The director who pulled a gun on Harry Dean Stanton and Bob Dylan: “He was a fucking nut”
Making a film isn’t an easy job, but there’s surely nothing that warrants a director pulling out a gun on set.
Yet, back in the 1970s, a certain filmmaker somehow got away with his incredibly volatile behaviour, not only pulling guns out and threatening his actors, but also throwing knives out of sheer frustration. I’m not doubting the amount of pressure that comes with making a movie and directing a huge cast and crew, but violence and instilling fear surely isn’t the best way to cope with the stress.
For some reason, Harry Dean Stanton and Bob Dylan took this intensity in their stride when they filmed Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid under the direction of Sam Peckinpah, whose violence didn’t seem to faze them all that much. The director was notorious for being difficult, his substance abuse issues – mixed with a sense of perfectionism that allowed him to make some pretty incredible westerns – inescapably affecting his work ethic.
“Sam Peckinpah was a genius for four hours a day,” actor James Coburn once told Venice Magazine. “The rest of that time, he was drunk. He called himself ‘a working alcoholic’, but he was much more than that.” It seems like Peckinpah was able to get by after downing copious amounts of alcohol, although this came with plenty of instability, including violent outbursts that the cast and crew would simply come to expect.
In an interview with the Guardian, Stanton recalled a particularly brutal moment documented in Kris Kristofferson’s book Partly Fiction, in which he revealed that Peckinpah threw a knife at the Alien star when he got a scene wrong. “As I recall, he pulled a gun on me, too. It was because me and Dylan fucked up the shot,” Stanton said. “We were jogging, and we ran right across the background.”
Peckinpah’s behaviour is indicative of a time in Hollywood where anything flew; directors could be violent and unpredictable, wholly unprofessional and rather deranged, yet they were still able to make films, and have since been lauded as crazed geniuses. But at what point do we step back and assess who we’re praising? Peckinpah made some undeniably great films, like Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch, and evidently, it can often only take someone as intense as a movie’s subject matter to accurately bring such a story to the silver screen.
Stanton called the director “a fucking nut, but a very talented nut,” which is something you could say about many of Hollywood’s most iconic directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Stanley Kubrick. But few went as far as pulling out guns and knives, which is, quite frankly, pretty terrifying.
Peckinpah’s legacy as one of the western genre’s greatest directors – one much more preoccupied with bloodshed and the sheer weight of violence on the human condition – lives on despite his complicated approach to filmmaking. It seems like it took a lot of strife for him to make a movie, which reared its head in ways that just wouldn’t fly on a film set today.
It sounds like this was just something that Stanton was rather used to back in those carefree days of the industry, where health and safety regulations were a thing of the future.
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