6 Devastating Burns From Jerkass Directors About Their Stars and Everything Else That Annoyed Them

6 Stanley Kubrick

Despite Kubrick’s reputation, his entire career wasn’t a series of anecdotes about him being sadist. Why, there are several crazy stories about him that have nothing to do with him being a sadist. This next one, though, really is kind of about him being a sadist. 

It’s about A Clockwork Orange and that famous bit of therapy known as the Ludovico Technique. Alex, played by Malcom McDowell, is forced to watch disturbing footage while his body is primed to feel nausea, and to ensure he can’t look away, his eyes are physically held open with tools called lid locks.

Metal arms really did hold McDowell’s eyes open during this scene, and one of them scratched his cornea. The meant pain and cloudy vision, and when McDowell announced what had happened, that probably should have called for a break in filming, for the sake of medical attention.

“Let’s go on with the scene,” said Kubrick. “I’ll favor your other eye.” 

5 Alfred Hitchcock

Actress Tallulah Bankhead was known as an exhibitionist. At parties, she would do cartwheels in a dress and no underwear. 

This penchant for showing off private parts extended to other people’s parts as well. At these same parties, she sometimes led guests to the room where her husband John Emery was avoiding everyone and just sleeping in bed. She'd tear off the sheets and point at his crotch. “Did you ever see a prick as big as that before?” she’d ask. That marriage, surprisingly, didn’t last long. 

During one play she did in 1942, she refused to wear underwear, until her union commanded that she do so, following a series of complaints from audience members. Then came 1944, when she did Lifeboat, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This movie takes place entirely in a lifeboat, featuring survivors of a merchant ship that sinks during World War II. 

Here, too, Bankhead neglected to wear underwear. Someone complained to Hitchcock — exactly who complained is disputed. It might have been the crew, who knew they had to shoot around this choice of hers as she swung her legs out of the tank, and they found this inconvenient. Hitchcock said this issue wasn’t his department. And which department was it then, asked the complainer. Hitchcock said he wasn’t sure. He said it could be either the makeup or the hairdressing department. 

4 John Boorman

Deliverance is another movie chiefly about a boat ride, though it also features some assorted misadventures that happen around it. At one point, the guys go over a set of waterfalls that overturn their canoes, breaking one guy’s leg. That guy is played by Burt Reynolds, and the initial plan for the scene was to place a dummy of him in the boat and then film it falling over the falls.

Reynolds took a look at this footage and insisted on doing the scene again, this time for real. It didn’t go well for him. He cracked his tailbone and fell out of the boat, risking further injury at least as severe as his character was going to suffer. He let the waterfall take him down, having heard that the water would send him right back up to the surface, but the pressure was much higher than he’d expected. 

Along with keeping him under so long that the other guys feared he'd drowned, it ripped off his clothes. Still, it meant they had that shot of his body — not a dummy — going over the falls.

He now asked director John Boorman just how the shot looked. Said Boorman, “It looked like a dummy going over the falls.”

3 Michael Bay

Phone Booth, from 2002, takes place mostly in a phone booth, which is an object something like a lifeboat, but smaller. Even in 2002, the movie had to go to some way to explain why there was still a phone booth in operation in New York City and why its lead guy was using it when he had a phone of its own, but it’s all well worth it for the thriller that follows, and the movie made $100 million. 

The reason the movie was set in a phone booth despite taking place in the 21st century was that it wasn’t originally conceived in the 21st century at all. Writer Larry Cohen had thought it up decades earlier, when having lunch with Alfred Hitchcock, and he took his inspiration from Lifeboat. It took decades for anyone to buy the script, and for a while, Michael Bay was set to direct it. His first words about the project were, “Okay, how do we get this thing out of the damn telephone booth?”

Ultimately, Bay was relieved of directorial duties, which instead went to Joel Schumacher.

2 Quentin Tarantino

Inglorious Basterds doesn’t spell the word “bastard” correctly, according to most dictionaries we own. At the Cannes film festival, someone directly asked Tarantino why it was spelled that way. “I'm never going to explain the spelling,” he answered. “When you do an artistic flourish like that, to describe it, to explain it, to take the piss out of it would invalidate the whole stroke in the first place.”

That makes sense with some mysteries — the contents of the Pulp Fiction briefcase is the obvious example — but here, trying to make this a mystery feels dickish because we do have a decent idea of the answer. A deleted scene in the script uses that spelling every time one character says that word, to highlight his Boston accent. This was never originally planned as a mystery for the ages. It was just a detail that never made it to the final cut.

1 George Lucas

“There’s probably no better form of government than a good despot,” said Lucas in a 1999 interview. 

Out-of-context, you might think this was a facetious comment about his own need for control. There’s no way he’d really mean that, especially given that he was plugging his Star Wars prequels at the time, which tell of the dangers of people embracing despots. But no — he meant it, and he elaborated to explain this.

“The United States, especially the media, is eating its own tail,” he said. “The media has a way of leveling everything in its path, which is not good for a society. There’s no respect for the office of the presidency.” He wasn’t referring here to the president (Bill Clinton at the time) lacking respect for the office but to the public lacking respect for the president, thanks to the media. 

“Not that we need a king,” he continued, “but there’s a reason why kings built large palaces, sat on thrones and wore rubies all over. There’s a whole social need for that, not to oppress the masses, but to impress the masses and make them proud and allow them to feel good about their culture, their government and their ruler so that they are left feeling that a ruler has the right to rule over them, so that they feel good rather than disgusted about being ruled.”

“In the past,” said Lucas, “the media basically worked for the state and was there to build the culture. Now, obviously, in some cases it got used in a wrong way and you ended up with the whole balance of power out-of-whack. But there’s probably no better form of government than a good despot.”

Before, when we compared directors to kings, you thought we were joking, right? Nope. 

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