Brian Cox slams ‘idiot’ directors for ‘not doing their homework’ and failing to inspire him: ‘I’ve been lucky, but I’ve worked with some real bozos’

Successor Brian Cox has attacked the directors, calling many of them “idiots” and saying he has rarely drawn much inspiration from them.

The Scottish actor, who played media empire chief Logan Roy in the award-winning HBO series Succession about a warring family, said that while he has been fortunate to work with some great directors, he has had to do a lot ‘bite through’.

Cox, 77, who now stars in Road To A Million from the new Amazon series 007, said: ‘I’ve been very lucky with directors, but I’ve also worked with some real bozos. And they couldn’t put a certain thing in a top hat.

‘But it’s a real struggle sometimes. As an actor, I’m always looking for the big note, the note that makes it clear what I have to do, and I rarely get it.

“I have to do it for myself, but I don’t want to be in that situation where I’m doing it for myself. We want to be inspired in some way. And there’s very little inspiration coming from many directors. It makes it very difficult.

“I was recently in a situation where the director actually came up with notes that were so useless.

“So I had to go through the script and say ‘that means that, that means that, that doesn’t mean I have to do what you’re suggesting because you’re asking for an emotion and a feeling without really understanding it’ which the point is, what the point is.”

‘And many directors do that. They don’t do their homework. They are so busy seeing “oh, the whole picture” that they forget the details. It’s all in the details and that also includes the acting.’

He added: ‘I really want directors who can inspire that, and unfortunately not many of them do. They forget about acting, they forget what it’s about, what the mystery of it is.’

In a new BBC Maestro series on acting, he added: ‘Many directors don’t understand the relationship between words and images. They understand the image and can walk the entire path of the image. But the words are kind of pushed aside. Or they are literal and do not give a good picture.’

Of the times he felt at odds with a director, Cox admitted, “You deal with it with great difficulty; a director you don’t get along with just has to bite the bullet. This happens a lot.

‘And in that situation you have to have a sense of self-preservation. “Diplomacy is always useful. It is difficult.

“You have to learn the lesson and say, ‘Oh, I understand, I’m working with an idiot, but I’m not going to let that stop me from getting where I need to go.’ And that happens a lot.’

Fame: The actor is a hugely successful stage and television actor, having achieved enormous fame as media titan Logan Roy in the smash hit series Succession

But Cox also said he had been fortunate to work under some great directors during his long career, citing Spike Lee as possibly the best he had encountered.

He added: “I’ve worked with some of the best directors ever. They were awe-inspiring. They had a vision of what they were doing and what the point of the piece they were doing was.”

He praised the “very eccentric” Wes Anderson, with whom he worked on the comedy Rushmore and who won an Oscar in 2014 for The Grand Budapest Hotel, for having “a kind of really original sensibility”.

But even with Anderson, he did not agree with all of the director’s methods.

He said, ‘The only problem I had with Wes was repeated lines, and I said to him, “If you do that all the time, we’ll lose the rhythm of the scene” – and the rhythm of the scene is very important . We need to know where we’re going, how I take what he says, and how he takes what I say.

“If you stop that rhythm every time, you’re actually making it more difficult for the way we play the scene. Because it’s stop, start, stop, start, stop, start, and that will always show.’

Cox praised Malcolm

He said, “Spike Lee is one of the best directors I’ve worked with, bar none. I made a movie called 25th Hour with Spike. His knowledge of cinema is so amazing.

‘He has a real brain in addition to extraordinary instincts. He has the ability to place you exactly where you need to be. You know where to be physically, you know where to be mentally, you know where to be emotionally in the scene.

‘He had done his homework so that when he came with a note, it was the right note. There was no argument.

‘That is the sign of a great director. There are certain directors who you know can feel safe, and you can say, ‘I will do anything because there is integrity of work here.’

‘But yes, I would recommend everyone to try directing.’

Read more about Brian Cox’s BBC Maestro course on acting at bbcmaestro.com.