Yes. Marlon Brando refused to film any scenes with Dennis Hopper while Hopper was on-set during the making of Apocalypse Now.
This despite them having a scene together in the film, which still had to be in the finished film.
Brando was notoriously difficult to work with, and this difficult incident and the notoriously hard logistical problem it started is a direct result of that fact.
Hopper told Bob Costas about the incident that caused it years later in an interview.
Brando had showed up on set weeks late, and had refused Francis Ford Coppola’s pleading to read the novel Heart of Darkness on which the film was based.
Hopper, for his part, had only agreed to appear in the film so that he could be allowed one scene with one line with Brando, who he’d always wanted to work with. He had no idea, by the way, that Brando had been refusing to read Heart of Darkness.
(Dennis Hopper, as the unnamed American journalist in Apocalypse Now.)
Hopper, like other actors on set, had been required to go through a lot of strenuous physical preparation while waiting for a very over-weight and out of shape Brando. As Hopper put it, “we were doing karate. We were doing jujitsu. We were climbing trees.”
Hopper had also, like the rest of the actors, been provided with a copy of “the little red book,” used in training US Army Special Forces.
During a story conference over dinner when Brando first showed up, Hopper, a bit irritated at Brando for not getting the venture and for not being physically prepared for the role told Brando, “I bet you haven’t even read the book.”
(Brando was so extremely over-weight during filming, he either had to be filmed in extreme closeup, or mostly in the dark to hide his obesity. This irked Hopper, who had been doing a great deal of training to prepare for the film.)
By this he meant “the little red book.”
But Brando thought he meant Heart of Darkness, and saw red.
Hopper claims Brando stormed out of the house they were in saying, “‘I don’t have to listen to this! I don’t have to take this!’ And he is screaming and yelling ‘Why do I have to hear it from him? I have to hear it from this punk!’”
Things got worse from here.
Hopper took this very personally, and then got good and drunk and went out of his way for the rest of the night, first at a boxing match and then at a screening of The Magnificent Seven, to get under Brando’s skin.
At some point during the film screening that evening, a very drunk Hopper, made some nasty and personal comments aimed at Brando and basically threatened to fight him, before himself staggering out drunk.
Brando and Coppola disappeared subsequently for the next two weeks, with production shut down the whole time.
(This film contains no scene where Brando and Hopper shared a line on-set. So, technically, Coppola broke his promise to Hopper. But that was probably for the best.)
When they finally came back, the deal presented to Hopper was that Hopper would do his takes first, Brando would watch them and do reaction takes to them, but neither would ever be on-set at the same time.
In the end, Hopper decided Brando had probably done him a favor.
The two would likely have come to blows on-set together.
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