Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (8 page)

But I was the only one. No matter who I talked to on that set about how cool Bruce was, I’d get weak smiles and strange looks. The person and persona I’d wax poetic about with his fellow cast and coworkers seemed to be regarded by most on the set who’d spent some time with him in the trenches as a fantasy.

“What a bad rap this guy gets,” I thought. “They just don’t understand him like I do. It takes a Jersey boy to know a Jersey boy …”

And this is what I was thinking when Jeff Robinov said
Bruce was their top choice to replace Marky Mark in
A Couple of Dicks.

“I know: People say he’s difficult,” I said. “But we got along great on
Die Hard
four, and we’re both Jersey boys, so I think he’ll listen to me. This’ll be fun.”

Very somberly, Jeff said, “I really hope you’re right.”

I
took an 84 percent pay cut from my writing/directing salary on
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
to direct a Bruce Willis vehicle that ended up being called
Cop Out
. Everyone on the cast and crew took less to work on the flick because we were all so excited to work on a Bruce Willis picture. Marc Platt, the producer, gave up his salary entirely to make the budget work. For a big, dopey studio buddy-cop flick, the budget sensibility with which the flick was made was Miramaxtastic. Bruce and I talked on the phone before shooting started, and he was warm, conspiratorial, slick. He said we were the Yankees. I insisted we were the Edmonton Oilers. We settled on the Flyers, because Bruce still remembered the name of NHL goalie legend Bernie Parent. We were gonna have a blast making a funny movie—his first flat-out comedy in years. I told him I wanted to make it as fun for him as
Moonlighting.

A month later we were standing on set in front of the villain’s house in Brooklyn—perhaps the friendliest neighborhood on the planet—when a glazier truck stopped at the light, affording the passenger a perfect view of a bona fide movie star in his backyard.

“Oh, Die Hard!” the dude yelled at Bruce, naming him after his most famous flick. “I got
Die Hard
one, two, three, and four at home, bro! DIE HARD!!!”

The light changed, and the truck pulled away. It was charming as fuck. Seeing one of the most famous movie stars on the planet getting love from his audience made me smile ear to ear. It was a plenty big smile, and it needed to be—as Bruce was frowning.

“You gotta love that,” I said, desperate to make conversation with or reach this unhappy man. “So awesome that they still love you.”

He asked if I wanted people yelling shit at me from cars all the time, twenty years after I made a movie. He glowered, watching the car disappear into Brooklyn as if the people in it were responsible for Holly Gennaro’s kidnapping.

“People still call me Silent Bob and yell ‘
Clerks
,’” I countered.

He looked at me like I was a soggy ol’ douche bag and moseyed elsewhere.

And that was Bruce for the
Couple of Dicks/Cop Out
shoot. The actor I’d worked beside in
Live Free or Die Hard
was now the actor who resented having me as a director. Like the characters he plays, Bruce doesn’t do well with authority figures—and when you’re the director, you’re ostensibly in charge. So the moment I walked onto that set, he recast me from a colleague to a warden who was sentencing
him to movie jail, where he’d have to wake up at hours he didn’t want to and say jokes he didn’t seem to understand.

On day one, we had a very simple scene to shoot: two guys at a diner, sitting across from each other, doing funny dialogue. This was in my wheelhouse: All I do in movies is two dudes talking to each other.

So when we hit the set, costar Tracy Morgan started doing the script as written, and Bruce started straying off the page. Encouraged by this, Tracy started ad-libbing. And when someone as gifted and crazy as Tracy starts bringing the funny, the guy who’s
not
funny—the guy who is, in fact, the most dour person I’ve ever met—turtles the fuck up like Claude Lemieux getting a beat-down by Darren McCarty. I honestly believe that Bruce got scared that day; he’s so image conscious, he appeared to worry that Tracy might outshine him. And rather than up his game, he went the other way: He shut down.

It didn’t help that all of his cultural references were decades old, either. Tracy, like Seth Rogen, can give you eight different variations of the same scene, because both will ad-lib and write within the confines of the scene without altering it. They know each scene in a flick is there for a reason, so they play their game
within
the scene, polishing it, making the dialogue and characters more current and identifiable. But here it was 2008, and we were shooting a scene in which Bruce Willis starts pretending to see a bunch of people walking by in Brooklyn, off camera. Bruce’s hip references?

Maury Povich. Connie Chung. Yoda.

After six hours of shooting, it became clear that once Bruce Willis became a
part
of pop culture, he stopped paying
attention to pop culture. Every reference he’d make in the scene was from a time
before
Bruce was superfamous. He’d been in a bubble ever since—a bubble where Yoda was still a new concept.

I’d go over to him after each take and suggest alts or changes and try to be there for him, but he’d stare at me as if I’d farted, nod, and wryly confirm. Then he’d alter nothing.

At the end of day one, most of the production team met quietly to discuss what we’d spent the day doing: shooting half a scene with one guy who clearly couldn’t wait to make this movie, and lots of takes of a guy who didn’t seem to wanna be there at all. Even though Bruce waved off any direction or guidance, Tracy would spend lots of time between takes going over what was funny and what material could be explored further in the next take. Unlike Bruce, he’d flat-out
ask
for direction; he liked having someone looking out for him. The other guy? Well … maybe he was just having a bad day.

By the next morning, Bruce removed any mask of pleasantry altogether and showed me who he really was: the guy you had to get through in order to make the movie. But Warner Bros. insured their bet by surrounding me with the absolute best in the New York City film industry. Jeff Robinov tapped Mike Tadross and Ray Quinlan as my line producer and production manager. This pair of white-haired movie-biz veterans we called Zeus and Apollo had roughly three hundred years of moviemaking experience between them, having worked on almost every big show that ever came through the five boroughs. Whether it was emptying Manhattan for
I Am Legend
or shooting
Manhattan
with
Woody Allen, Tadross and Quinlan were there—the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the New York film community.

Mike and Ray surrounded me with an amazing crew that moved like the guts of a Swiss watch under their firm but friendly leadership. And lots of my crew had worked on the third
Die Hard
years back, so they weren’t surprised how shitty Bruce was getting over a simple tow shot. While Tracy pretended to drive around Bay Ridge, Bruce was meant to monologue about a very important baseball card and its value to his father. We were shooting on what’s called a process trailer: You place the picture car, as well as lights and cameras, on a flatbed truck and drive it. In the movie, it looks like a couple of guys in a car, driving and talking; in real life, the trailer rig looks more like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float, calling
lots
of attention to itself. Attention that it became clear Bruce didn’t want.

As we parked on a block in Brooklyn to set the lights and get ready for our run, the locals would gather around the process trailer, curious about all that goes into shooting a movie. Add to that a movie star like Bruce and a TV star like Tracy, and you’ve got at least twenty people, pointing, taking pictures, or simply watching from across the street.

Willis called me over to bitch about how long it was taking to get on the road. The camera and rigging crew were scrambling all over the trailer making it safe, securing the equipment so it didn’t fall onto the road and kill someone. Bruce started pointing out people and asking me what they were supposed to be doing and why they were doing it so slowly. He nodded to our cinematographer, Dave Klein, and
bitched that all he did was turn on lights—which is kinda the job of a cinematographer. No lights? No camera, no action.

I tried to joke about it with him to lighten the mood, but he just looked at me silently, like I was telling him, “I see dead people.” I hurried the already-rushing crew along, and within minutes we pulled out onto the city streets to shoot our scene on the process trailer.

We did a few runs around Bay Ridge before Bruce announced he was done. I hadn’t gotten all the performance beats and information from the script that I felt we needed to complete the scene, but that didn’t matter to Bruce because we’d shot what
he
felt was the most important aspect of the pages: his monologue. If I hadn’t been such a starstruck pussy—like if it’d been Affleck doing this kinda shit?—I’d have shot coverage until I had what
I
needed to edit a scene together. And if it was a script he liked, a costar he understood, and a director he didn’t loathe, maybe he would’ve been happy to oblige. But there was no happy for me whenever the Fifth Element was on set. The fun lovin’ Hudson Hawk was actually just cranky ol’ Bummer Buzzard—the guy who pulled me aside and strongly suggested, without a hint of irony, that I never call him to set before ten
A.M.
again. After that mini lecture, Bruce left—seemingly content he’d done well while the rest of us had somehow failed.

That was day two.

The rest of the shoot with him was just as fun. Bruce would openly bitch about how little money he was making on this show (he was the highest paid cat in the flick by millions, naturally) and dug his heels in to grind the production to a halt over the weirdest, dumbest shit. There was a scene
in which the script called for Bruce’s character to jump out of a parked car so he could race across the street to attend to his fallen partner, who’d just been fired upon by the bad guy with an Uzi. It’s a panic moment, with the crowd scattering while candy-glass windows are shattering. We were doing Bruce’s coverage, and when we yelled, “Action!” he stepped out of the car and
walked
across the street, looking more casually irritated than worried that his partner might be dead. AD Michael Pitt and I watched Bruce’s low-impact saunter with mouths agape. At the end of that first take, I let Bruce know we were doing a second. He seemed genuinely shocked that I wanted to go again.

“I know you’ve been in a hundred movies where you jump out of the car carrying a gun, Boss,” I said to him quietly. “But this is the first time I’m ever doing it. And I’ve been looking forward to rolling cameras on you running across the street with a gun, because it’s so movie-badass. So can we do it one more time?”

Bruce rolled his eyes and waved me away. I went back behind the monitor waiting for take two, but Bruce wouldn’t get in the car: He was just leaning on the driver’s-side door. I went over and asked him if anything was wrong. He said he was ready to shoot.

“Awesome. I just need you in the car again,” I told him.

“We already did that.”

“Can you do it one more time on
this
take, too?” I asked in the same tone of voice I’d use to beg a chick for a hand job back in high school.

As serious as a Republican clergyman, he looked at me with disgust and said, “So you want me to get out of the car again,
too
?!”

The lazy, fat-ass settler in me felt his pain. The lazy, fat-ass settler in me, however, wasn’t getting paid millions to make pretend he was a cop whose partner was being gunned down. So pretty please, with sugar on it—get in the fucking car and get out of the fucking car once more with feeling. The second (and last) take is in the finished film. If you’ll notice, when we cut to Bruce he’s already out of the car—that’s because as tough as
Cop Out
might have been for some critics to swallow, it would’ve been a true spitter if they watched Bruce’s character’s ultrablasé reaction to a loved one whose life was in danger. It was so disappointingly close to the first take, the message was clear: This was the best he was going to give me.

Where was the happy-go-lucky charmer who made Maddie Hayes fall so madly in love? There were no staff limbo parties like there’d been at the Blue Moon Detective Agency whenever Bruce was around. The singing pitchman who made me believe that Seagram’s Wine Coolers were a manly enough spirit to chug at a high school kegger? He turned out to be the unhappiest, most bitter, and
meanest
emo-bitch I’ve ever met at
any
job I’ve held down. And mind you, I’ve worked at Domino’s Pizza. I signed up to work with John McClane but spent the whole flick directing Mikey, the talking baby, minus the Scientological serenity of Kirstie Alley and John Travolta.