Feuds, affairs and total mayhem: Why it’s the norm on almost all film sets – not just Don’t Worry Darling

As the media frenzy surrounding Olivia Wilde’s film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this week, intensified with the film’s star Florence Pugh’s no-show at the press conference, Geoffrey Macnab looks back at other films where production troubles became the story

The ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ cast and director Olivia Wilde at the Venice Film Festival premiere (Invision)

They faced the world’s media looking like furtive teenagers who had been caught doing something very naughty on a school camping trip. When Olivia Wilde and cast members from her new film Don’t Worry Darling gave a press conference in Venice earlier this week, it was a toe-curling affair for all concerned. What should have been a moment of celebration turned into an ordeal. Pop star turned actor Harry Styles, well accustomed to tabloid scrutiny, writhed uncomfortably. Chris Pine stared downward. Wilde smiled grimly.

Wilde’s dystopian sci-fi thriller has been the most hotly debated film in the festival which ends this weekend. The focus, though, hasn’t been on the performances or the daring of the director’s aesthetic choices. Instead, everyone has been talking about the mayhem behind the scenes – the alleged affair between Wilde and her leading man Styles, simmering tensions between cast members, disputes over pay and status, and just why the star Florence Pugh didn’t turn up at the press conference.

It was fitting that the film screened shortly before the Venice Festival premiere of Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, his biopic of Marilyn Monroe based on the Joyce Carol Oates book about the star. After all, Monroe, played by Ana De Armas, was involved in many Hollywood productions which were even more fraught behind the scenes than Don’t Worry Darling. Monroe was a victim of the Hollywood system. She was used, abused, and then spat out by the studios but when she was on a film set, she invariably left chaos in her wake.