Director Says Bruce Willis Was Showing Signs Of Decline Years Before His Recent Revelation
Director Says Bruce Willis Was Showing Signs Of Decline Years Before His Recent Revelation
The end of an era is here for a Hollywood legend. It’s time to say goodbye to him as an actor.
Bruce Willis’ family members, including ex-wife Demi Moore and daughter Rumer, recently announced on Instagram in posts that the actor had been diagnosed with aphasia, a neurological condition, and will step away from acting.
When news broke about the condition that Bruce Willis is suffering from, people were saddened. But according to a director who recently collaborated with Bruce Willis, the actor has already been showing signs of decline years before his revelation.
Mike Burns shared in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that he had to cut Bruce’s dialogue by five pages on one film that they were working with. This was a process that felt Herculean at the time.
Then more than a dozen people also spoke to the newspaper about Bruce, sharing experiences from the set and many of them were extremely concerned.
During the interview, Mike told the newspaper that he was aware of Bruce’s condition. What he didn’t know was how serious it was. He was asked to work with Bruce for a second time and he agreed only because he believed the actor had improved.
He said, “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.” He added, “I didn’t think he was better. I thought he was worse.”
Mike was also instructed to condense all of the dialogue Bruce would be required to deliver, around 25 pages, into one full day of filming. When it came time to shoot a second film, he admits that things weren’t going so well.
He praised the actor’s decision to retire from acting. He said, “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.”
The Times also mentions that adjustments were incorporated into the contracts Bruce signed for recent works.
His contracts, for example, stated that he could only work eight hours a day, yet the celebrity frequently left sets after only four. In recent years, some fans have questioned Bruce Willis’s film choices, saying that they are beneath an actor of his caliber.
Jesse V. Johnson, who directed one of these low-budget films, told the newspaper that Bruce’s condition bothered him. He asked the team working with Bruce about how he was doing, and they replied “that he was happy to be there, but that it would be best if we could finish shooting him by lunch and let him go early.”
Another who worked on set with the actor shared, “It was less of an annoyance and more like: ‘How do we not make Bruce look bad?’ Someone would give him a line and he didn’t understand what it meant. He was just being puppeted.”
Lala Kent, who played Bruce’s daughter in “Hard Kill,” also said that Bruce discharged a blank-loaded gun at the wrong time on set, which may have resulted in injury. Also. Bruce was supposed to deliver a line that would cue her to duck before he fired the gun. However, he had forgotten the line and instead discharged the gun.
Bruce Willis rose to fame in the 1980s comedy-drama TV series “Moonlighting.” Since then, he has appeared in about 100 movies across his four-decade career, garnering credit for his roles especially in “Pulp Fiction” and “The Sixth Sense.” He also won a Golden Globe Award and two Emmys.
