Several directors who have worked with Bruce Willis in recent years recently talked to the Los Angeles Times about working with the actor and the concerns they have over his memory and safety.
It was recently announced that Willis has retired from acting due to being diagnosed with aphasia, which is a language disorder caused by brain damage that affects a person’s ability to communicate.
As for what Willis was going through while he was working in this state, the directors of some of his recent film offer some insight as Willis was having a hard time remembering his dialogue. Mike Burns, who directed Willis in Out of Death, shared that he was asked to reduce the actor’s speaking parts in his film.
Burns wrote in an email back in 2020, “It looks like we need to knock down Bruce’s page count by about five pages. We also need to abbreviate his dialogue a bit so that there are no monologues, etc.” He went on to say, “After the first day of working with Bruce, I could see it firsthand and I realized that there was a bigger issue at stake here and why I had been asked to shorten his lines.”
The director ultimately had to shoot all of Willis’ dialogue scenes in a single day, which was about 25 pages of the script. Burns was asked to direct a follow-up film titled Wrong Place, and he was told that Willis would be able to do a better job than the first time around. In regards to that, Burns said, “I didn’t think he was better; I thought he was worse. After we finished, I said: ‘I’m done. I’m not going to do any other Bruce Willis movies.’ I am relieved that he is taking time off.”
Another director who worked with Willis recently was Jesse V. Johnson in the film White Elephant. He previously worked with the actor years ago as a stuntman. Johnson explained, “It was clear that he was not the Bruce I remembered.”
The filmmaker said he was asked to direct Willis in another movie after that, but turned it down. He said: “After our experience on White Elephant, it was decided as a team that we would not do another. We are all Bruce Willis fans, and the arrangement felt wrong and ultimately a rather sad end to an incredible career, one that none of us felt comfortable with.”
The report goes on to say that in recent years, Willis’ film shoots were limited to only two days with only eight hours of work a day, but according to sources the actor only worked for four hours. It was also revealed that at times Willis would have to be fed his lines through an earpiece by an actor who traveled with Willis to these jobs. Also, as you might expect, most of the action sequences in these films required a body double for Willis.
There was an incident that was mentioned in the article about a film he was shooting in 2020 titled Hard Kill. Willis ended up firing a gun loaded with a blank on the wrong cue and it left the cast and crew shaken. An actor in the film, Lala Kent, was in a scene that required her to duck before Willis fired the gun in her direction. Willis was supposed to give her a verbal cue for her to duck before he fired, but he never said his line and fired the gun.
Kent said, “Because my back was to him, I wasn’t aware of what was happening behind me. But the first time, it was like, ‘No big deal, let’s reset.’” Kent told director Matt Eskandari to remind Willis to say his line when they did the next shot but he forgot again.
It’s really hard to hear these stories but it gives us a little insight into what was going on. A lot of people have been giving Willis a hard time about the string of movies that he’s made in recent years, but the guy was just trying to work and do what he loved under the difficult circumstances he was under.
I’m a huge fan of Willis and the films that he’s made over the course of his career. He’s done a lot of awesome and great work. Of course, he didn’t want his career to end like this, it’s really quite sad, but I hope he and his family enjoy his retirement. We wish Willis and his family the best.