“Biggest pain in the ass”: Bruce Willis and the director of The Equalizer had a lot of problems while filming this war action film – Film News

This jungle action film was a big flop in 2003. And that’s not all: during filming, sparks flew between Antoine Fuqua and Bruce Willis.

In 2022, it was announced that Bruce Willis was suffering from a rare form of dementia praecox and would therefore be putting his career on hold. After keeping his fans guessing for years about two-minute cameos in third-rate straight-to-DVD films, now there was a tragic explanation: The Die Hard star wanted to set aside a little money for his family, as long as that was still possible. .

Willis was at his absolute career peak between the late ’80s and early 2000s, with the 69-year-old occasionally having a reputation for not being particularly easy on set. Justin Long, for example, kept quiet about the details, but noted that he had a “completely different experience” with Willis during the filming of Die Hard 4.0 than the young star of The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment, who was full of praise for her on-screen partner. Cops in Trouble director Kevin Smith, on the other hand, described working with Bruce Willis as “true darkness”.

Fast but not overly brutal action: The best action film from the creator of The Equalizer is streaming

The Equalizer director Antoine Fuqua also had his difficulties with the actor, who was born in Idar-Oberstein, Germany: In 2003, they filmed together the war action film, Tears of the Sun, in which Willis played American Lt. AK Waters, who maneuvers his team through the jungle in the middle of Nigeria’s civil war in order to find a doctor to take Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci) to safety.

Tears of the Sun, in the original, received mostly negative reviews at the time (meanwhile, QuandoCinema users gave it 4.3 out of 5 stars), and the $100 million action film also didn’t do well at the box office. To make matters worse, director Fuqua and his star didn’t get along very well during filming.

When Fuqua was asked in a BBC interview about the biggest pain in the ass he has ever worked with, he responded directly: “Bruce Willis. He irritated me. We just didn’t get along.”

However, he later slightly amended his statement: “We got along well off camera, but we just didn’t get along during filming. It’s different work ethics, different opinions, different points of view, different methods of filmmaking, and we just didn’t fit together, we acted like friends as soon as the cameras were off.”

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