The worst director Geena Davis ever worked with: “We nearly turned to anarchy”
Most actors avoid taking direct aim at their directors in public. In an industry full of prying eyes, it’s best to keep the feuds behind closed doors. However, when an actor or filmmaker exhibits behaviour that is beyond the pale, word trickles out one way or another. Geena Davis has worked with some first-rate directors over the years, including Sydney Pollack, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, and Tim Burton, and she usually has nothing but good things to say about her collaborators. But there was one who proved to be spectacularly ill-equipped for the job.
Davis made her screen debut in the comedy Tootsie in 1982. It was directed by Pollack, a legendary filmmaker who took Davis under his wing and let her sit next to him on set to observe how movies were made. She loved the experience and adored Pollack. Three years later, she landed her first lead role in a movie, and the atmosphere on set couldn’t have been more different.
Transylvania 6-5000 was a horror-comedy in which Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr played reporters who travel to Transylvania to investigate Frankenstein sightings. Davis played Odette, a nymphomaniacal vampire who is just one of the mythical monsters that the men meet on their journey. The film was written and directed by Rudy De Luca, who Davis and her co-stars had been told was nothing short of a genius. In her memoir, Dying of Politeness, Davis revealed that there was very little evidence to back this up.
For one thing, despite having apparently written the script, “he seemed profoundly unfamiliar with it.” After several instances in which the director appeared to be caught off-guard by the way the story was unfolding, the actors became convinced that he had never even read the screenplay, let alone written it. He also didn’t seem to have his wits about him much of the time. At one point, Davis remembered him requesting, with increasing urgency, that the curtains on a window be tossed by wind. After several frustrated takes, they realised he was looking at the wrong window.
“In the end, the whole shoot was so unhinged we nearly turned to anarchy,” she wrote. “We fantasised about trying to shoot scenes without Rudy there.” As it happens, he did have a habit of falling asleep while the camera was rolling, so they got to do some of their scenes without his input.
All of this paled in comparison, however, to her experience during her audition. Davis recalled that the scene De Luca wanted her to perform was one in which her character sits on one of the reporter’s laps and presses his face into her breasts. “The director wanted me to act out that scene for my audition… with him—actually sitting on his lap and shoving his face into my breasts,” she wrote. Davis tried to laugh it off, but he insisted. The male producer in the room just chuckled and shrugged when she looked to him for support.
Needless to say, Davis wasn’t in a hurry to work with De Luca again, but she did end up being grateful for the film. During production, she and Goldblum fell in love. They went on to star in David Cronenberg’s The Fly a year later, and got married a year after that.
