The one director Marlene Dietrich hated working with: “I didn’t like his arrogance”
Just because actors and filmmakers seem like they’d have a lot in common, at least on the surface, that doesn’t always mean they’re going to get along.
There have been many infamous, damn-near homicidal direct-actor feuds over the years, from Tippi Hedren vowing never to work with Alfred Hitchcock again after The Birds or, more recently, the ongoing conflict between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively following It Ends With Us. Few will touch the strange relationship between Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog, however, with the director admitting to bottling out of having his actor killed on more than one occasion. Fitzcarraldo just really needed to get finished – and that wasn’t going to happen without a lead actor.
Being a director means having the confidence to command a large crew so that you can get exactly what you want, and that’s a lot of pressure. There’s so much at stake, and that leaves no room for messing about. However, the result of these demands is usually a filmmaker who isn’t afraid to get bossy, even tyrannical, in the name of art.
It’s definitely a role that many filmmakers, particularly male, have exploited in the name of a power trip, which makes it unsurprising that there are so many stories of directors pushing their actors to their absolute limits. Take Stanley Kubrick forcing Shelley Duvall into a state of sheer exhaustion in The Shining, for example, or Megan Fox once comparing Michael Bay to Hitler.
Marlene Dietrich, a classic star of movies like The Blue Angel and Shanghai Express, wasn’t keen on a certain filmmaker who seemed to take advantage of actors by turning into a bit of a tyrant himself. In Marlene Dietrich: A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler, Dietrich’s distaste for Fritz Lang, who directed her in Rancho Notorious, is made clear.
She noticed that Lang acted differently towards certain people, allowing himself to fly off the handle with some stars while others escaped his childlike outbursts. So, while she managed to avoid his wrath, Dietrich was simply left feeling bad for those who weren’t as lucky.
The actor explained that she “had the utmost respect for Lang’s German work,” but “his American work was never up to his German films, in my opinion. I didn’t like his arrogance, which I think came from insecurity. I don’t think he ever adjusted to America. America never adjusted completely to him. Many people didn’t like him. Professionally, he didn’t get many wonderful scripts.”
From there, she detailed his difficult qualities as a director, believing that he lacked the professional skill of other filmmakers she’d worked with – because it’s hardly acceptable to scream at your staff, after all. Calling him “Teutonic,” and adding, “In the worst sense of the word,” she explained, “He screamed at people who didn’t do something just the way he wanted it done the first time. He was horribly impatient. He expected you to read his mind. No matter how quickly you did what he said, you were late.”
Dietrich concluded, “He never treated me that way. I would not have accepted it, and he knew it, so that means he was fully aware of his temper tantrums and could control them if he wanted to. He used the tyranny of the director to terrorise people. I sympathised with his victims, and it upset me.”
