Director recalls fight with Brad Pitt on the set of “Legends of the Fall”

In his autobiography, director Edward Zwick recalled the constant fights and arguments with Brad Pitt while recording the 1994 film “Legends of the Fall”.

Zwick's autobiography, “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions”, has not yet been released, but an excerpt was published by the magazine Vanity Fair. According to the director, discussions between him and Brad Pitt happened frequently because the two had different ideas for his character Tristan in the film.

“Brad would get nervous whenever he was about to film a scene that required him to show deep emotion. It was here that his ideas about [o personagem] Tristan differed from mine. Brad grew up with men who controlled their emotions; I believed the point of the novel was that a man's life was the sum of his pains,” the director wrote.

He continued: “One afternoon I started loudly lecturing him in front of the team—a stupid, shameful provocation—and Brad responded, also loudly, by telling me to stop. The right thing would have been to tell the team to take five minutes and the two of us to talk about it. But I was feeling bad and wasn't willing to give in. I was angry at Brad for not trusting me to influence his performance. Brad wasn’t willing to give in without a fight.”

“In his defense, I did pressure him into doing something he felt was wrong for the character or more “emo” than he wanted to appear on screen. I don't know who screamed first, who cursed or who threw the first chair. Maybe I? But when we looked up, the team was gone,” he added.

According to Zwick, that wasn't the first fight between the two on set. “Eventually, the team got used to our fights and stepped aside and let us resolve the issue. One of them said: 'We hate it when our parents fight'”, recalled the director.