10 Major On-Set Clashes That Almost Ruined Recent Movies

Fincher continues the tradition of Kubrick, Hitchcock and Von Trier in being the most exacting of directors, and this came to the fore in Zodiac. Fincher has a method called “70 Takes and Up’’ where he sought utter perfection is his scenes, particularly those featuring the doe-eyed Gyllenhaal. After forcing one-hundred plus takes of the same scene Fincher would then delete all of Gyllenhaal’s previous takes, just to make the actor cry.

Gyllenhaal swore never to work with Fincher again, revealing in a series of interviews the frustration and animosity that existed between the pair during filming. Gyllenhaal claims there was simply no point doing a scene again after a certain amount of takes, that nothing ‘was at stake anymore’ and that the megalomaniac Fincher “paints with people … and it’s tough to be a colour.” In response Fincher admitted Gyllenhaal was a kind of Pavlovian experiment and that he hated ‘earnestness in performance’, whatever that means.

Even Robert Downey Jnr likened the experience of working with Fincher to being in a “gulag,” going so far as to leave urine-filled mason jars around the set to highlight his protest at the director’s no- bathroom breaks policy.