The bitter feud between Tom Sizemore and Val Kilmer
Pairing two actors with reputations for being difficult together in the same movie can only end up going one of two ways, with 2000’s Red Planet finding Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore becoming so agitated by each other that they ended up brawling on set.
Whereas Kilmer had gained the distinction of being difficult long before the shoot began, with several former collaborators happy to reinforce that notion after experiencing it themselves, Sizemore’s penchant for causing disruption was always attributed more to his well-known addiction issues as opposed to any sense of ego or entitlement.
Even though the pair had been colleagues before when they both starred in Michael Mann’s classic crime thriller Heat, throwing them together on Red Planet proved to be a recipe for disaster. It may not be a coincidence, but it’s worth noting that the critical disaster and box office dud forced to contend with a troubled filming process remains the one and only feature film credit of director Anthony Hoffman’s entire career.
In excerpts from Sizemore’s memoir By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There that appeared in New York Daily News, whatever bad blood there may or may not have already been between the two was exacerbated by Kilmer flouting his significantly larger payday in his co-star’s face, telling Sizemore that “I’m making ten million on this, you’re only making two”.
Incensed, the Saving Private Ryan star responded in kind by launching a 50-pound weight, which fortunately ended up missing its intended target. A member of the production team reportedly even insisted that if Kilmer and Sizemore were compelled to resolve their differences physically, the best way to do it would be without hitting each other in the face so as not to cause visible physical injuries that would slow down or even halt shooting altogether.
Red Planet already faced an uphill battle to win over audiences when it was arriving in cinemas just eight months after Brian De Palma’s own intergalactic blockbuster Mission to Mars, which had itself conspired to underperform in terms of both reviews and ticket sales, and the highly-publicised tales of its two top-billed male leads coming to blows generated the wrong kind of buzz.
Neither Kilmer nor Sizemore publicly shared the specifics of what went down behind the scenes of Red Planet, but Ting Poo – co-director of the former’s self-filmed documentary Val – confirmed to SlashFilm that there were 200 hours of footage captured from his time on the movie, but none of the footage ended up making it into the end product to potentially shed new light on the matter.
There was “a multi-camera shoot of behind the scenes” that saw the filmmaker acknowledge that “we had a whole scene cut around that film, too, but it didn’t make the cut” to leave the mystery of whether they ever made peace unresolved.
