The actor Steven Spielberg never wanted to work with again: “It was an unfortunate time for us to work together”
Steven Spielberg has enjoyed the pleasure of working with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, collecting a list of some of the industry’s most illustrious names during his time as the highest-grossing filmmaker of all time. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he gets on with every actor he has directed.
In fact, the filmmaker has clashed with various actors over the years, finding certain stars just too difficult to work with. This kind of thing shouldn’t come as a surprise, really, because celebrities are a notoriously tricky group of people, and he’s not immune to this classification, either.
Working in an industry like Hollywood, where big personalities fight for the spotlight while immense strain takes hold from higher-ups, often creates a pressure-cooker environment that is subject to exploding. Sometimes it’s a miracle that a movie even gets made when there’s so much difficulty going on behind the scenes.
During the shooting of one of Spielberg’s less-revered films, Hook, he found himself working with someone whom he’d later refer to as an actor he would never work with again. The movie featured some big names, like Robin Williams, Glenn Close, Dustin Hoffman, and Bob Hoskins, but it was actually Julia Roberts who clashed with the director.
It’s rather surprising that she would be the one to anger the director the most, especially because she seems to have this perfect Hollywood image, but there were many rumours circulating about her rather diva-ish behaviour on set. This is something she denies, stating that any of her behaviour that came across as ‘difficult’ was totally justifiable.
“I’m a normal person,” she once said, “I mean, if I sit in my trailer for six hours doing nothing, I’m going to say, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I don’t think that’s an outrageous question. I don’t think that’s temperamental either.”
But reports from people who worked on the film paint a picture of a star who was “sometimes sombre, sometimes at the near edge of hysteria”. It seems like Roberts was going through a difficult time in her personal life, having recently called off her wedding to Kiefer Sutherland after apparently discovering that he had cheated on her, so perhaps she wasn’t in the greatest mental state.
Appearing on 60 Minutes, Spielberg was asked about his experience of working with Roberts, to which he replied, “It was an unfortunate time for us to work together, but I think that Julia is a really, really good actress”. When asked if he would work with her again, he dodged the question, saying, “This is a 60 Minutes question, isn’t it?” with a smile.
So, they might not have had a huge feud, but the tension between Spielberg and Roberts was enough to put the director off working with her again. However, Roberts was disappointed that the filmmaker would allude to having a difficult time working with her, though.
She told Vanity Fair, “I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that this person that I knew and trusted was actually hesitating to come to my defence. It was a hard lesson to learn. It was the first time that I felt I had a turncoat in my midst.” I think it’s safe to say that the pair will never work together again.
