Bruce Willis’ Directors Were Concerned With His Memory and Safety on Set Prior to Retirement
variety.comZack Sharf Several of Bruce Willis’ recent directors spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the concerns they felt while working with the actor in the years leading up to Wednesday’s announcement that Willis has aphasia and is stepping away from his acting career.
Aphasia is a language disorder caused by brain damage that affects a person’s ability to communicate. The directors witnessed the effects of Willis losing his mental acuity, which often resulted in the actor being unable to remember his dialogue.
Mike Burns, who directed Willis in “Out of Death,” said he was asked to reduce the actor’s speaking parts in his film.“It looks like we need to knock down Bruce’s page count by about five pages,” Burns wrote in a June 2020 email, obtained by the Times, to his film’s screenwriter. “We also need to abbreviate his dialogue a bit so that there are no monologues, etc.” “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,” Burns said, noting he was ultimately tasked with shooting all of Willis’ dialogue scenes (about 25 pages of the script) in a single day.When Burns was asked to direct a follow-up Willis movie, “Wrong Place,” he was told the actor would be able to perform better.
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.”Jesse V.
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