Brad Pitt ‘Volatile’ on Legends of the Fall Set, Says Director

An excerpt from director Ed Zwick‘s new memoir “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood” (published by Vanity Fair) reveals the tensions that existed on the set of his 1994 Western epic “Legends of the Fall.” Zwick writes that he had a rocky relationship with leading man Brad Pitt, who was cast in the role of Tristan Ludlow after Tom Cruise dropped out. Pitt’s agent allegedly called Zwick after the first table read “to say Brad wanted to quit.”

“It fell to [producer] Marshall [Herskovitz] to talk Brad off the ledge,” Zwick writes. “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, as I was to be reminded more than once as shooting began and we took each other’s measure.”

“Sometimes, no matter how experienced or sensitive you are as a director, things just aren’t working,” Zwick continues, noting that Pitt “would get edgy whenever he was about to shoot a scene that required him to display deep emotion.”

“His ideas about Tristan differed from mine,” Zwick writes. “Brad had grown up with men who held their emotions in check; I believed the point of the [‘Legends of the Fall’] novel was that a man’s life was the sum of his griefs. […] Yet the more I pushed Brad to reveal himself, the more he resisted. So, I kept pushing and Brad pushed back.”

Zwick remembers one afternoon on…