One actor has opened up about a tense moment between Brad Pitt and Quentin Tarantino while filming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, recalling that the director allegedly told Pitt he’d be “dead in this business”.
Disagreements on set aren’t exactly rare. Creative teams don’t always align, and friction between actors and directors has been part of Hollywood lore for decades.
There are plenty of examples of that dynamic spilling into the public eye, including Kiera Knightley and John Carney.
The two worked together on the 2013 film Begin Again, after which Carney described Love Actually star Knightley as a “supermodel” rather than an actor. He told The Independent that “being a film actor requires a certain level of honesty and self-analysis that I don’t think [Knightley’s] ready for yet”. Ouch.
Carney later apologized for the comments.
And it appears Pitt and Tarantino may have had a prickly moment of their own during the making of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Pitt played stuntman Cliff Booth in the acclaimed film, and shares a scene with Bruce Dern, who portrays George, the owner of Spahn Ranch. In the story, the ranch—once used for filming—has been taken over by the Manson family, prompting Booth to check in on the elderly George. When he arrives, George is in bed inside his trailer.
Speaking to PEOPLE about shooting that sequence, Dern said: “When Brad Pitt wakes me up, I’m in the bed and I get up and I’m a little groggy and stuff, and I just say, ‘I’m not really sure what’s going on.’
“I’m looking at him. [Pitt] cut the camera. He cut the camera. The look on Quentin’s face — I mean, he was insanely grave — and he said, ‘Brad, what did you just do?’ He said, ‘Well, I cut the camera.’”
Tarantino reportedly answered: “Never again in your life will you ever cut a camera, or you’ll be dead in this business. That’s my domain. Don’t stop behavior.”
Dern added: “So then we went on and did the scene and all Brad did was say to him, ‘Well, that wasn’t in the script what he said.’”
The 89-year-old actor also told PEOPLE he’d improvised his line during the take.
In the finished film, George tells Booth: “I don’t know who you are, but you touched me today. You came to visit me, now I gotta go back to sleep.”
Despite the story of the on-set exchange, one source has pushed back on the idea that there’s any lingering tension between the two. They said: “Quentin is one of Brad’s favorite directors, and they have a great rapport.”
Representatives for Pitt and Tarantino have been contacted for comment.