The director who almost quit Hollywood because of Steven Seagal: “He is a nightmare”
It’s remarkable that Steven Seagal even had a career in cinema when there’s barely anybody with a nice word to say about him. The martial artist had his fans, though, which is probably the only reason he continued churning out terrible straight-to-video movies for so long.
Seagal hasn’t appeared in a feature since 2019’s Beyond the Law, which has been a blessing for filmmakers, actors, and crew members across the industry. From most accounts, he’s a horrible person and a highly unprofessional presence on set, but apparently not enough of a magnanimous arsehole to keep him out of work for too long between the late 1980s and the late 2010s.
With his reputation established early on, everybody should have known what they were getting into whenever they agreed to board a production with Seagal attached. Anthony Hickox wasn’t the first or last director to speak ill of the star, but his experience was so thoroughly miserable that it left him contemplating his future.
2005’s Submerged was scripted as “a full-on horror and sci-fi,” according to Hickox, who pitched his vision as a cross between The Thing and Das Boot: “And then Seagal came on board.” Three weeks before shooting, the actor called and informed him that it was no longer a sci-fi movie. Why? “Because I don’t like aliens, and I don’t like monsters. I don’t want to be in a monster movie.”
Never mind the fact that was the script he read and agreed to star in, Hickox knew he was up shit creek without a paddle. “We had no clue what we were doing,” he admitted. “It was really insane. At that point, again, I should have quit, but I needed the cash.”
Once Submerged had wrapped, the director was well past his breaking point. “I just decided, ‘I can’t do this shit anymore,'” he admitted to Dread Central. “He is a nightmare. He’s impossible; he doesn’t turn up, and he refuses to say any line that’s written; it’s just ridiculous. I sat back when I was making it and said, ‘I’m a better director than this.'”
It would be another three years before another Hickox-directed film was released, and while that doesn’t sound like a long time, it was the longest he’d ever gone without making a new movie since debuting in 1988 with cult horror Waxwork. His time with Seagal was so crushing that he needed to take a step back, reassess, and recharge, and it’s certainly not a coincidence that he never went near the action genre again.
Hickox may have specialised in relatively low-budget fare that rarely saw the inside of a theatre, but he’d directed 17 films in 17 years before working with Seagal. After Submerged, he only made four in the next 14.
