Joaquin Phoenix reportedly threatened to drop out of Napoleon until Paul Thomas Anderson was drafted in to rewrite the script.

The news had first been reported by The Hollywood Reporter in August, and now the film’s director Ridley Scott has appeared to confirm it in an interview with the New York Times.

“Tommy was doing Licorice Pizza, advising me how to do Napoleon,” Scott said, referring to Anderson, who had directed Phoenix in 2012’s The Master. “It turned into a lot of fun, actually. Three of us in this room screaming with laughter.”

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It is not the first time that Phoenix has caused controversy by threatening to abandon major film projects, in August he dropped out entirely of Todd Haynes’ new gay romance film just days before they were due to start filming. That project now appears to be dead, and a producer has described it as a “tragedy”.

James McAvoy recently revealed that Phoenix also dropped out of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split “two weeks before they started shooting”, with McAvoy only being drafted in at the last minute.

Phoenix has even threatened to abandon a Scott film in the past in the form of the original Gladiator in 2000, which caused Russell Crowe to label him as “unprofessional”. Speaking about that experience, Scott recalled: “He was in his prince’s outfit saying, ‘I can’t do it.’ I said, ‘What?’ And Russell said, ‘This is terribly unprofessional.’” On that occasion, Phoenix did stick with the project, and went on to be nominated for an Oscar for his performance.

“I can act as a big brother or dad. But I’m quite a friend of Joaquin’s. Gladiator was a baptism of fire for both of us in the beginning,” Scott added.

Napoleon was released in November last year, and in a four-star review, NME wrote: “Scott has teased a four-hour version of Napoleon that will eventually be available to stream on Apple TV+ and, on the basis of the terrific entertainment he’s already served up, it’ll be a doozy. In the meantime, the details of historical truth be damned: this mighty adventure should be seen on the biggest screen possible. Charge on horseback to the multiplex to savour it.”

Phoenix did star in the recent Joker: Folie à Deux, which performed poorly at the box office and became the first Hollywood comic book movie adaptation to have earned a ‘D’ CinemaScore. Comedian Tim Dillon, who had a brief role in the film, has said that many actors on set were predicting its flop, saying it was “the worst film ever made”.