Movie Sets That Were Really, Really Tense

Sadly, Three Kings proved to be just a warm-up for the on-set disaster that was I Heart Huckabees. Russell often found himself entering into expletive-filled fights with one of the film's stars, Lily Tomlin, two of which were captured in now-viral videos posted to YouTube. In one fight, Russell is shown throwing papers off the desk Tomlin was sitting on and referring to her as both a "bitch" and a "c***." In another incident, Tomlin fired back at the director after she grew increasingly impatient with his ever-changing notes. "Do you know what the f*** is going on? Period. F*** you!" She yells at one point. "I've had it up to here!"

Tomlin later addressed the feud in a 2011 interview with Movieline, saying, "We don't want to misbehave; believe me, it's embarrassing. It's humiliating, you know? Because you just lose it. You act like a crazy person. But I adore David. I adore him as a talent." In fact, she even claims she'd work with him again—but we'll believe that one when we see it.

Grueling movie shoots can often lead to intense bonds between its stars. But not every set is the stuff of movie magic. In fact, many of Hollywood's most popular movies were put together amid intense feuds and often violent rivalries. These are nine movies that were reportedly a pain in the you-know-what to shoot.

We're beginning to sense a pattern here. In early 2015, word leaked to TMZ that David O. Russell and his Oscar-winning muse, Jennifer Lawrence, got into a screaming match on the set of their new movie, Joy, which chronicles the life of Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano. The fight reportedly got so bad that even Weinstein Co. honcho Harvey Weinstein paid a visit to the set to make sure everything was okay. Multiple sources have since tried to downplay the interview. Even J-Law herself made a rare public statement on her Facebook page, telling fans: "David O. Russell is one of my closest friends and we have an amazing collaborative working relationship. I adore this man and he does not deserve this tabloid malarkey. This movie is going great and I'm having a blast making it!"

While things got pretty tense between Theron and Hardy on Mad Max, nothing quite compares to the awkwardness that went down on the set of Hardy's 2012 Western drama Lawless. Hardy particularly did not get along with co-star Shia LaBeouf. In fact, things were so bad the two got into a full-on fist fight during filming. LaBeouf first leaked word of the fight in an interview with Details, which Hardy later confirmed in an interview with Den of Geek:

"It was behind the scenes...He knocked me out sparko. Out cold. He's a bad, bad boy. He is. He's quite intimidating as well. He's a scary dude...He just attacked me. He was drinking moonshine. I was wearing a cardigan, and er, went down. I woke up in [my trainer] Pnut's arms."

Tensions ran high on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road, particularly due to the difficult relationship between stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, who often clashed during the film's grueling shoot. Theron herself owned up to the rumors that the two stars hated each other, flat-out telling Esquire that they "drove each other crazy" on set.

"It was the isolation, and the fact that we were stuck in a rig for the entire shoot," Theron said. "We shot a war movie on a moving truck — there's very little green screen. It was like a family road trip that just never went anywhere. We never got anywhere. We just drove. We drove into nothingness, and that was maddening sometime."

Looking back on her experience now, though, Theron says she ultimately appreciated Hardy's approach to filming the now-blockbuster movie. "I think we have respect for each other, and that's the difference," she said. "This is the kind of stuff that nobody wants to understand — there's a real beauty to that kind of relationship."

The Royal Tenenbaums may be considered one of the funniest movies ever made, and yet filming the actual movie was apparently anything but. Much of this had to do with the film's star, Gene Hackman. At a 10-year anniversary panel talk, both Gwyneth Paltrow and Anjelica Huston admitted to being "scared" to work with Hackman. Huston even recalled a point in which Hackman told Anderson to "pull up [his] pants and act like a man," while Anderson admitted that, yes, Hackman called him the c-word.

Despite Hackman's alleged antics, Anderson and the cast ultimately praised their experience working with the two-time Oscar winner. "Gene passed for a year and a half," Anderson said. "He was sort of forced to do the movie and that was not fair, really. I just kept asking him and bothering him. I just wore him down. I didn't really have that much access to him, I don't know how I went about that. Eventually he just kind of caved ... He's a great actor and he was great in the movie."

Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall apparently carried their long-gestating feud all the way to the set of Sex and the City 2. Cattrall herself held up production on the movie, reportedly because she was unhappy with her salary offer. Once filming started, things seemed to get worse, with Parker and Cattrall reportedly opting not to speak to each other once cameras stopped rolling. Parker herself admitted to tensions on the set of the Sex and the City franchise, telling Marie Claire in 2010: "There are times when all of us have been sensitive and sometimes feelings get hurt." Fair enough. Now, let's hope they never make a threequel.

Much like David O. Russell and Lily Tomlin, Terminator: Salvation star Christian Bale became the subject of a viral video after audio of him attacking cinematographer Shane Hurlbut leaked to the Internet. The almost four-minute clip, in which Bale shouts such obscenities as "I want you off the f****** set, you f****** prick!", reportedly came about after Hurlburt repeatedly (if accidentally) broke Bale's concentration on the notoriously tense set. Not a great moment for Bale or for Hurlburt.

Over the years, director David O. Russell has built up a reputation for being somewhat of a tyrant on the set of his movies. It all dates back to the now-infamous filming of his war drama Three Kings, during which he butted heads (in one case quite literally) with the film's star, George Clooney. In one particular incident, the two allegedly got into a physical altercation after Clooney expressed disgust at the way Russell was treating an extra. The film's tense atmosphere stuck with both Clooney and Russell as the years went on; in a 2004 interview with Premiere, Clooney said, "Quite honestly, if [Russell] comes near me, I'll sock him right in the f****** mouth."

Now, though, the whole experience seems to be water under the bridge. "Look, there came a time when I just said to him, 'Is this going to go on forever?'" Clooney told Fox News in 2014. "'We've got to shake hands and let it go' ... We put it behind us," Clooney said. "And that's great."

Oscar-winning icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford had one of the most infamous feuds in the history of Hollywood, all of which reached peak tension while filming the 1962 thriller, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In the film, Davis plays a deranged former child star who is left to care for (read: torture) her much-more-successful sister (Crawford) after an accident leaves her bound to a wheelchair. Scenes of rage-filled torture follow, many of which were reportedly fueled by the actresses' real-life hatred for each other. Quoted by Elizabeth Fuller in the book, Me and Jezebel, Davis reportedly claimed that "every time Crawford got near me, I could feel her trying to annihilate me!...She hay-ayted being Number Two ... The only thing I regret is that I didn't get to slap her around more in Baby Jane."