George Clooney has launched a blistering attack on David O. Russell.
The Oscar-winning actor, 63, called the filmmaker, 65, ‘a miserable f**k’ in a joint interview with his Wolfs co-star Brad Pitt published Tuesday in GQ.
During a chat about how they spend their time, Clooney explained how he justifies spending months working on a project, referencing when he and Russell clashed on the set of the 1999 war film Three Kings.
The Lexington, Kentucky native said: ‘The older you get, time allotment is very different. 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.”‘
Clooney played the starring role of Archie Gates in Three Kings, which arrived in theaters in October of 1999.
The motion picture, derived from John Ridley’s story, also featured Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze, Nora Dunn and Cliff Curtis.
Clooney detailed his clash with Russell in a 2000 interview with Playboy, calling production on the motion ‘truly, without exception, the worst experience of my life.’
In the interview, Clooney said that after witnessing Russell behave verbally abusive to crew members, humiliating them in front of others, he penned a letter to the director imploring him to calm down for the sake of the project.
Clooney added that later in production, Russell that got physical with an extra over a stunt, and he tried to intervene and calm things down.
‘I was trying to make things work, so I went over and put my arm around him,’ Clooney shared. ‘I said, “David, it’s a big day. But you can’t shove, push or humiliate people who aren’t allowed to defend themselves.”‘
Clooney claimed that Russell then turned verbally abusive on him, telling him, ‘Why don’t you just worry about your f*****-up act?’
Clooney continued: ‘He goes, “Hit me, you p***y. Hit me.” Then he got me by the throat and I went nuts. Waldo, my buddy, one of the boys, grabbed me by the waist to get me to let go of him.
‘I had him by the throat. I was going to kill him. Kill him. Finally, he apologized, but I walked away.’
‘By then the Warner Bros. guys were freaking out. David sort of pouted through the rest of the shoot and we finished the movie, but it was truly, without exception, the worst experience of my life.’
Russell denied putting his hands on Clooney in an October 2004 interview, telling The Guardian: ‘I never physically attacked him. If I ran into him, I’d say, “Shut the f*** up, you lying-a** b****.”‘
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly in 1999, Clooney said that Russell is ‘a weirdo, and he’s hard to talk to but that’s what makes his writing unique and interesting.’
Clooney in 2012 told The Hollywood Reporter that he approached Russell at a Hollywood event, and the two seemed to be on firmer ground.
‘I saw David a few weeks ago at a party … and I felt compelled to go over and go, “So, are we done?” And he goes, “Please.”
‘And I said, “OK.” We made a really, really great film and we had a really tough time together, but it’s a case of us both getting older.
‘I really do appreciate the work he continues to do, and I think he appreciates what I’m trying to do.’
Russell is also said to have clashed with Hollywood stars Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams.
In 2015, Lawrence was allegedly spotted having a blazing row with the director of their film Joy.
A source claimed to TMZ that the actress and the director were loudly screaming and swearing at each other on set of the movie in Boston.
The website alleges that the argument began because Lawrence was unhappy with how Russell was directing a scene.
A representative for Fox 2000, the studio behind the movie, told TMZ that the screaming was just method acting.
The studio claimed to the website that Russell was helping Lawrence to get riled up before she shot a scene in which she had to shout at another actor.
Joy is the third film to date that Russell and Lawrence have worked on together.
Lawrence won a Best Actress Oscar for their first movie, Silver Linings Playbook, and was nominated the following year in the Best Supporting Actress category for their second effort, American Hustle.
Joy tells the true story of Joy Mangano (played by Lawrence), a struggling single mother who achieved great success after creating the Miracle Mop.
While there were no reported clashes between Lawrence and Russell on American Hustle, the same can’t be said for all the stars.
The 2014 movie starred Lawrence, Adams, Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper and followed the story of an ambitious FBI agent manipulating two con artists to help him expose corruption in Congress in the 1980s.
However, Adams admitted she was left crying most days during filming, with reports that Bale had to step in and try to help.
Asked about reports of a rift between the leading lady and director, Bale admitted in a 2022 chat with GQ that he was a ‘mediator’, explaining: ‘When you’re working with people of the crazy creative talent of Amy or of David, there are gonna be upsets.
‘But they are f***ing phenomenal. Also, you got to remember, it was the nature of the characters as well. Right? Those characters were not people who back down from anything, right?’
Bale also worked with Russell and Clooney on Three Kings, and when asked about Russell’s ‘difficult’ sets, he explained that he would step in to try and calm matters.
He shared: ‘That’s just in my nature, to try to say: “Hey, come on, let’s go and sit down and figure that out. There’s gotta be a way of making this all work.”‘
The stories about Bale’s conciliatory role on the set of American Hustle first went public in 2015 after WikiLeaks published a raft of hacked Sony emails.
Liberal political pundit Jonathan Alter sent a particularly juicy message to his brother-in-law Michael Lynton, who was then CEO of Sony.
His email claimed that the director ‘grabbed one guy by the collar, cursed out people repeatedly in front of others and so abused Amy Adams that Christian Bale got in his face and told him to stop acting like an a**hole.’
Adams then confirmed to British GQ that David made her cry, recalling: ‘He was hard on me, that’s for sure. It was a lot.’
She remembered being ‘really just devastated on set’ and going home in the same dismal emotional state ‘not every day, but most.’
Adams declared she had no desire to work with the director ‘in the near future’ unless there were ‘a way to mitigate the insanity’ of the experience.
Russell also infamously carried on a seething feud with Lily Tomlin on the set of their 2004 movie I Heart Huckabees, as seen in leaked behind-the-scenes footage.
‘I worked on this f***ing thing for three f***ing years, not to have some f***ing c*** yell at me in front of the f***ing crew when I’m trying to f***ing help you, b****!’ he shrieked at her during one row. ‘Figure it out yourself!’
Another video showed Tomlinson shouting at Russell between takes while trying to film a car scene with Dustin Hoffman, Naomi Watts and French screen queen Isabelle Huppert.
While Hoffman unsuccessfully tried to cool down tensions and Watts giggled nervously, Huppert became visibly bored and started checking her hair in the mirror.