12 Directors Everyone Hates Working With (But Get Awesome Results)

9. Oliver Stone

His Reputation: Oliver Stone is a famously explosive director whose rampant drug use earns almost as many headlines as his films do. His legendary tussles on movie sets are numerous, such as telling Jamie Foxx on the set of Any Given Sunday, "you€™re just not good at all, are you?", while after working with Stone on Savages, Blake Lively rather politely called it "an experience", and bought T-shirts for the entire crew reading, "I Survived Oliver Stone". Unsurprisingly, this didn't rub the director the right way at all. On the set of U-Turn, Sean Penn also said that talking to Stone was like "talking to a pig", and while promoting W., Richard Drefyuss called him a "fascist". Furthermore, the filmmaker has even struck behind-the-camera talent the wrong way, by taking Quentin Tarantino's script for Natural Born Killers and severely altering it for the final film, much to Tarantino's disgust and leading to an eventual lawsuit when he attempted to publish his own original screenplay. Val Kilmer also got on Stone's wrong side by intentionally flubbing his lines on the Alexander set so he got to spend more time filming sex scenes with Angelina Jolie, though that's clearly the infamously difficult Kilmer's fault. The guy even said, "I spent four months doing that all day and someone paid me millions of dollars for the pleasure." Why He's Worth Working With: Stone has been nominated for 11 Oscars (6 for writing, 3 for directing and 2 for producing), and won 3, two of which were for Best Director. He's directed a ton of actors to Oscar-nominated performances, including James Woods (Salvador), Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe (Platoon), Tom Cruise (Born On the Fourth of July), Tommy Lee Jones (JFK), Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen (Nixon), and a win for Michael Douglas (Wall Street). Though Stone hasn't released an Oscar-grade film in almost two decades, there's still something exciting and dangerous about him that lures in A-list actors, and with that ever-lingering potential for him to make another Platoon or JFK, why not?