The actor who said they’d “never work with Bruce Willis again”
While it’s natural that the sad circumstances surrounding the health of Hollywood megastar Bruce Willis have led to tributes from all over the industry, it’s worth noting that many members of the public have also talked about how kind the action star has been to them over the years in different scenarios.
But in a nigh-on 50-year career, not everyone is going to like you, and that proved the case when Willis was at the height of his fame.
That’s because when one of the movie-making old guard, seasoned veteran James Garner, in fact, found himself working with Willis in 1988, he was not impressed, to say the least. Now Garner wasn’t just any old actor; this was someone who had appeared in 50 movies, including opposite Steve McQueen in The Great Escape and was no stranger to going head to head with tough guys, having worked with Bruce Lee.
But Willis, who was about to have a forever-hit with the monumental Die Hard late that same year, was not to Garner’s taste, as he explained in his biography, saying: “I’d never work with Bruce Willis again. I did that Blake Edwards film with him, Sunset. Willis is in high school. He’s not that serious about his work. He thinks he’s so clever he can just walk through it, make up dialogue and stuff. I don’t think you work that way.”
Which, to be fair, is probably true if you’re someone who’s been making TV and movies for more than 30 years – you’re not going to be too used to folk just going off script because they feel like it. Garner was also a former army man and recipient of a Purple Heart for bravery, which they don’t hand out like sweets, so the likelihood is that he was, shall we say, something of a ‘no nonsense’ chap.
Sunset, the film in question, also happened to be an enormous flop, which probably didn’t help Garner’s recollection of the movie and the process involved in making it. A curious kind of crime/mystery/western set in the 1920s, it was a disaster at the box office on release, with critics and audiences alike not really sure what it was supposed to be: a comedy or a drama.
British star Malcolm McDowell was also on board, and the music was provided by The Pink Panther legend Henry Mancini, but that wasn’t enough to save it from bringing in just under $5million against a production budget of more than $16m.
It seems like most of the cast really signed up to the film solely as a chance to work with the director, Blake Edwards, who was responsible for classics including Audrey Hepburn’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But its failure didn’t dent Willis’ trajectory, of course, with Die Hard becoming one of the highest-grossing movies of the year and spawning four sequels. Garner, on the other hand, spent most of the next decade making TV movies, although he did have something of a hit in Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys in 2000.
Garner’s final big role came in Ryan Gosling’s classic weepy The Notebook in 2004, when he played the older version of Gosling’s character. Over his long career, he won three Golden Globe awards and passed away in 2014.
