Painful viewing: the shoot Steven Seagal turned into “a ‘Saturday Night Live’ parody”
Marching to the beat of one’s own drum can often be commended and is regularly encouraged, apart from when that person is Steven Seagal, and doing whatever he wanted to turn a relatively straightforward production into a nightmare.
Of course, the martial arts savant is no stranger to rubbing people the wrong way, with Hollywood full of people who can’t stand him. Not that he cares, because there isn’t anyone in the industry who has a higher opinion of cinema’s most famous aikido practitioner than he does of himself.
After all, this is the guy who was so moved by a screenplay he’d written himself that he was brought to tears, in a roundabout way claimed responsibility for Tommy Lee Jones eventually winning an Academy Award, and claimed he was two decades ahead of the curve on global warming after beating a Nobel Peace Prize winner to the punch. Madness, but classic Seagal nonetheless.
It’s not a surprise that 2001’s terrible Exit Wounds was the source of much friction, because co-star DMX would subsequently refer to Seagal as “a shithead with spray-on hair” after experiencing his temperamental way of working first-hand. Stunt coordinator Stephe Quadros had his own issues with the leading man, but he found them more bleakly hilarious than anything else.
Admitting that “he’s on his own wavelength,” Quadros shared how the stunt team of Exit Wounds had choreographed the hand-to-hand sequences, only for Seagal to say “these moves would not work and they had to change things to fit his style.” After a heated argument with director Andrzej Bartkowiak, he eventually stormed off set, returned an hour later, and performed the scene exactly as rehearsed.
A small fire was put out, then, but an additional one would erupt soon after. “Another time we were filming this scene in this strip club with hundreds of extras,” Quadros explained. “Seagal would show up late, shoot one take, then while they were resetting the lights, he would leave the set and get shuttled back to his trailer. Moments later, people on the set would be looking for him to do the next shot, but he wasn’t there, so they had to call him back in his trailer each time.”
There was a 20-minute roundtrip between his trailer and the set, which led to one of the producers calling Seagal and letting rip at the star for his unprofessionalism. “The whole thing was like a Saturday Night Live parody, but it was real,” Quadros admitted. “They had to add a whole extra day of shooting in the club, which, when you consider camera crew, lighting, building rental, food, extras, actors, it get kind of expensive to say the least.”
Thanks to his reluctance to shoot any more than one take and retreat to his hideaway as soon as possible, Seagal was single-handedly responsible for a frustrated stunt team, furious producers, and indignant accountants who had to extend the schedule and the budget because he couldn’t be arsed doing his job properly. All in a day’s work.
