Zwick had rocky relationship with star Brad Pitt, who was cast in the role of Tristan Ludlow after Tom Cruise dropped out.

Pitt’s agent allegedly called Zwick after the first table read “to say Brad wanted to quit.”

“It fell to producer Marshall Herskovitz to talk Brad off the ledge,” Zwick writes. “It was the first augury of the deeper springs of emotion roiling inside Brad. He seems easygoing at first, but he can be volatile when riled, as I was to be reminded more than once as shooting began and we took each other’s measure.”

He notes that Brad Pitt “would get edgy whenever he was about to shoot a scene that required him to display deep emotion.”

“His ideas about Tristan differed from mine,” Zwick writes. “Brad had grown up with men who held their emotions in check; I believed the point of the [‘Legends of the Fall’] novel was that a man’s life was the sum of his griefs. Yet the more I pushed Brad to reveal himself, the more he resisted. So, I kept pushing and Brad pushed back.”

“Brad came back at me, also out loud, telling me to back off,” Zwick writes. “The considered move would have been to tell the crew to take five and for the two of us to talk it out. But I was feeling bloody-minded, and not about to relent. I was angry at Brad for not trusting me to influence his performance. Also for the reluctance he’d shown after the first table read. Who knows, I might even have been acting out my own inability to be vulnerable. But Brad wasn’t about to give in without a fight. In his defense, I was pushing him to do something he felt was either wrong for the character, or more ’emo’ than he wanted to appear onscreen. I don’t know who yelled first, who swore, or who threw the first chair. Me, maybe? But when we looked up, the crew had disappeared. And this wasn’t the last time it happened. Eventually the crew grew accustomed to our dustups and would walk away and let us have it out. ‘We hate it when the parents fight,’ said one.”

Legends of the Fall was based on author Jim Harrison’s novella and cast Pitt opposite Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, Julia Ormond and Henry Thomas. The sprawling epic centers on three brothers and their father living remotely on the plains of Montana in the early 20th century. The film was nominated for 3 Oscars and won for John Toll’s cinematography.

I had cut only a single shot from the scene where Tristan is raging with fever, screaming as the waves wash over him on the schooner,” Zwick writes. “But it was a shot he dearly loved, and it would have been little enough to leave it in, and I should have. Apologies, Brad. He was also unhappy when People named him ‘Sexiest Man of the Year’ — something for which I take neither credit nor blame.”

Read the full Legends of the Fall excerpt from Zwick’s book on Vanity Fair’s website. “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood” is now available for pre-order and releases on February 13.