Why Antoine Fuqua and Bruce Willis didn’t get along: “Pain in my ass”
In addition to being one of the biggest stars in Hollywood during his pomp, Bruce Willis also developed a reputation for being a prickly customer on occasion, with the actor butting heads with several collaborators for an assortment of reasons.
Justin Long refused to comment on his experience working with the Die Hard star on the franchise’s fourth instalment. However, he noted he had a “very different experience” than the positive one enjoyed by Willis’ young The Sixth Sense co-star Haley Joel Osment, who couldn’t have spoken of him more highly.
Kevin Smith said that “true darkness is working with Bruce Willis” after they’d teamed up on the dismal buddy caper Cop Out, but that doesn’t mean he was always a difficult presence on set. Many former colleagues have nothing but nice things to say about him, although Antoine Fuqua falls somewhere in the middle.
The duo teamed up on 2003’s militaristic action-packed blockbuster Tears of the Sun, which finds Willis’ veteran soldier leading his team into the jungles of Nigeria to extract Monica Bellucci’s doctor to safety. As tends to be the case with the genre, enemy forces have other ideas, and the group’s decision to go off-mission and lead a band of locals to safety as part of the rescue presents danger from all sides.
It’s far from being the most memorable entry in either man’s filmography, and Tears of the Sun ended up bombing at the box office to rub further salt into a wound initially opened by the butting of heads between director and star. When asked to name the biggest pain in the arse he’d ever worked with by the BBC, Fuqua only had one answer.
“Bruce Willis. Pain in my ass, no problem about that,” he admitted, along with the entirely simple explanation of “we just didn’t get along”. That being said, the Equalizer trilogy helmer did share how “we got along off-camera, but shooting, we just didn’t get along”. They had different personalities and different approaches, which didn’t make for an ideal pairing during shooting.
“You have different work ethics, different opinions, different points of view, different methods of filmmaking, and we didn’t gel,” he continued. Still, they were friends when cameras weren’t rolling according to Fuqua, who sought to make it perfectly clear their continued disagreements were restricted solely to a professional setting.
In the years since making his feature debut, Fuqua has worked with Chow Yun-fat, Jamie Foxx, Denzel Washington, Mark Wahlberg, Gerard Butler, Chris Pratt, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Will Smith, so he’s encountered plenty of action heroes along the way. And yet, Willis stands out from the pack because, by the director’s own admission, he’s a massive pain in the arse from the second he steps onto the set.
