Director Kevin Smith chokes up talking about his feud with Bruce Willis

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ANAHEIM, Calif. — Director Kevin Smith held back tears several times while talking about his complicated history with Bruce Willis, whom he contentiously directed in the 2010 buddy comedy Cop Out, and who recently announced that he was stepping way from acting due to his aphasia diagnosis.

“I worked with Bruce and we butted heads. ... That’s how it was for years,” Smith said. “Then we found out this week that Bruce is suffering from aphasia and instantly, all the f*cking strife and all the friction and all that sh*t, all the grudge … just slipped away.”

“I’m just sad for the guy that I absolutely adored for most of my life.”

Smith made the frank (and casually expletive-laden) comments at WonderCon 2022 in Anaheim, Calif.

Last week, after learning about Willis’s diagnosis of aphasia, a disorder that affects a person’s ability to communicate and understand language, Smith tweeted out an apology for his “petty complaints” over the Cop Out rift.

“Long before any of the Cop Out stuff, I was a big Bruce Willis fan - so this is really heartbreaking to read. He loved to act and sing and the loss of that has to be devastating for him. I feel like an a**hole for my petty complaints from 2010. So sorry to BW and his family.”

Smith said that he’s idolized Willis since he was a teen watching the TV series Moonlighting, for which Willis won an Emmy in 1987.

He was also a huge fan of Willis’s music. Smith learned to drive in his friend’s truck, which had a broken cassette player with Willis’s debut album The Return of Bruno stuck in it. For years, until the tape player was replaced, that was the only thing Smith and his friends could listen to while driving, “but we didn’t give a sh*t because we f*cking loved that album and Bruce was just the epitome of f*cking cool,” he said.

Smith accepted the Cop Out job — the lowest paid directing gig in his adult career — specifically so he could work with Willis. “I wasn’t there for the money, I was there for the love. I loved Bruce Willis,” he said. “And by the end of the process, not so much.”

NEW YORK - JULY 24: Actor Bruce Willis and director Kevin Smith on location for
Actor Bruce Willis and director Kevin Smith on location for "Cop Out" on July 24, 2009, in New York City. (Photo by Bobby Bank/WireImage) (WireImage)

In 2011, Smith went on comedian Marc Maron’s podcast and said that working with Willis was “soul crushing.” He complained that Willis wouldn’t even sit for a poster shoot, adding that “were it not for Tracy [Morgan, Willis’s co-star], I might have killed either myself or someone else.”

On the set, Smith once got so frustrated with Willis that he punched a hole through a wall in his trailer, he told the WonderCon audience. The movie’s screenwriters, brothers Mark and Robb Cullen, had to act as go-betweens for the actor and director.

After Smith tweeted his regrets last week, he got a call from Mark Cullen, who said, “It looks like you’re beating yourself up. I need you to know something.”

Smith braced himself. He figured Cullen would share something negative that Willis had said about him, which, while it would justify Smith’s previous anger, would also “hurt my heart f*cking more,” he said.

But Cullen, who had met with Willis a few months prior, said the actor told him that working on Cop Out turned out to be one of the best times he had in the latter part of his career. On top of that, Willis “said he never had any hard feelings. He said that he really liked you and he knew that he f*cked things up with you guys,” Cullen reportedly told Smith.

The words affected Smith deeply.

“At the end of the day, all I ever wanted was for the guy to like me. I liked him and I wanted him to like me too,” he said, his eyes glistening. “Having Mark tell me that he liked me destroyed me, and that’s all I’ve been thinking about for the last few days.”

—By Pauline Vu