“I’m gonna kill him”: The director John Wayne loathed working with and hey problematic movie they made together
John Wayne‘s position as one of the most iconic figures in cinema history will rarely be challenged. Despite being one of the most polarising legends of old Hollywood, Wayne’s on-screen performances will outlast even his more outlandish opinions and unwanted, problematic behaviour. His career is littered with moments that will be forever emblazoned upon the collective cinematic consciousness.
But that doesn’t mean his career was all smooth sailing. Even forgetting his often racist outbursts or his sincere commitment to making cinema what he deemed a more wholesome, family experience, Wayne’s brutish outlook on life would often leave him rubbing up against his co-stars and contemporaries in uncomfortable ways. Over the years, he had notable squabbles with plenty of other actors, but there were also a few directors with whom he struggled.
Naturally, he would bicker with John Ford, the man he spent most of his career with. Ford would notably laugh at Wayne’s lack of service in the Second World War and use it to tease the star whenever they were on set. But one filmmaker pushed Wayne over the edge, with the western legend hating his experience under the spotlight with him.
“I ask him what’s on tomorrow’s shooting schedule, and he’ll tell me to spend more time absorbing the beauty of the scenery and less time worrying about my part,” Wayne once lamented of his time working with the acclaimed filmmaker John Huston. “When I tell him I can’t memorise the script unless I know what we’ll be shooting, the bastard says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll improvise.'”
For this reason alone, the set of The Barbarian and the Geisha, Huston and Wayne’s 1958 production, would be fraught with tension. Wayne was a traditionalist and saw his position as an actor as similar to any tradesman. He was there to do a job and needed the right tools to complete it. Any thought of acting as an art seemed far from Wayne’s understanding of the vocation.
The lack of a sustained script or comprehensive direction nearly pushed Wayne to quit the production: “After a couple of weeks out here with no action, I had to make up my mind whether to quit and go home and let them sue me, or stay and trust in God and Huston.” He would eventually stick by his commitment to the project and complete The Barbarian and the Geisha in Japan, “I decided to stay. Anyway, I was in too deep to get out,” he explained.
Angelica Allen, the script supervisor on the movie and Huston’s longtime colleague, remembered their frosty interactions: “They had nothing in common. John Wayne loathed him. He used to say, ‘I’m gonna kill him!’ I said, ‘I’ll fix up the appointment, what time do you want to come?’ But he didn’t want to be left alone with Huston.”
With a penchant for losing his cool, Wayne was notably shut off when interacting with Huston, hoping to keep his manners mild. “He was very regimented and could only go in one way. Very professional, but he wasn’t that bright,” Allen remembered. Rather than scream and shout at his new director, Wayne would confide in his most trusted filmmaker. “It’s a little frustrating trying to arouse the […] sleeping talent of our lead, Mr. Huston,” Wayne wrote to John Ford.
Wayne saw his opportunity to exert control when filming was complete, and Huston left for Hollywood to make his next picture. Wayne would remake several of the scenes in the movie because he simply didn’t like his hair in the cut. He wanted his character to have some “vitality” and so completely re-shot the scenes. It would lead to Wayne commandeering the entire movie.
“When I brought it back to Hollywood, the picture, including the music, was finished … It was a sensitive, well-balanced work,” Huston remembered in his memoirs written some 20 years after the movie was released. However, the actor would have his way with it; Huston wrote: “John Wayne apparently took over after I left… and when I saw it, I was aghast.”
How does the movie fare within the legacy of John Wayne?
Perhaps expectedly, The Barbarian and the Geisha was a complete box office disaster. And time hasn’t been particularly kind to it since. Alongside Wayne’s own attitudes towards race and conservatism being brought under fire, the picture has also received heaps of criticism for its white saviour framing. With Japanese characters often needing guidance or intervention in moralistic scenarios with Wayne acting as the conduit for a “proper” moral code.
As well as over-simplified viewpoints on Japanese culture and a serious lack of accurate casting, the movies feel incredibly outdated. But, considering it is nearly 70 years old, perhaps that is to be expected. In other words, the movie has some cultural blindspots from the 21st century pespective, but that’s ot what makes it a bad movie.
The two men heaped the reason for the failure on one another for the unmitigated disaster and held grudges towards one another for the rest of their lives. It would go down as one of Wayne and Huston’s worst pictures, and they only had each other to blame.
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