The director intimidated by Gene Hackman: ‘It was great and scary”
If there were some objective scale for measuring acting greatness, then Gene Hackman would appear somewhere near the top. The moustachioed maestro could do it all, serious and comedy, simple and complex, as capable of manipulating an audience in his late 60s as he was in his prime. Whether as an embattled cop in The French Connection, Lex Luthor in the ‘Superman’ series, or in any of the countless other great roles he embodied, Hackman always brought his A-game. That being said, he wasn’t always easy to work with.
Hackman famously loved acting, but hated pretty much everything else that came along with it. He would repeatedly get into arguments with co-stars and directors. He made no secret of his feelings towards John Travolta when they worked together on Get Shorty, reportedly yelling at him constantly for failing to know his lines.
One person who witnessed the star’s frustrations is the director Andrew Davis. The brains behind The Fugitive and Under Seige, Davis directed Hackman in 1989’s The Package, a political thriller in which he played a Green Beret protecting the President of America in Cold War-era Berlin. This was early in the filmmaker’s career, and his inexperience was on full display whenever he was around his leading man.
“I had never worked with an actor of that caliber before,” Davis told The Film Stage. Actually, it was the first time I’d worked with [Tommy Lee Jones] also. And they had just a few scenes together. It was great and scary. It was like I had to learn to give him space to find how he wanted to handle certain things within the context of the script and be able to work around that. You don’t tell Gene Hackman how to pick up the apple.”
However, in general, the experience was good: “So it was good. I’m very proud of the movie. I think he was 60 years old. He was doing a lot of action. He was banging himself around, falling down, and rolling over. It’s an active role for him, this 60-year-old man.”
Davis admitted to feeling a certain sense of kinship with Hackman, as they’d both grown up in the state of Illinois. The interview was conducted shortly after the announcement of the actor’s death, which spun off into a bizarre media circus. Davis said that The Package was ‘haunting me right now’ following the sad news.
By the time The Package came around, Hackman was a four-time Oscar nominee (and one-time winner) who was widely regarded as one of the best to ever grace a screen. Here he was making a movie on a modest budget with a director nobody had heard of. You can understand why he might have objected to being told what to do in this scenario; he’d been around long enough to ‘pick up the apple’, as Davis put it. The director deserves credit for backing off and letting his star figure things out for himself. That’s the best way to manage an actor who’s being difficult.
Whether he was rightly annoyed at this perceived patronising or just letting his ego run wild, Hackman seems to have had a positive impact on Davis and a number of the other directors he worked with. He may not have always been an angel, but the results speak for themselves.
