“Pull up your pants and act like a man”: the actor who labelled Wes Anderson a “c**t”
There can’t be too many people in the industry who have a bad word to say about Wes Anderson, based solely on the fact that the writer and director has spent the last three decades consistently working with the same cast and crew members to build Hollywood’s widest recurring repertory.
Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, and Wallace Wolodarsky have been regular collaborators since the 1990s, while the following decade introduced multiple fixtures of Anderson’s ensembles, including Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Anjelica Huston, and Jeff Goldblum.
Even in his most recent batch of features, Anderson has welcomed even more names into the fold, expanding his collection of favoured actors by enlisting Fisher Stevens, Rupert Friend, Frances McDormand, and Tony Revolori, which only covers those who’ve become ubiquitous in front of the camera.
Music supervisor Randall Poster, cinematographer Robert Yeoman, composer Alexandre Desplat, and production designer Adam Stockhausen are among those who’ve been added to the tight-knit group at various points, with Anderson collating what looks, for all intents and purposes, to be cinema’s happiest extended family.
However, there always tend to be exceptions that prove the rule, and even if he hadn’t retired several years later to draw a line under a legendary career that placed him in the company of America’s greatest-ever screen actors, there’s no chance Gene Hackman would have gone anywhere near Anderson following The Royal Tenenbaums.
The bad blood between the two-time Academy Award-winning icon and the auteur has become the stuff of legend, with Hackman upping his belligerence levels to the maximum. Anderson isn’t entirely sure why Hackman was so pissed off all the time when they were making the movie, but it was an experience he still managed to look back on fondly despite the tension between them.
Huston recalled that during one verbal tirade, The French Connection and Unforgiven star instructed the relative newcomer – who was only on his third feature at the time – to “pull up your pants and act like a man.” If anything, that was positively quaint compared to his other insults, which Noah Baumbach dredged back up to the surface.
Reminiscing at a tenth-anniversary Q&A session moderated by Baumbach, Anderson thanked Huston, Murray, and Gwyneth Paltrow for their assistance. “You did, all three of you did defend me,” he said. “But that’s making it sound bad. Well, he did call me a worse name.” Baumbach stepped in and didn’t beat around the bush; “He called you a cunt, didn’t he?”
The director answered in the affirmative, confirming that Hackman did, in fact, call him a cunt at least once during the production of The Royal Tenenbaums. The star probably thought Anderson deserved the tongue-lashing, but even though his behaviour has become one of the most famous aspects of the film, it turned out pretty great in the end despite the veteran’s perpetually angry presence.
