the lot are often second-or third-generation employees of the studio, tan, muscle-bound men who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and had the Big Studio culture ingrained in them. Goodman called it “a Calabasas cul-de-sac kind of world.” Their worldview was very different from Russell’s. He had taken to wearing hip-hop clothes—baggy pants, hooded sweatshirt, boots, and beret—courtesy of Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube. Some thought he’d adopted a hip-hop attitude, too, a swagger. The crew was not willing to work past their union hours—that was never done at a major studio. If Russell was in the middle of the scene at lunch break, the crew would be looking at their watches, while Russell wanted another take. The crew was also impatient; they were mad he hadn’t given them a shot list in the morning, which annoyed Russell. At the same time, Russell was not easy to deal with. He was pushy, scared. He insisted on working as an artist. To the crew, he was a strange bird, staring into space, racing out into the desert at lunch. As Nora Dunn, who played a war journalist, put it, “David’s always in the moment, but it’s not always going to be the moment you’re in.” Often no film was printed before lunch, then after lunch they’d have to run and shoot. Russell would be hysterical, shouting at the crew as the light faded, “Just shoot! Just shoot!”

  The crew began to form into a kind of anti-Russellian bloc. They thought the movie was strange, with its shifting dialogue and ambiguous morality. It had good Arabs and bad Arabs. It was confusing. They would mutter under their breath “What kind of crap is this?” and “This is insane. What movie are we making?”—comments that would filter back to the director. It began to feel like sides were taken. Clooney would defend the crew, saying, “Hey, come on, don’t try to rush the crew like that, buddy.” He sidled over to Goodman one day and said, “I don’t know how a nice guy like you could be friends with a guy like that,” referring to Russell. Goodman was nonplussed. “Why can’t I just be loyal to my friend?” he responded. Relations deteriorated particularly with several crew members. Russell clashed with his cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel, whom the director felt had been foisted on him by Warner Brothers. Others felt he ought to be grateful, that Sigel was the reason the movie looked fantastic. Clooney was mortified that Russell didn’t seem to show any concern at all for other people on his set. One day an extra had an epileptic seizure, and Clooney—like a real movie hero—rushed to his aid (a moment which made the tabloids: “Clooney to the rescue in real-life ER Drama”). According to the actor, though, Russell blithely wandered back to the monitor and ordered that the shot continue. “You can’t do that,” Clooney later told Russell. “You’ve got a man down on your set.” Russell said he wasn’t aware that someone had passed out. “It’s five hundred yards from where I was, and I was still setting up a shot,” he protested. “And he’s like, ‘Look at this, a director who doesn’t even come over to look at the extra.’ I was thinking to myself, ‘Fuck you.’”

  But Russell’s relationship with the crew was not nearly as fraught as the one he had with Clooney. They had gotten off on the wrong foot, and it didn’t take long for them to clash on the set. Four or five days into the shoot the director and star were driving in a Humvee with a camera attached. According to Clooney, Russell shouted at the driver to go faster. “David started reaming this guy. I got off the Humvee and said, ‘Knock it off,’” said Clooney. “David was stunned. I’d humiliated him. But I said, ‘This is not the way to do this.’” Russell read the incident entirely differently. “The crane broke, we were losing the day and I was upset about that. So I jumped off the truck and I was like, ‘Fuck!’ I was just kicking the dirt and everything like that. And then George had this big thing about defending the driver of the truck, whom I hadn’t really said anything to. The drive was fine, but George seized on that like I was the bad abusive director and he was going to defend the guy. The guy turned out to be friendly with me throughout the shoot. I made a point of being friendly to him, because I thought George was casting me as this bad guy.”

  It was not the last time the two clashed. Matters were exacerbated by Russell’s tension with the crew, guys Clooney knew and worked with on the Warner lot for years; he respected them. It made for a strange dichotomy. Clooney was a schmoozer, a guy’s guy and a basketball player who liked to shoot hoops with assorted crew members between setups. In the industry he was known as “Good-Down, Bad-Up”—shorthand for his ease with guys lower on the totem pole and his difficulty with those with more authority. He constantly stuck up for the crew when Russell pushed for one more take or curtly demanded that a gaffer hurry up. Clooney played pranks and made jokes, annoying Russell with fake sneezes in his direction or getting into a rock fight with Nora Dunn. One day Clooney took the antenna on his Humvee, put an apple on the end of it, whipped it back and smacked Dunn on the forehead. “Whap!” Clooney recalled, delighted. “I go around getting high fives.”

  Russell thought Clooney ought to be working on his performance instead of horsing around. There was tension, too, between Clooney and some of his fellow actors. While he was beloved with the crew, Clooney sometimes came to work unprepared—understandable given the demands of his schedule. Other actors complained that he wouldn’t look them in the eye during dialogue. Russell kept pushing Clooney to look directly at other actors, and would grumble when Clooney slowed down principal photography because he didn’t know his lines. Clooney also didn’t respond well to Russell’s improvisational style. Russell would give a direction in the middle of a take, and “it would be tense,” said Goodman. “George didn’t come prepared to do improv every day.”

  Clooney had reportedly had trouble with his lines on other movies. After Three Kings he made The Perfect Storm, a big-budget action movie about the capsizing of a New England fishing boat, Clooney taped his lines of dialogue to the steering panel of the boat. In a scene in which Clooney and John C. Reilly, playing a fellow sailor, were buffeted back and forth by waves, Reilly—as a prank—dove across the steering panel and ripped off the lines of dialogue Clooney had taped there. For the rest of the takes, Clooney ad-libbed things along the lines of “Aaaaaagh!”

  Clooney acknowledged that he didn’t do well with Russell’s loose style. But he says that if he didn’t know his lines on Three Kings, it’s because the dialogue kept changing. “I had long, long monologues written, and he
would rewrite all of it in the morning,” he said. “That happens on every job, but the hard part was that he was so specific about everything—down to the movement of a finger. David’s feeling was, ‘What am I supposed to do? Shoot it the way I don’t like it written?’ And my feeling was, ‘What am I supposed to do? I don’t know my lines.’”

  Other cast members found the method challenging, too. “We would complain about doing a scene thirteen or fourteen times,” said Ice Cube, “but if we didn’t get what the director wanted, you’ve got to do it again. I would hate for George to just say, ‘Fuck it! What’s my line? All right I’ll do it,’ and then go back to his trailer.” Jonze said he learned a lot from watching Russell’s method of working. “He’ll throw everything out if there’s a new idea that’s better,” said Jonze. “He’s not precious about his words because he can always make something better, or more real, or finding a way that’s real but funny.” But, he noted, “it’s a certain sense of chaos, and obviously that’s stressful to everyone else because it’s like—you’re planning to do something like this and suddenly it’s, ‘This is a better idea, let’s do this.’ But at the same time, it always did make it better.”

  Goodman and studio veteran Charles Roven had their own culture clash. Once the shoot began the line producer found out that the studio hadn’t built 10 percent extra into the budget for contingencies, as was common in the indie world, so he was behind on the finances from the start. And while Goodman was accustomed to shaving corners to save money, a habit from the indie world, Warner Brothers didn’t like to skimp in making its movies. Instead, they wanted a precise budget detailing what the movie cost and a forecast of likely budget overruns. If Goodman suggested using a location they’d rented, a twenty-five-square-mile copper mine in the desert, for more than one scene, Roven would chafe. “That’s too ‘little-movie,’ Greg,” he’d admonish. Meanwhile Goodman (and Russell, too) wondered whether the story really needed a scene in which Ice Cube threw a football-bomb at a helicopter, detonating it. It added an additional $1.5 million to a movie that was already starting to slide over budget.

  As they watched the shoot progress, Warner Brothers executives began to panic about certain riskier elements. On the one hand, they were worried their action war movie didn’t have enough action in it. On the other, they were disturbed by several graphic scenes that Russell wanted to shoot, not just for their visual impact but to dramatize the human cost of war. The studio thought a stunt blowing up a cow was too expensive and absurd. (Clooney helped convince the studio to go ahead with it.) They didn’t like showing birds drenched in oil from the oil fields (though they didn’t seem to mind human casualties). They resisted a key graphic scene in the film, in which an Iraqi woman is shot in the head; it is the turning point in the story, where the would-be gold diggers are shocked into aiding the fleeing Shiites. Also the studio was very disturbed by a shot that showed a bullet tearing its way into the human body, showing the infected organs in nauseating detail. Russell wanted to use a corpse, and did, over studio opposition. It only stayed in the movie after passing muster with the test audience.

  When it came to filming the torture scene with an Iraqi interrogator, played by Moroccan actor Saïd Taghmaoui, the studio balked again. Not at the torture, but at the reference to Michael Jackson. Russell had written some dialogue that had the torturer asking about Jackson’s apparent predilection for little boys. Warner Brothers told him to take it out, but Russell resisted until the day the scene was to be shot. Finally the studio produced a legal document that the director had to sign, promising the scene would not be offensive to Michael Jackson. The reference remained, but the part about little boys was removed.

  As the shoot drew toward its close, relations had badly deteriorated on the set. Hoping to clear the air, Clooney scribbled a three-page, single-spaced letter to Russell, venting his anger, desperately attempting to salvage things.

  “At every step of the way, from my voice, to my gestures, to my interpretation, to my slurring words, you have made it your mission to change me of my bad habits,” he wrote. “Now it’s my turn. Since I’ve logged around 6,000 work days on a set and you’ve had in the neighborhood of 110 days, I’m going to give you a few pointers.”

  Clooney then let loose his fury against Russell for all the bad behavior: yelling at the camera car driver; telling the cinematographer his shot “sucks.” “You have created the most havoc-ridden, anxiety-ridden, angry set that I have ever witnessed,” he wrote. Clooney said he was struggling with his performance because he didn’t know what the director wanted. “You didn’t get Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson or Nick Cage. You got me. Be glad. Because they would have walked long ago,” he wrote. “You use me when you need me, working the budget, the film processing, even to keep them from pulling the plug. But when it’s time for my input the answer is no. Every time.” Clooney urged Russell to try and start over, to communicate, to be patient, to provide a shot list. “I’m holding out my hand and offering you an olive branch,” Clooney concluded. “And to take it, all you have to do is reach.”

  That seemed unlikely because by this time, the relationship was unsalvageable. Those who’d watched the tension ratchet up between Russell and his leading star thought it came from a mutual frustration. Clooney believed he was giving all he had artistically to the role and was making a considerable physical effort by working on both his day job and the movie simultaneously. But Russell thought Clooney wasn’t going deep enough as an actor, wasn’t taking the journey of the character. He thought Clooney was masking his acting inadequacies by horsing around with the crew, using them as a wedge. “I’m convinced that had George given it up, things would have been different,” said Goodman, who takes Russell’s side. “George gave as far as he went, and he went as far as he could, but he resented David asking him to go further.”

  The tension came to a head a few days after the letter during one of the last days of production. It was the end of a long day shooting a complicated scene in which a group of Iraqi refugees was trying to make it to the safety of the Iranian border as U.S. troops pursued them. In the scene, Mark Wahlberg’s character, who had been shot in the chest, was struggling to breathe. The actor kept hyperventilating and blacking out. Helicopters were flying overhead; a hundred extras milled about.

  In the scene, a soldier—played by a young ROTC recruit from the area—was supposed to throw Ice Cube down on the ground, but did so too timidly for Russell. According to one version, Russell physically took the extra and moved him, to show him what to do. According to Clooney and others, Russell took the man and threw him on the ground. “He went nuts on an extra” was Clooney’s version. Others disagree. “An extra was supposed to attack Cube and bring him down to the ground,” said producer Edward McDonnell, who was among the several dozen present. “He tried it three or four times and didn’t get it right. David was slightly frustrated and showed him exactly how he would like Cube to be brought down.”

  Either way, Clooney had had enough. He thought what Russell did was over the line. All the pressure of the moment, and the tension of the previous weeks, erupted. He took Russell aside. “Don’t you push those people around!”

  Russell was confused. “What are you fucking talking about? Why don’t you do your job?”

  “You’re being an asshole. Don’t you fucking touch those people!” The two were shouting nose to nose.

  “Hit me, pussy!” yelled Russell.

  “I’m gonna fuck you up!”

  “Oh yeah? You’re gonna fuck me up? Mr. Bad Ass?”

  At that point Russell head-butted Clooney. Clooney grabbed Russell by the neck amid the chaos of the heat, the dust, the extras, the cameras, and the fading light of the day. The second assistant director, Paul Bernard, quietly quit, setting down his camera and walking off the set.

  The two were broken up and each went to cool off, though not before shouting a few “fuck yous” in each other’s direction. When things cooled down, Russell returned and apo
logized to the cast and crew. They picked up the threads of the day and made the shot.

  “I thought things were better after that,” said Russell. It seemed better to have lanced the boil, to get the tension out in the open, and the two shook hands.

  The security detail shut down the set for the day. Immediately Warners sent a physical production executive, Bill Draper, to the set as an enforcer, to make sure the movie wrapped on day seventy-three, five days late. By that time, everyone’s nerves were raw. Russell was quiet for days—contrite even.

  He and Clooney agreed not to talk about it, but of course it did get talked about. Everyone on the set and everyone in production at Warner Brothers knew about it. On the record, Russell and Clooney both concluded it was behind them. “George and I are friends now,” Russell told Premiere. Clooney told the magazine just ahead of the movie’s release: “It’s a movie and part of the process is that there’re gonna be misunderstandings…. It’s not a problem. It was really nothing.”

  But then in interviews with Entertainment Weekly and Premiere, Clooney described the dispute in detail. And he didn’t hold back his feelings about Russell. “He’s a weirdo, and he’s hard to talk to, but that’s what makes his writing unique,” said Clooney to Entertainment Weekly. “Will I work with David ever again? Absolutely not. Never. Do I think he’s tremendously talented and do I think he should be nominated for Oscars? Yeah.”