At a certain point in your life — hopefully sooner rather than later — you realize working with (or for) needlessly angry people just isn’t worth it. Life is short. That’s something George Clooney is all too aware of after he famously clashed with director David O. Russell on the set of Three Kings. In a recent GQ cover story, Clooney said he isn’t going to repeat that experience anytime soon.
“The older you get, time allotment is very different. Five months out of your life is a lot,” Clooney said. “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**k like David O Russell making my life hell. Making every person in the crew’s life hell.’ It’s not worth it. Not at this point in my life. Just to have a good product.“
Russell frequently had angry outbursts on the set of Three Kings, and Clooney regularly defended the extras and crew members. Russell reportedly even ignored an extra who was having an epileptic seizure. Clooney and Russell eventually came to blows after Clooney saw Russell allegedly getting physical with an extra. Clooney later called the production the “worst experience of my life.” This wasn’t the end of Russell’s abuse of his cast and crew, as he verbally berated Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees, made Amy Adams’ life a “living hell” during the production of American Hustle, and even apparently attacked Christopher Nolan at a Hollywood party.
In the same interview, Clooney also had a few words for Quentin Tarantino, who reportedly criticized the actor’s career. “Quentin said some shit about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him,” Clooney said. “He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about you, 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.” And I was like, “Since the millennium? That’s kind of my whole fucking career.’“