Understanding the feud between Bruce Willis and Kevin Smith on the set of ‘Cop Out’
Kevin Smith rose to prominence in the mid-1990s with the release of several slacker buddy comedies such as Clerks and Mallrats, which he wrote, directed and starred in. The filmmaker also released Chasing Amy in 1997, a project that has been widely hailed as his best work, although it received significant backlash from the LGBT community upon release. Over the following decades, Kevin Smith’s movies have earned mixed reviews, though none have faired as poorly as Cop Out.
Despite becoming Smith’s highest-grossing film, the feature was slammed by critics. Reviews were far from kind, prompting Smith to lash out on Twitter: “Writing a nasty review for Cop Out is akin to bullying a [disabled] kid. All you’ve done is make fun of something that wasn’t doing you any harm and wanted only to give some cats some fun laughs.”
Evidently, Smith was hurt by the negative reaction to his film. However, his experience of working with Bruce Willis, Cop Out‘s leading actor, upset him even further. Willis was a childhood hero of Smith’s, who grew up watching him in the 1985 show Moonlighting. Therefore, he was delighted to star alongside the iconic actor in Live Free or Die Hard. Smith gushed on MySpace how he had worked on “a flick that’d reveal a heretofore unrealised dream I’d unwittingly harboured since I first watched David Addison limbo in the Moonlighting Detective Agency offices 20 years prior.”
In the documentary Kevin Smith: Sold Out – A Threevening with Kevin Smith, the filmmaker recalled that Willis suggested they work together. The pair joined forces for Cop Out, the first film Smith had directed that he hadn’t penned himself. However, Smith’s idolisation of Willis got the better of him. He revealed in an interview with CinemaBlend that during filming, “I wasn’t the 38-year-old Kevin Smith who had directed a bunch of movies; I was the 12-year-old who would lay on my parents’ couch and watch David Addison on Moonlighting on Tuesday”. Furthermore, Willis would tell Smith to “snap out of it, you’re a grown-up, I’m not David Addison”.
The director claimed that Willis was difficult to work with, often feeling like the actor was purposefully messing up his scenes. At one point, Willis criticised Smith for directing him, strangely enough. Smith recalled: “I was going at it like, ‘Bruce, do it like this.’ I was directing Bruce the way I direct everybody else. And Bruce was like, ‘I’ve been acting like Bruce Willis for 25 years, do you really think there’s anything you’re going to tell me that I don’t know?'”
Smith also discussed an incident on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno in 2012, detailing how Willis confronted the director and threatened him with violence. After a scene had wrapped, Willis informed Smith that they weren’t done, to which Smith joked: “OK, everybody, hold on one second. I’m going to go talk to the director”. This caused Willis to tell those in attendance to leave the room and ask Smith, “Do you want to take a swing at me?” Once Smith returned to his trailer, he was so angry that he punched three holes in the wall.
Off the back of this incident, Willis did not partake in promotional photoshoots, resulting in a graphic designer Photoshopping the actor alongside his co-star Tracy Morgan. According to Smith: “Tracy Morgan, I would lay down in traffic for. Were it not for Tracy, I might’ve [offed] myself or someone else in the making of that movie”. Willis also failed to attend the wrap party, during which Smith reportedly made a speech where he said, “I want to thank everyone who worked on the film, except for Bruce Willis.”
Smith partially blamed the film’s hostile reception on Willis’ performance, explaining that he had “no help from this dude whatsoever”. In response to the feud allegations, Willis told Time Out: “Poor Kevin. He’s just a whiner, you know? We had some personal issues about how we approached work. I don’t have an answer for him. I’m never going to call him out and lay him out in public. Sometimes you just don’t get along.”
The apparent feud has been ironed out since Willis announced his retirement from acting following his aphasia diagnosis. Smith took to Twitter to write: “Long before any of the Cop Out stuff, I was a big Bruce Willis fan – so this is really heartbreaking to read.” He also stated: “He loved to act and sing, and the loss of that has to be devastating for him. I feel like an asshole for my petty complaints from 2010. So sorry to BW and his family.”
