“I was in trouble on that film”: the director Gene Hackman admitted was right to hate him
Throughout his career, it would be fair to say that Gene Hackman could be a pretty damn prickly customer. More often than not, he wouldn’t give a shit about being a jerk either. However, this wasn’t always the case, as one of his directors in the 1970s can attest.
One of the best things about Hackman was that he would always be honest about his failures, and if he didn’t like his own movies, he’d have no issue airing the dirty laundry. This radical honesty reared its head several times in the ’70s, a strange decade for the iconic star. It contained several of his greatest triumphs, including a ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award for The French Connection. However, he also wound up absolutely hating several of his movies, such as March or Die and Lucky Lady, causing the eternal goddamn conflict between mainstream success and artistic convictions that never really goes away.
Naturally, because Hackman was Hackman, this struggle with the push and pull between art and commerce usually manifested in him being bad-tempered and difficult to work with. In fact, he admitted to arguing almost every single day with director Stanley Kramer on 1977’s The Domino Principle, a paranoid conspiracy thriller that cast him as a Vietnam veteran sprung from prison by shadowy government forces to assassinate a politician.
Despite some good source material (a potboiler novel written by Adam Kennedy), a director who had three ‘Best Director’ nominations to his name, and a marketplace that loved similar thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View, The Domino Principle wound up a pale imitation of those films. It died at the box office, with the small number of people unlucky enough to see it being subjected to a boring drudge that somehow made exciting material seem like the least exciting thing in the world.
To be fair, both Hackman and Kramer knew while making the film that it wasn’t working, and it was obvious that this was what caused them to clash. Repeatedly. “We had a lot of problems on that film; I had arguments with Stanley Kramer,” Hackman admitted to The Los Angeles Times. To the star’s surprise, though, his disagreements with Kramer were so frequent and combustible that the director kept a diary of them, which went into excruciating detail. Amazingly, this diary was later published.
Suddenly, readers were given a glimpse behind the curtain into the poor behaviour of one of the industry’s biggest stars. The diary made it perfectly clear why Kramer may have hated Hackman during that shoot, and in normal circumstances, it would have been pretty damning for a major movie star. In response, though, Hackman engaged that radical honesty again and admitted that, while he couldn’t deny the diary was “embarrassing”, Kramer was well within his rights to publish it.
“I have to say it was accurate, and he was probably right in his remarks about me,” Hackman confessed with a brutal frankness that is rare in Hollywood. “The film we were making just wasn’t worth the difficulties I was giving him.” By way of explanation for giving Kramer such a hard time, Hackman explained, “The truth is I was in trouble on that film and I got scared.” Was this a hint at his inability to strike the right balance of performance and star power in a mainstream thriller or a suggestion that he didn’t like the material and became worried that it would bleed into his performance?
In truth, the second option actually seems the most likely, given something else Hackman later said about the film: “I’m told a lot of people didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand it either.” He simply felt like The Domino Principle was too damn convoluted for its own good, like a lot of espionage/conspiracy tales, and this fucking pissed him off, leading him to lash out at Kramer and adding to the belief held by many that he was yet another Hollywood asshole.
