The director who greatly disappointed Sean Penn: “I too had been an enormous fan”
When an actor’s career has spanned multiple decades and genres, it’s likely they’ll encounter a difficult director or two. Often, this stays under wraps, but Sean Penn has no qualms about naming the filmmaker who disappointed him due to their difficulty working together.
Penn has starred in over 70 films and collaborated with renowned directors like Gus Van Sant, David Fincher, and Terence Malick, as well as actors-turned-directors such as Denis Hopper and Ben Stiller. Throughout his career, Penn has described each experience as a valuable learning opportunity. However, it was one early directorial occurrence in his youth that left a lasting impression—teaching him what not to do in filmmaking.
Having been excited to work with Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger, Penn was disappointed by the director’s approach to his character. Talking to Alex Simon, he said, “I, too, had been an enormous fan of his. He made some great movies, no question, but we had a difficult time”. Working together on the 1985 spy drama The Falcon and the Snowman, the director and actor never truly saw eye to eye.
“The arguments that he continues to make on his side are those movies he made prior to that. We never found the centre where we could talk about the picture,” Penn recalled. The Mystic River star felt like the project was never really “productive” due to a misunderstanding about his character and how the movie was made. Saying he felt like he had to “protect the character [he] was playing from the director” which made it difficult for him and Schlesinger to be on the same side.
However, this should maybe be taken with a pinch of salt as Penn himself admits that it is just “the way he remembers it” and his own difficulty must be taken into consideration. The actor himself openly admitted to Howard Stern that he can be difficult to work with and “not good with humans”, a bizarre sentence by any measure, meaning he may well have been the problem on the set of The Falcon and the Snowman.
This seems especially plausible given Penn’s belief that the director has to “support the instincts of the actor every time” lest he lose the “spark of spontaneity”. That, of course, gives great license to the stars, but it is a tricky way to helm a picture.
After all, in an interview with Total Film, Penn claims that Dustin Hoffman told him that he was jealous that he “had won his crown from Schlesinger as the most unprofessional actor he had ever worked with”. So, perhaps Schlesinger got unlucky with a run of actors too difficult to work with instead of the other way around.
At the end of the shooting day, the film was received well by critics and audiences alike. Penn himself was praised for his realistic portrayal of drug use and his odd chemistry with co-star Timothy Hutton. So, clearly, the difficult relationship between actor and director did little to hinder the stakes of the film, even despite Schlesinger’s refusal to simply support the actor’s whim.
