George Clooney has blasted his Three Kings director David O Russell, saying he made “my life hell” and “every person on the crew’s life hell.”
Clooney, 63, worked with American Hustle director Russell on the 1999 war heist comedy Three Kings.
In a new interview with GQ, Clooney reflected on how getting older has led him to prioritize different things in life, and said he now only wants to work with “people who like what they do.”
“The older you get, time allotment is very different,” Clooney continued.
“Five months out of your life is a lot. And so it’s not just like, ‘Oh, I’m going to go do a really good film, like Three Kings, and I’m going to have a miserable f*** like David O Russell making my life hell. Making every person in the crew’s life hell.’
“It’s not worth it,” he added. “Not at this point in my life. Just to have a good product.”
Clooney and Russell’s feud on the set of Three Kings has long been public knowledge. For The Independent’s list of 22 actors who didn’t get on with their directors, Adam White wrote: “Clooney confronted the filmmaker after he ‘went nuts on an extra’, according to the actor.
“‘I would not stand for him humiliating and yelling and screaming at crew members, who weren’t allowed to defend themselves,’ Clooney said in 2003. ‘I don’t believe in it, and it makes me crazy. So my job was then to humiliate the people who were doing the humiliating.’ He also dubbed working on the film ‘the worst experience of [his] life.’”
Elsewhere in the same GQ interview, Clooney revealed he is “a little irritated” with Quentin Tarantino for talking “s***” about him.
The actor starred alongside the film director in Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 vampire thriller From Dusk ‘Till Dawn, which Tarantino wrote, early in his film career.
According to Clooney, Tarantino recently questioned how successful his career has been: “Quentin said some s*** about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him.
“He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about [Brad Pitt], and somebody else, and then this guy goes, ‘Well, what about George?’ He goes, ’He’s not a movie star. ‘And then he literally said something like, ‘Name me a movie since the millennium.’”
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Clooney said this put his nose out of joint, adding: “I was like, ‘Since the millennium? That’s kind of my whole f***ing career.’”
The actor continued: “So now I’m like, all right, dude, f*** off. I don’t mind giving him s***. He gave me s***.”
Clooney was interviewed alongside Pitt, with whom he stars in the new film Wolfs. The action comedy, directed by Jon Watts, will have a one-week limited theatrical release on September 20, followed by its streaming debut on Apple TV+.
Wolfs, which also stars Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams and Poorna Jagannathan, follows two stubborn professional fixers who find themselves forced to work together after being hired for the same job.
Read the full interview in the September issue of British GQ, available on newsstands and via digital download from 27 August.