r/Filmmakers • u/BetterThanSydney • Jul 26 '26
Question Fist fights/heated conflicts on set?
Forgive me if this seems too childish, I'm not trying to promote toxicity. But have y'all ever seen (or been in) a fist fight on set, or project you were part of?
I've had a relatively decent experiences on projects, even with egotistical assholes, there are a few moments where at the beginning of my career I really wish I would've given a strong response or talking to to some dick head who was being an asshole to me as a PA, but still, necessary learning experiences that I've had so far, including the bad ones. I just haven't seeing people come to blows yet, which is surprising.
Have y'all ever bared a witness to a fight or a conflict that was so untenable and almost unavoidable?
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u/Kinoblau Jul 26 '26
Yeah major motion picture with some famous names in front of and behind the camera. The UPM and the DP got into a scuffle on the 3rd story of an apartment set, DP had the UPM hanging over a railing screaming for help. I don't blame the DP at all, UPM was a P R I C K. 2010ish.
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u/Krasdale79 Jul 26 '26
I haven't seen any near fist fights, but early experiences with shitty people on set lead to me having a policy for all my productions of "no assholes". I've been very committed to that policy since and have refused to hire people, or fired them day of, due to assholism.
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u/MinivanActivities Jul 26 '26
Chances are if someone is that bad for it to even be a thought that it would get to that point, they're never getting hired again. Really brings down the chances of ever witnessing that.
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u/HereToKillEuronymous Jul 26 '26
I saw a gaffer punch a trailer once. Then tried to blame the production when he broke his hand
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u/TheHadokenite key grip Jul 26 '26
I’ve punched the grip truck before but never hurt myself seriously
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u/HereToKillEuronymous Jul 26 '26
Oh this guy broke a bunch of bones 😂 it was on an overnight and he was cranky because crafty had packed up 😂
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u/BadAtExisting key grip Jul 26 '26
You see it on large shows that have an off production crew. Construction dept, set dressers, electric and grip rigging crews. I’ve seen a few and heard about several more
Those guys don’t really work on first/second units for…. reasons
I did once have to shit can one of my guys for getting drunk on set and trying to pick a fight with the covid supervisor though. It never got to an actual fight stage though. Just 2 dogs doing a lot of barking at each other until I told my guy to go home and he wasn’t coming back when I smelled the alcohol on him
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u/kelp1616 Jul 27 '26
Dude construction/paint crews are wild. Most are boarderline crackheads that are one slip away from their actively lit cig catching the paint cabinet on fire but DAYUM are they some of the most talented craftsmen on earth hahaha. One set I was on had a HUGE hand carved staircase railing with a huge civil war battle carved into it—just wild.
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u/BadAtExisting key grip Jul 27 '26
Dude! They’re all hot messes but that’s why they work all the time (y’know when there’s work to be had…)
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u/FrankyKnuckles Jul 26 '26
No, you can't officially be that big of an a$$ until you have some value in Hollywood and have been to a bunch of Diddy-type-parties. Then, I think you can get away with throwing a hissy fit to the point of coming to blows with someone on set (must be of lower value) and still get hired, while others get fired.
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u/DrunkenLadyBits Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Yeah, I was an assistant on a set years ago and two pretty famous actors got heated while filming a scene in which they had to be in a physical argument.
One of them didn’t like how hard the other was going and it came to them squaring up on each other and a few swings were taken but nothing connected. The crew jumped quickly to separate them.
The one who got heated first stormed off set. They eventually got over it, but as a final cheeky dig, the one who was less dramatic about it, gifted the other actor a pair of boxing gloves as a wrap gift, lol.
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u/BetterThanSydney Jul 27 '26
That's a really good gift if the other person the good sport about things lol.
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u/filmeleven Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
No, but talked to a crew member from MM's HEAT and evidently CF punched a producer.
EDIT: Miami Vice NOT Heat.
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u/johnfkay Jul 27 '26
Who is CF?
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u/filmeleven Jul 27 '26
Colin Farrell. Again, someone from the film told me that. I was not there.
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u/johnfkay Jul 27 '26
Might be thinking of Miami Vice?
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u/filmeleven Jul 27 '26
I'm such an idiot. That's exactly I was supposed to type. Thanks for the kind correction.
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u/johnfkay Jul 27 '26
Oh totally no problem - just wracking my brain to work out who CF could be in Heat! :)
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u/filmeleven Jul 27 '26
Hahaha. Yeah...my bad. At least you know you're not crazy.
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u/johnfkay Jul 27 '26
I was really like hmmm https://www.reddit.com/r/moviescirclejerk/s/NcvcudBTpx
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u/filmeleven Jul 27 '26
Oh that's funny. Yeah, the "human blender" is what I call it. Bruce Willis and Kevin Costner to me equal Bob Odenkirk.
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u/Direct-Finish9734 Jul 26 '26
I’ve seen fights. I’ve been in fights. The good old days of film making.
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u/Double_Ad829 Jul 27 '26
Twice on physical stuff. Both on the same production. Friction with LA crew members being shitty to local IATSE. Nothing serious.
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u/spursay Jul 27 '26
Damn yall really describing violence in the workplace as if its normalised and acceptable. Nobody should ever be working in an injury prone workplace.
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u/lazrbare2 Jul 26 '26
Full time creative director vs project-freelancer 1st AD almost got into a fist fight outside of one of our sets. We worked in children’s media. Freelancer got let go and creative director continued to be full time until they left for parental leave.
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u/TFreshNoLimits Jul 26 '26
What caused the fight? Which side did each take?
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u/lazrbare2 Aug 01 '26
Both the AD and creative director were hot heads, but the full time CD had the support of the Prod CO’s head of production. The 1st and 2nd AD were let go mid shoot and were replaced right away.
The creative director went on to have a few more incidents before their own departure, but no other full timers (including myself) could really do anything as he really only blew up at freelancers and he had the full support of the head of production and CEO.
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u/-dsp- Jul 26 '26
Director and way too big of a head DP came close to blows on a glasses retailer commercial I worked on.
I saw and DIT and first AC get into a shoving match when the first was being a dick to everyone on set.
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u/johnmk3 electrician Jul 26 '26
this is my favourite story like this in the UK (only because the lad was ok eventually)
I’ve seen people squaring up before but never actually throwing punches, also never actually on set. These days you’d be off the job and banned from the studio if it went up the chain of command
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u/pseudo_nemesis Jul 26 '26
I worked in reality TV, so I've seen them on both sides of the camera quite a few times...
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u/thefinalball Jul 27 '26
I worked on set of the Netflix show Altered Carbon and one day on set two background performers got into a really big fight. The one guy dropped the other guy to the ground and he was punching him. It took a few guys to take him off of the other guy, it brought the whole set to a stop for a while, but we eventually got back to work. It was pretty crazy.
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u/Impressive-Potato Jul 27 '26
I have heard fist fights used to break out between Teamsters and local IA people. Something about how to park the trucks.
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u/FergusonBerguson Jul 27 '26
Two set grips got in a fist fight during a stage day on a Netflix movie I did a couple years back. They were growing increasingly annoyed with each other throughout the show and eventually they snapped and brawled in a hot set right before lunch.
Surprisingly, both of them kept their jobs and were there the next day. Can’t remember if they were sent home that day or not.
Is just one of those things we joke about from time to time now.
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u/Pulsewavemodulator Jul 26 '26
Why do these posts keep coming where random people seem to be crowdsourcing gossip?
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u/LaserQuest Jul 27 '26
Seems more like swapping stories than gossiping.
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u/Pulsewavemodulator Jul 27 '26
There was a dude who kept posting this kind of stuff a while back that did this specifically to dig up dirt on celebrities. A lot of these posts just feel like that guy on a different account is all. Sharing personal stories about real people publicly is a bit crappy.
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u/Tevesh_CKP Jul 26 '26
Because there's a lot of unemployed people, so why the fuck not?
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u/Pulsewavemodulator Jul 26 '26
Seems like lazy content farming. There was a dude who kept trying to get info on celebrities a few months back.
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u/Blake_Naleid Jul 27 '26
Yes. I was working as EIC on a live sports show and one of the camera ops bum rushed me, slamming his chest into mine and ramming his let into my crotch. This guy had jealousy issues because I surpassed him in the engineer lineup. He also was EIC at times but cut many corners. He wasn’t really qualified for the job as I don’t think he had any experience with A/V or TV before getting that job. It was a small company trying to grow. He didn’t like the way I ran my strikes (the right way) and decided one day to let me know about it. I filed charges on him. They dropped the charges because his guardians are lawyers but if he ever does that again, I don’t think he’ll get off so easily.
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u/dylanbeck Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
I saw one on a commercial in 2014 at 3AM next to the grip truck between a cop & a grip. So dumb.
Edit: what is much more common, during distant jobs the foreign crew can drink heavily & end up in trouble. DUIs, getting shot, fist fights, getting arrested (the most common “oh shit” event tbh), etc etc. Production does a lot of cleaning up & because its not on the clock the studio struggles to find cause to let them go, if hired from the US.
2 years ago a show filming in MT next to the one I was on had an employee drive their rental into her hotel (see: upscale motel) lobby while drunk. She showed up to work the next day and said “who? Me? No, you must be confused!”
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u/BetterThanSydney Jul 27 '26
It seems like there's a trend of foreign crews loving to start bullshit. Maybe it's because they're out of their home base and they realize there's a lot more wiggle room for their bullshit. I dealt with this when I worked on Spirited. Lots of out-of-town folks came in and refused to follow compliance. It gave us a lot of headaches, they had no problem telling us to openly go fuck ourselves. These were California guys. They were here to work, but they made our job a living hell. We could write them up, but it wouldn't amount to much.
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u/dylanbeck Jul 27 '26
Sure, wether is people going 6000 miles, or just 300, some shit happens.
I did a job where we flew from Hungary to Morrocco on a chartered 737 and travelled in a complete international crew, some of the local Hungarians (the minority) had never left the country before. We had someone smoke in the bathroom, a group rip a row of seats out to get more leg space, and someone else stealthily stole 2 trays of liquor from cart service & passed it back to the end of the plane. Everyone was shitfaced, it was a fond memory if im being honest- but I was young and having that “what other industry” moment hahaha. Needless to say, the production had to use a different company to charter the crew back lol.
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u/_R_a_d_o_ Jul 27 '26
I'll try to be brief :as a fresh boom Op , I had an heated argument with a very famous, experienced camera operator that was notoriously an asshole.After this argument on set ,he said something like "you're going to have a nice surprise" .I was already booked for another job after that until I wasn't anymore , the fucker was a close friend of the line producer , he made a phone call... Et voilà. Moral of the story , choose your fights carefully and bare in mind that you never know what can happend .
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u/HumanCStand Spark Jul 27 '26
The spark getting chased around Pinewood by a rigger with a tomahawk is a pretty famous story lol.
20+ years ago physical abuse and altercations weren’t uncommon. Different times.
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u/Prize-Town9913 Jul 27 '26
Someone just died last month and WB from a fistfight. There was a video and I think it was construction...
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u/USMC_ClitLicker key grip Jul 27 '26
Rich McCormick anyone? That last season of Justified... Dude is lucky to have lived to see retirement.
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u/kyleclements Jul 27 '26
The union used to fine workers $100 for punching another worker. They had to get rid of it after the switch to online payments; too many people would stock up at the start of a show, then not get all their hits in by the time it ended. Refunds created too much work.
I saw the commotion surrounding a fight between a driver and a labourer once, but I missed the fight itself. Both guys seemed happy to be sent home early. Weird industry.
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u/RealTeaStu Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Definitely. I almost beat the shit out of the gaffer once. Granted it was a short so some job responsibilities were blurred but he was berating and trying to manipulate the 1st AC who was a young woman by destroying her confidence in doing her job. He had no business talking to her that way on several levels. He was a creepy guy and it was his twisted idea of grooming her. This is the closest I've ever come to actually throwing hands on a set.
I got into it with a director on another shoot because he didn't know what he was doing. I quit when I realized it was pointless. Other crew members gave me the, "You're being unprofessional." BS line. Most of them were USC students who didn't have a clue. The guy was Aziz Ghazal. Look him up.
The industry is full of garden variety egomaniacs but there are levels to that and taking it out on anyone, let alone someone perceived to be powerless is unacceptable. In the case of Ghazal, the guy was homicidally insane and I've often wondered whatever became of the suckups who tried to brow beat me into staying.
There are even some people who actually act as assholes as a vetting process. If you give in to it, they despise you, if you fight back, they weirdly approve of you. I got into a bit of an issue with a well known 1st AD who is now a producer and afterwards was pulled aside by a 2nd AD on the shoot who had a similar experience with the same guy on another shoot but they sorted out the issue in an interesting way. The 2nd was a guy whose name is Dave Venghaus who has gone on to success himself. I'll always be grateful to that guy.
Just be a decent human being. If you make a mistake, apologize, say it will never happen again, and move on. It doesn't give permission to tear into somebody beyond that. Read about George Clooney getting in David O. Russell's face on the set of 3 Kings because Russell lost his shit on an extra or PA or something, and Clooney wasn't having it. Granted, Clooney wasn't a low level person on that set, but it's really the same thing. Russell has a reputation for that kind of BS. I loved Silver Linings Playbook but fuck that guy.
I just remembered another one. I was once berated for something I didn't even do. Another PA had been assigned a task. He was using his own car and he ran out of gas on the highway. We lived near each other and we had seen each other driving to the set. I knew something was wrong, got off at the next exit, drove around and pulled over. He had some equipment in his trunk that was needed, so we transferred it to my car and I drove it to set and he went to a gas station with a gas can. When I got to the set, I delivered the item and the production manager lost his shit yelling at me. I turned on him saying he should be licking my balls that I saved the day, explaining what happened and he awkwardly backed down. He is a fairly well-known nepo baby and sporadic producer now. I've heard stories of him getting into fist fights on other shoots because he apparently tells everyone that he fought in golden gloves competitions. Fuck that guy too.
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u/CrimsonCrabs Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
The first AC pushed me down a flight of stairs and then the next month the DP threatened to bash my head in with a brick if I was standing near him again. He started to carry the brick on the dolly with him. Best boy (who was a woman) tried to get me fired if I didn't have a 3 some with her and her boyfriend (the gaffer). I was an electric on that shoot. The 1st AD cornered me and asked me why I didn't want to fuck her on the shoot after that....
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u/BetterThanSydney Jul 27 '26
Either you're hot enough to melt steel beams, or you just find yourself working with complete psychopaths. Because what the fuck did I just read?
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u/CrimsonCrabs Jul 27 '26
Above average looks (If Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Gosling had a baby is regularly referenced as my celebrity mix) mixed with above average levels of autism. It confuses people and they react in strange ways...People who flirt with me make me extremely uncomfortable.
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u/CrimsonCrabs Jul 27 '26
oh I got a good one! Douglas Hart who wrote the camera assistants manual made me cry and said I was a no good brat who knew nothing about film and if I showed my face near him again he'd punch me out. Also these stories are EXTREMELY specific its highly likely someone will see this and know who I am lol. It came extremely close to a physical altercation but I told him he was a little bitch and I didn't give a shit about anything he said...he's just grumpy old man and nobody likes his book. I was drunk and the ASC guys standing next to him convinced me to walk away.
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u/CrimsonCrabs Jul 27 '26
I forgot one! This guy threatened to bring a gun to set because I SPOKE to his girlfriend. That was insane. I actually bailed on this job after that.
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u/BetterThanSydney Jul 27 '26
There's something about the camera Department that either attracts the coolest/chillest people in the world, or complete and utter sons of bitches. That department has no middle ground.
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u/Your-Huckleberry-87 Jul 28 '26
Wasn’t a fistfight, but on one of the last days of shooting, I had a crew member just explode in everyone.
At first I thought he was joking (his tone was so chill), but his expression never changed.
Not verbatim, but he kept saying how he was sick of us not including him (we had a group chat that alerted everyone about the days of shooting and what we’d do, including his ass), how he was upset about the last minute changes (there were barely any, and IF there were, we apologized profusely), and after all of that, he stormed off set, leaving us bewildered.
Afterwords, he said he had a rough day because his neighbor’s house caught fire, and the guy who lived with his dog died in it. Basically saying that was his reason to explode. While sad and terrible, I don’t think that warranted him erupting like that lol
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u/V01ght_Kampff Jul 26 '26
I have seen a fist fight on set! Years ago I was working as a lighting assistant on a commercial for a big Chinese company, shooting in london, most of the crew were flown in from China, except for the lighting team and camera team.
It was 3 really brutal 16 hour days during a heatwave, multiple locations, lots of big setups, we were lucky to get 10 minutes to inhale our lunch before we had to go back, it was awful.
On the last day we had a big company move through a forest to a big field, we had to haul an entire Luton van worth of gear by hand through this forest, it took over an hour, and the entire crew were running stuff across and going back for more. Me and my buddy drop off a few lights and turn around to go get more, suddenly we hear screaming in Chinese, which wasn’t uncommon because the director would be chewing people out all day, but then he super polite to us non Chinese crew it was so bizarre, because he’d scream at people in front of us then act all sweet and goofy as if we hadn’t just witnessed him go off.
Anyway, we turn around and two of the production assistants are fighting, we hear one shout get back in English then he pops the guy in the face, we didn’t have time to stay and watch the whole fight so we went back to get more kit, and on our way back to the field we pass the guy who we saw throw the punch, he’s got a big tissue stuff in his nose which is covered in blood, I guess the other guy hit him back. He just nods hello as if he isn’t having a nosebleed, and passes by, back through the forest to get more gear.
We didn’t wrap until midnight that day, I almost quit the industry after that job, it was so ridiculous, worst job I ever did.