Hollywood Director Reveals Brad Pitt Can Be “Volatile” In New Memoir

Hollywood director Ed Zwick is spilling some tea about the high profile actors he’s worked with in his career, including Brad Pitt. Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Zwick’s memoir in which he talks about the “volatile” fights he got into with Pitt on the set of the 1994 movie Legends of the Fall.

In fact, trouble started early when Pitt “wanted to quit” the film after the first table read. “It fell to [producer] Marshall [Herskovitz] to talk Brad off the ledge,” “It was the first augury of the deeper springs of emotion roiling inside Brad. He seems easygoing at first, but he can be volatile when riled.” Pitt “would get edgy whenever he was about to shoot a scene that required him to display deep emotion.”

He admits he poked the bear one day when he gave Pitt an acting note in front of the cast and crew, a move he called in retrospect “stupid, shaming provocation.” That caused a big fight. “I don’t know who yelled first, who swore, or who threw the first chair. Me, maybe? But when we looked up, the crew had disappeared,” “And this wasn’t the last time it happened.”

Zwick’s book is called “Hits, Flops and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years In Hollywood” and is out February 13.