8 Times Movie Directors Were Total Jerks To Their Actors

Pretty much everyone has had a horrible boss at some point or another. These people are total nightmares to work for. They're rude, demanding, controlling, and abusive of their authority, treating their employees more like cattle than human beings.

If ever you work for one of these sorts of people, the only thing you want to do is walk into their office, jump on their desk and tell them all those angry comments you've been bottling up inside, but for one reason or another, you often have to suck it up and endure their cruelty until you happen to find a better position elsewhere.

Well, even in the glamorous world of Hollywood, where actors can be paid millions and millions to appear in a single film, bad bosses exist in the form of fearsome film directors. Plenty of famous actors and actresses have been criticised, insulted, and even physically harmed by directors, many of whom have developed reputations as being horrible to work with.

We'll probably never hear the grisly details of what many of these directors have done to their actors over the years, but some stories have made their way out from behind the scenes and into the spotlight.

Fritz Lang was one of the greatest directors of the mid-20th century, responsible for such legendary classics as Metropolis and M. He was also known for pulling no punches - quite literally - when it came to getting the most realistic reactions out of his actors. Lang nearly let a woman burn to death while filming Metropolis and was especially harsh to actor Peter Lorre on the set of M.

A scene near the end of the film features Lorre being dragged, punched, and kicked by a bunch of thugs on a set of stairs. These days, scenes like that would be carefully choreographed to ensure that nobody got hurt, but Lang wasn't going to waste time with any of that. He encouraged his actors to really go for it, leaving Lorre with some nasty bruises.

One sequence in the scene shows Lorre's shin taking a kick, and Lang re-filmed that single shot over a dozen times, leaving Lorre unable to walk for a few days and needing bandages all over his leg. Since every cloud has a silver lining, it's worth noting that Lorre's turn in M really launched his career, and he would go on to appear in classics like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca in the years that followed.