Legends of the Fall director Ed Zwick says Brad Pitt was ‘volatile when riled’ on film set

Brad Pitt filming for a Formula 1-related movie during the British Grand Prix 2023 at Silverstone, Towcester. Photo / PA Images

Brad Pitt is said to have become “volatile when riled” on the set of the film Legends of the Fall.

The 60-year-old Fight Club actor starred in the western in 1994, and its director Edward Zwick, 71, has now opened up about what it was like to direct the star – revealing one of their bust-ups ended with a chair being flung.

He says in his Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood memoir: “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, as I was to be reminded more than once as shooting began and we took each other’s measure.”

Zwick, whose other films include Blood Diamond and The Last Samurai, added the relationship would grow strained as the A-lister would allegedly “get edgy” when “he was about to shoot a scene that required him to display deep emotion”.

Brad Pitt and Edward Zwick have known each other for decades. Pictured are Zwick (left), Marshall Herskovitz (centre) and Pitt attending the 15th Annual AFI Awards Luncheon on January 9, 2015 in Beverly Hills, California. Photo / Getty Images

The director added he would try to push the actor out of his comfort zone because he had grown up with men in the Ozarks “who held their emotions in check”, and he wanted the character to show true emotions.

But Zwick admitted the strategy could backfire: “Yet the more I pushed Brad to reveal himself, the more he resisted.”

“So, I kept pushing and Brad pushed back.”

Zwick said one particularly heated face-off ended with a chair being thrown when he gave Pitt a direction in front of the crew, which he admitted was a “stupid, shaming provocation”.

He said: “Brad came back at me, also out loud, telling me to back off… I was angry at Brad for not trusting me to influence his performance.”

“Also for the reluctance he’d shown after the first table read… but Brad wasn’t about to give in without a fight.”

“In his defence, I was pushing him to do something he felt was either wrong for the character, or more ‘emo’ than he wanted to appear on-screen.

”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.”

Zwick stressed that even though he and Pitt would have regular “blow-ups”, they would always “make up and mean it”.