Ed Zwick's Battles with the Stars

A dishy conversation about making movies — even with Julia Roberts, Matthew Broderick and studio bigwigs in the way. And why Hollywood today runs the risk of becoming 'opera'

Ed Zwick and Janice Min at Zibby’s Bookshop. (Courtesy Zibby’s Bookshop)

I read Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years Working in Hollywood, Ed Zwick’s New York Times bestselling memoir, expecting it to be a certain sort of eye-rolling self-hagiography, the kind one imagines successful industry figures fantasize about writing to cement their legacies. Instead, it was quite the opposite: endlessly entertaining, but brutally honest —about the industry, his insecurities and failures, the mind game of working with talent and why and how he picked certain projects.

An Oscar-winning director, writer and producer, Zwick has worked with Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington and Matthew Broderick — with some relationships a struggle more than others, as he details below. He’s also delightfully, ruthlessly candid about the business. An earlier conversation after Blood Diamond with Alan Horn was a turning point, where he knew the industry in which he found so much success was more or less over. He also talks about his fears of Hollywood TV and film becoming “opera” — “a privileged, overpriced nicety” as it fights for its place in popular culture.

Zwick calls his book not a “tell all” but a “tell some” as some stories remain secret, so we can only hope for a sequel.

The conversation took place at Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica in front of a live audience on May 10, and is lightly edited for length both below in text and in a podcast format. I hope you enjoy hearing from this great storyteller as much as I did.

Janice Min: This is not a town where people talk, it’s a town where people don’t tell the truth, and they certainly don’t tell the truth to your face. So you poured it all out in this book, and then it’s about to come out. How do you feel? 

Ed Zwick: I at a certain point had to make a decision, which is to say, if I were to be authentic about myself, then that earned me the right to tell the truth about others. And I also realized that if people were stupid enough to misbehave in front of a writer, then they get what they deserve. 

JM: Let’s start with you before we get to some of the stories in the book. You grew up in Chicago, went to Harvard, which all sounds pretty charmed. But everyone’s drive, particularly here [in Hollywood], stems from some kind of early adversity. 

EZ: Which is to say, at least one dysfunctional parent.

JM: And sometimes two. But in your case, you wrote about one. So tell us about your father. 

EZ: He was a charming narcissist, talented, hard-charging and one of those sort of suburban princes who moved from the city of Chicago to the suburbs, got married at 23, had three children by 29. And probably would have been better off had he not done any of it and stayed in the city. He was around when he was around, and he was just as often not around. He was an alcoholic. My mother in the meantime was extraordinary and present and generous and long-suffering. 

JM: You write about how even though he was screwing up constantly with work and business, he always could charm the next person into giving him money. And somehow continued to get by. 

EZ: I never thought that I would have any of that part of his life, but then I came to Hollywood. And that boom-or-bust mentality actually in some way prepared me. I thought I would run from business and of course if you want to be in Hollywood, even as an artist, you’re spending a disproportionate amount of your time trying to protect your art and to get the money to do your art and all of that. 

JM: So, this book is filled with these stories of just how hard it is to make a movie — the miracle of every movie, basically. Every single one of these movies that you’ve done — Glory, Last Samurai — have had extraordinary levels of production, huge actors attached. And these movies are getting greenlit based on the actor, with the studio saying it can happen if you get Tom Cruise, if you get Leonardo DiCaprio. What is that dynamic for a director, knowing that your budget, your greenlight, is resting on making the most out of a star? 

EZ: It’s an unfair responsibility to foist on an actor, because as they continue to climb that ladder, it becomes almost incumbent on them to think that there’s something more that they have to do. Some people are prepared for that. Some people have the training and the understanding of what that is, and others don’t.

And it, it’s most problematic when they don’t know. It’s doubly problematic when they’re very young. Because when they’re very young, they’re usually surrounded by a universe of handlers and fluffers and whisperers and —

JM: Mothers? 

EZ: Mothers, yes. And they’re in a bubble, and that’s all they hear, and it doesn’t prepare them necessarily for what the rigors of production are, or what the issues are, because how can they know it? They’ve never been up against it. The best time I’ve ever found to work with an actor is after he or she has finally directed, because they know what they’re dealing with. 

JM: Let’s start with Glory. You’d had this huge success with television. Thirtysomething, Emmy-winning. And jumping from television to film, even more so back then, was a huge deal, like being invited to sit with the big kids in the lunchroom. And you had done About Last Night, but Glory was a whole other level of production. About Last Night was based on a play. 

EZ: And it was more people in rooms talking.

JM: Fewer horses and guns. So Matthew Broderick is fresh off of Ferris Bueller, and he’s the hottest thing. And you write about that pressure that you, I think probably in hindsight, realized he was feeling, his mother was feeling, and how that manifested on the set.

EZ: Ironically, it was before the set. It was everything that preceded the set. Once it got to the set, he did the work, and he was very good in the work, and that was okay. But in anticipation of it, I mean, who knows what he was being told? I certainly know what his mother told him. But I was, you know, very young — not much older than he was, really — and I was a TV person. And he had won Tonys, and was in that Mike Nichols world, and the Neil Simon world. And probably those around him would have been more comfortable had he been directed by Sidney Lumet or Peter Weir.

JM: So you’ve been entrusted with a very large budget, one of the biggest stars, and you’re trying to hold it all together. And I love how you explain how executives and agents get involved in this. And there are things stars will not say directly to your face — or will, and then the agent will call and contradict it.

EZ: It was the age of Mike Ovitz, and Mike Ovitz figures prominently in the plot, and it was one of those moments when you just realize how things work — in fact, that there were the unseen hands that went far beyond the studio heads or anybody else. 

But he also picked on the wrong hippie. I didn’t care. This thing was so important to me, and I would do whatever it took to get it through, and it included going against him and whoever else. It was a Chicago thing. 

JM: The whoever else is Patty [Broderick].

EZ: Yes. His mother had been a playwright of no renown — but smart, knew her stuff and she . . . Let me back up: The big mistake is a mistake that is more appropriate to the context of the moment — which is to say, this was 1990 or something, and the notion that one would tell a story as a white savior narrative was just the knee-jerk response. 

But it wasn’t my intention. The true story had this young man [Robert Gould Shaw, Broderick’s character] with the responsibility of leading these Black troops, and that was all true, and I was determined to be truthful about it. But her intention, in beefing up the part of that young white man, was to change the dynamic and to make it seem subjectively told from that point of view. And that was just not my intention. 

And I took it upon myself in every way to try to sabotage that, first by rewriting — but I also had to fight her in this prep period, because she was an expert in Emerson, so-called. And Emerson was the head of the Brook Farm community and was about abolitionism and all of that period in American history. Important, but not necessarily central to the story we’re telling. It’s the preface to the story.

And so I fought her back on a lot of things, and then figured out ways even as I was shooting, manipulatively, to be able to cut them once I put the movie together. When I showed the movie to the studio, I basically cut the first 15 minutes, the first reel and a half of the movie.

What they had forced onto the film was, young Robert Gould Shaw at Brook Farm, young Robert Gould Shaw reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, young Robert Gould Shaw listening to Frederick Douglas, young Robert Gould Shaw practicing, and it was just —

JM: His hero’s journey.

EZ: It was such horseshit. We shot it the first week, it looked terrible. And when I put the movie together, Steve Rosenblum, who had been my friend and editor since film school and ever since, we looked at it, we said, “Not in the movie.” 

I looked at the film, and I realized, you take one look at Matthew Broderick as this callow boy wearing this uniform and this hat with explosions going around him, and a man’s head blows off near him, you know everything you need to know. And I just started there. And the studio, when the lights came up, when they saw it the first time — they realized that it worked, and we previewed it, and it worked.

JM: And the opposite experience, in terms of an actor on Glory, was Denzel Washington. People may not remember this now, but Denzel was not a household name, by any stretch, at the time. Can you just talk about how you found him and what you saw?

EZ: We had met once. I’d seen him on Broadway. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see what his quality was, it was evident to everyone who really thought about it.

There weren’t as many great parts yet for Black actors really, in those kind of movies. There’s a guy who produced the movie for me, a roguish, lovely man named Freddie Fields. And Freddie had been a famous agent and a very Hollywood character, but I remember seeing the first day’s dailies of Denzel, and he’s in this in a shot with Morgan Freeman, no slouch. Andre Braugher, no slouch. And in that scene all you could look at is Denzel, and Freddie is drinking vodka at the time, and he sort of looks up at the screen and goes, “Jesus fucking Christ. The kid carries his own lights.” And that sort of said it.

But obviously, what I saw was so much more. That he had a quality that was so present, so mesmerizing, that his participation in the moment and his ability change and find different ways to do things that were unexpected and to make those decisions even in the spur of the moment were so remarkable, that it kept surprising me again and again, and what I also did was write more for him. I’d never been in the presence of that genius. And it is genius.

JM: And Ed writes about this scene in Glory where Denzel’s character is getting whipped, and this iconic moment of the tear running down Denzel’s face, but it was a real collaboration, I would say, between Ed and Denzel.

EZ: It is an interesting part of the book, cause I actually do talk about my process and his process as I understood it then, and what I’ve even understood since, and how these things happen. Some of it is ineffable, some of it is this unspoken thing that happens between an actor and a director, and some of it is just sheer struggle of phallic identities . . .

JM: Dick swinging.

EZ: Dick measuring. But it was great, and it created something for us. It then led us to do more work together because we saw that there was something in that collaboration that was working. 

JM: It could have also blown up in your face, and it did not, and you reveal that tension and your nervousness around that. 

EZ: Look, a Black man is being whipped a mile from the docks at Savannah, Georgia, where slaves were kept, so there were ghosts, so already the environment is more fraught than you could ever imagine. 

JM: Now we have to talk about Shakespeare in Love. Julia Roberts was originally cast in the lead role, and this was your passion project. You picked this out, you got Tom Stoppard, you flew to England and got him to write the script, and Julia Roberts was your star. And then? 

EZ: Then she wasn’t. A line that I quote, I think it’s from a Fitzgerald story, where it says about a young flapper, says, “She was young and she was beautiful, and though she’d never wrecked a railroad, one could tell that her destructive period was just beginning.” 

JM: You describe in the book — they’re flying across, from London to Los Angeles, Julia Roberts is 23 or 24, they have not cast the male lead yet, and Ed has all these ideas of who he wants, these great British actors. And she’s telling you she wants Daniel Day-Lewis. 

EZ: She wanted it to be Daniel, and Daniel Day-Lewis was a great choice, except Daniel Day-Lewis was committed to his friend Jim Sheridan’s movie called In the Name of the Father, and Jim Sheridan had directed him in My Left Foot, for which they won the Oscar. It was an obvious thing that he was gonna do it and had told me so when I met him. Julia wasn’t content to think that could happen, because she was Julia. And so she set about trying to get him to do it. 

JM: And to fast forward, you’re in London and she’s reading with Ralph Fiennes, Hugh Grant, every huge British theater actor of the time, and she wasn’t having it. She’s reading with Ralph Fiennes and I think you said there was less than zero chemistry. She wasn’t going to give anything. Then you get a call. 

EZ: I actually called to talk to her about it and she had checked out. 

JM: Like literally checked out. And was the next call from her agent? The studio? 

EZ: Oh, it took a day. I mean, nobody wants to have those conversations or tell you what’s going on. The really upsetting part was the studio did not hold her feet to the fire, which they should have done. And it probably would have worked out. But those were different days in terms of the kind of juice that a movie star could wield. 

JM: When there were movie stars. 

EZ: Yeah, there were movie stars at that moment.

JM: Fast forward. The project’s dead. You moved on and then you get a call from . . .

EZ: Well, it took six years, and I showed that script to every studio twice and every independent financer and couldn’t get anybody wanting to do it at all.

But then, I had done Legends of the Fall, and Harvey Weinstein had seen it early and he had to meet me. “What do I want to do? Anything you want.”

And I said, “Well, there’s this one script,” and it was Shakespeare in Love. “Let me read it. I love Tom Stoppard.” And he read the script, “I’ll do it.” But then he saw how much it cost and he said, “I’m not going to do it.” So that was it. And then two more years passed, and I then hear that he has traded the rights to King Kong to Universal for the rights to Shakespeare in Love. And not only is he going to do it, but he’s going to try to cut me out of the whole process. 

JM: And you don’t allow this. (Zwick ended up a producer on the film; John Madden directed.)

EZ: It’s the Chicago thing again. It got really nasty. He’s a fascist, and I’d never encountered that, really.

JM: I think he threatened to kill your children. 

EZk: As one does. 

JM: How do you feel about how things have turned for him? 

Ed Zwick: If you wait long enough by the sides of the river, the bodies of your enemies will wash past. That’s how I feel. 

JM: I want to ask you about Tom Cruise. You did The Last Samurai. And you called him, in the book, joyous, challenging, exhausting. What do you mean? 

EZ: Well exactly as it sounds. There’s nobody who is more committed and more utterly absorbed and enjoying this process — and it is infectious, and if you ask him to stand on his head to do a take, he will do it. And he really knows what a director is and he’s there to do it. What are the other words?

JM: Joyous, challenging, exhausting.

EZ: Because he’s made a lot of movies, and he’s watched a lot of movies, and he has a lot of ideas as to what movies should be, and he’s often right and you don’t listen to him at your peril, because he’s got a lot to contribute — witness his whole career.

He was a wrestler in school, and so was I, and that was a thing that we shared. So challenging is not a bad word, necessarily, if it’s for the process. 

Exhausting. I’m a grandfather now and I’ve got a 2-year-old, right, who’s running around the house, and it’s that. If you’ve ever seen a 2-year-old boy and the amount of energy that they can put out constantly without ever seeming to flag, it’s that. And at a certain point, that’s just fucking exhausting. 

JM: He was very polite to you and deferential, but there was a moment when you were kind of losing it cause . . .

EZ: More than one, I’m sure.

JM: But he said something to you. He passed you, and he said, “It’ll be okay” or “The light’s the light” or something. 

EZ: Something was revealed in that moment. The stakes were so high. It’s a very expensive movie on three continents, and so the stakes are high. And I was showing it. 

JM: He wanted you to pull it together. 

EZ: But he didn’t do it in a way that was at all mean. He just went [slaps Min’s shoulder], you know, that kind of thing. It’s like, “Okay, I got it. That’s who he wants me to be.” 

JM: Right, and it helped you.

EZ: It helped! 

JM: Your partner, Marshall Herskovitz, helped you come to the realization — even though you were so successful, had made all these successful movies — you have to assert yourself, like stand up to these Hollywood executives, and they will often cave. And on one of your films, they sent out a junior executive, someone who to this day has a senior job in Hollywood, and you did not name the person. 

EZ: He was basically a messenger boy. It wasn’t his fault, really. He was asked to have a stupid conversation. In the movie Courage Under Fire, there’s a scene at the end where Denzel confronts the parents of the people whose death he’s been responsible for. It’s a very emotional scene, and we were over budget, and they were trying to cut pages out of the script, and he came with the unfortunate task of saying that that was a scene they were thinking could be cut.

And, you know, I’m in the desert, with tanks, and he just sort of starts laughing. I said, “We’re just going to pretend we didn’t have this conversation.”

JM: And he flew back to L.A., and that was it. 

EZ: And we shot the scene, and the scene was in the movie as it should have been, and maybe one of the best scenes of the movie. 

JM: Fast forward, it’s 2006, you make Blood Diamond with Leonardo DiCaprio. It is a hit, but let’s talk about the changes in Hollywood. So Alan Horn at Warner Bros., a legendary film executive, you go and see him after the movie opens. And you write in your book that he told you he loved the move. “I’m proud of it and I’m going to hang the poster in my office. But it’s the last one of its kind we’ll ever make.” 

Ed Zwick: It made $270 million dollars, but the profit to the studio was maybe $40 million. And what he was saying to me, and he was being loving, he was trying to tell me a truth. “Forty million dollars does not move the needle on the stock price.” And that’s the game that they were in now, you know, with multinational corporations and P&L projections being put on them every quarter.

JM: Of the projects you’ve made and loved, could they get made today? 

EZ: I would say a majority no. I think that’s just a truth. I think that it has to do with grownups. It has to do with grownups going to movies and [Hollywood] deciding that [grownups] were too hard to get to the movies and that they had to make what they called four-quadrant movies, which is to say a movie that appeals to at least three of four quadrants: women under 25, women over 25, men under, you know — that at the prices that they were paying, at the marketing, at the amount of profit they wanted to get, they had to create something that would be appealing to that size of a group.

Well, what appeals to that kind of group? Things that are less challenging, that are less threatening, that are more palatable, that have a certain homogenized feel. And the movies that I’ve made are, at least to some degree, disquieting or more rarefied or particular or niche or whatever word you want to call them. 

In addition to which, you can make serious movies, obviously, for much less money. And so scale becomes different. And I was able to do real time and real scale with a lot of these movies. And scale to a director, at least traditionally, has been an important part of the palette.

You know, you take that away, can you do Glory? Of course. It’s about 12 guys in the woods and you don’t see much else and it’s about their dynamic. And would it be fine? It would be okay. But it wouldn’t seem to partake of the verisimilitude of the moment or the context or the scale of it. 

JM: Which leads me to my last question for you: What is the future of Hollywood? Are you optimistic?

EZ: I’m not optimistic. I mean, there will be adaptations, you know, it’s not gonna disappear. You just hope that it doesn’t become opera. You hope that it doesn’t doesn’t become like a sort of a privileged, overpriced nicety. Obviously, it should be popular culture, and it has a role in popular culture. It will still have that, but it won’t be the same. 

JM: Well, this executive I had lunch with today said, “It’s not fun.” Because no one’s having fun. Executives aren’t having fun. Can fun happen again? 

EZ: I swore I wasn’t going to be that old fart who would always say, “Oh, in the old days we had fun.” When you’re 30, it’s always fun no matter what you’re doing. 

JM: You, you did it. You turned down Harvard Law School to come to Hollywood. People do it and it works out. 

Let’s take a few questions from the audience. 

Audience member: Outside of Shakespeare in Love, were there a couple movies, ’80s, ’90s, 2000s where you were like, “God, I wish I’d directed that.”

EZ: I remember passing on Forrest Gump. Like, I didn’t get it. I mean, Eric Roth is such a good writer, and I remember reading it early on and saying, “What? He’s there, and then he’s there, and where’s the dramatic arc? And what’s the, like … ?” 

Really stupid. 

Audience member: What was it like working with Brad Pitt? 

EZ: We had a very intense relationship. At times we were confrontational, at times we were buddies. We fought a couple times, but every time we made up and understood that it was just about the work. He’s a good guy. He’s a very serious person about his work. He works really hard, you know, I liked him, even though we threw chairs once. 

Audience member: There’s a scene in the book that sort of haunted me, where you join the Director’s Guild at a young age, and you’re surrounded by these older directors that are unhappy cause they’re not working. And I was wondering, how often do you think about that and how much does that motivate you to find the next project, stay involved? 

EZ: Well, they were younger than I am now, and they were very upset, not that they weren’t making money. Not that they weren’t getting sort of, the phone was ringing, or sex, or fame. They were upset because they weren’t connected to a project, to that thing that you feel when you are just cathected onto something that you are passionate about. And I knew they missed that.

What I vowed is that I would try to be supple enough to still have that feeling. 

We all came to do this because we loved it. We loved it. We were that kid in high school theater, or we had the Bolex that we threaded ourselves or whatever it was. It was of love. And when I don’t feel that is when I’m just going to stop.