TALES FROM THE DIRECTOR'S CHAIR

After 40 years in Tinseltown, filmmaker Ed Zwick is spilling the beans about the stars with the biggest egos in his tell-all memoir - and he doesn't regret a thing

- ED CUMMING

HE HELPED Denzel Washington win his first Oscar, put Brad Pitt into a Western in Legends of the Fall, had Leonardo DiCaprio doing a passable Zimbabwean accent for Blood Diamond and turned Tom Cruise into a samurai for The Last Samurai.

Anthony Hopkins, Daniel Craig, Claire Danes, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway and countless others have all worked with him. Along the way he has battled penny-pinching producers, capricious actors and Harvey Weinstein at the height of his manipulative, avaricious powers.

In his more than 40 years as a writer, director and producer, Ed Zwick has seen the best and worst that Hollywood has to offer. As a pioneering TV writer and executive, he made the hit TV series Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life.

Behind the camera as a director and producer, Ed (71) has capered around the world with the industry's biggest stars.

In a reflective moment during lockdown, after a remake of Thirty-something was put on hold, Ed, who started his career as a journalist, decided that the time had come to commit some of his stories to paper. The result is Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Forty-something Years in Hollywood, an enjoyable memoir, which looks back on his eventful career.

"I'm more accustomed to my films being polarising, frankly," Ed says over video call from his home in Santa Monica, California. Bearded, with horn-rimmed glasses and a plaid shirt somewhat louchely unbuttoned, a spacious wood-beamed room behind him, he looks every inch the prosperous Hollywood veteran. He's friendly, but you can imagine you would not want to be late to set. "There has been unanimity about the book, which makes me anxious," he admits.

He shouldn't worry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given he has made his fortune distilling complex stories into digestible spectacles, Ed strikes a canny balance between pulling back the wizard's curtain and spilling over into bitchiness.