Wes Anderson says Gene Hackman was ‘furious’ about ‘Royal Tenenbaums’ salary: ‘He left without saying goodbye’

Wes Anderson is recalling his rocky relationship with Gene Hackman.

The Grand Budapest Hotel director looked back on the two-time Oscar winner having significant reservations about getting paid a flat fee for his 2001 film, The Royal Tenenbaums. “Gene was very annoyed about the money,” he said in a new interview with U.K. paper The Times. “He was furious. Also, he didn’t want to do the film anyway. I talked him into it — I just didn’t go away.”

Anderson explained that he adopted the flat-rate payment model on his previous film, 1998’s Rushmore, because Bill Murray offered to take the same salary as the then-unknown 18-year-old actor Jason Schwartzman. 

“He said he would do the movie and offered to work for the same amount as Jason — the kid,” Anderson explained. “He said, ‘I’ll take what he’s taking, but I have to be able to leave for a golf tournament.'” 

Anderson and his collaborators wanted to bring the same salary model to Tenenbaums. “And then, for the next movie, we just said to the studio, ‘Can we do that again?'” he recalled.

Hackman was the only member of the Tenenbaums cast — which also included Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Danny Glover, and Murray — to put up a fight. “Everybody else said yes to the salary, so Gene just went with it — and that just became our way,” Anderson said.

Anderson previously praised Hackman’s performance in the film at a Tenenbaums reunion screening event at the Tribeca Festival in 2021. “I think maybe when he finally settled on the fact that he was really going to have to do the movie, he had to make it worth his while somehow,” he said. “He gave us a lot. For that small amount of money, I feel like he gave us everything he had.”

Luke Wilson, who played one of Hackman’s onscreen sons, said the late actor was a constant presence during production. “He had a great thing that he did where he was on set all day,” he said at the screening event. “He just sat in his chair between shots. So even if another scene was going on, or if he wasn’t in it, he was always right there — which was also intimidating.”

The filmmaker told the Times that he didn’t keep in touch with Hackman, who died in February at age 95, after production concluded. “Not a word,” Anderson said of their post-Tenenbaums communication. “In fact, he left without saying goodbye. He was grumpy — we had friction. He didn’t enjoy it. I was probably too young and it was annoying to him.”

Fortunately, Anderson said, Hackman appreciated the movie once he saw the final cut — which he expressed to the director in their final conversation, shortly after the film hit theaters in 2001. “He liked it,” Anderson said. “But he told me he didn’t understand it when we were shooting.”

Anderson regrets not making his vision clearer to Hackman. “I wish I’d shown him 10 minutes, early on,” he said. “Then, maybe, he would have said, ‘Okay, I get it.'”

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Murray praised Hackman’s “really, really good” performance shortly after the actor’s death but acknowledged that the Unforgiven star wasn’t too keen on Tenenbaums while working on it. 

“I sympathize with Gene because, to him, Wes Anderson was just a punk kid and Gene’s made some of the greatest American movies,” Murray said on The Drew Barrymore Show. “So he was a little irritable. But he had to work with children, dogs, [actor] Kumar [Pallana] — who was an absolute mystery to all of us anyway. They put him in very challenging positions to work, and so he just felt a lot of responsibility and kept thinking, ‘What am I doing here with these people?'”

Murray also said he thinks Hackman came around to the movie eventually. “He was not an ignorant man. He was a bright guy, and when he saw the movie, he had to go, ‘Oh s—, I acted like a jerk,'” the Groundhog Day star said. “I’m sure he did, because when you see the movie it’s a real piece of work. Wes Anderson makes great movies and so does Gene Hackman, and you put them both in the same movie, what are you going to get? You’re going to get a good movie.”