Dustin Hoffman offers context to Lily Tomlin and David O. Russell’s famous fight on “I Heart Huckabees” set

Raechal ShewfeltThu, November 12, 2026 at 2:00 AM UTC

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Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, and David O. RussellCredit: Stefanie Keenan/Getty; Amy Sussman/Getty; Paras Griffin/GettyKey Points -

Dustin Hoffman writes in his new book about the infamous on-set arguments between I Heart Huckabees director David O. Russell and costar Lily Tomlin.

The actor says the leak came from a traitor.

The footage needs details about what’s happening, he says.

Dustin Hoffman was furious when that moment between costar Lily Tomlin and director/co-writer David O. Russell was leaked.

Footage of the actress and Russell arguing intensely, with him even kicking a trash can out of frustration and both of them yelling expletives at one another, went viral in 2007, three years after the release of the comedy.

But it didn’t tell the whole story of what was happening when viewed on its own, costar Dustin Hoffman writes in his new memoir, Look at Me.

“Someone who was on the crew of I Heart Huckabees —a traitor, as far as I’m concerned —leaked a video of Lily Tomlin cursing out our director, David O. Russell: she’s sitting next to me in the passenger seat of a car, Isabelle Huppert is in the driver’s seat, and I’m wedged in between them like a slice of sandwich meat while Lily gives David the finger and screams every conjugation of the word ‘f---’ at him,” writes Hoffman, 89. “(He was outside the car, watching us on a monitor, and making frantic suggestions about how we could try to make the scene work. Which it didn’t. It isn’t in the movie.)”

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Hoffman continues, “Then there’s a second video of a different scene, in which David retaliates by calling Lily all sorts of terrible names and throwing things around the room in a rage. The videos are awful, ugly. But if you were there, it was a totally different experience.”

The 2004 movie, which also costarred Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Jason Schwartzman, and Mark Wahlberg, depicts Hoffman’s Bernard and Tomlin’s Vivian as a married pair of “existential detectives” hired to help Schwartzman’s Albert find the meaning of life.

“These were two close collaborators who had worked together before. They loved each other,” Hoffman notes. “They were just freaking out because we were making an insanely complicated and surreal movie about ‘existential detectives’ investigating the nature of reality.”

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He admits, “When I first read the script, I had no f---ing idea what it was about.”

Hoffman originally passed on it, he recalls.

“The next thing I know,” Hoffman writes, “David O. Russell and the screenwriter Jeff Baena come to my house, unannounced, scale the front fence — I’m not making this up — find me in my kitchen, and start explaining what they mean, line by line. ‘Well, why didn’t you just say that?’ I remember asking them.”

The veteran of Hollywood classics, including All the President’s Men, The Graduate, Tootsie, and Midnight Cowboy, explains that making a film can be “painful and frustrating,” a “cry into the void.”

‘I Heart Huckabees’ stars Dustin Hoffman and Lily TomlinCredit: Claudette Barius/Fox Searchlight

“Lily Tomlin and David O. Russell both just happen to say ‘f---’ a lot as part of their existential crying,” the actor writes. “Huckabees turned out to be something very special — something worth screaming and crying over, if you ask me. (And those two f---ers finished that film with their friendship intact).”

Though I Heart Huckabees was a box-office flop, both Russell and Tomlin later expressed their respect for one another, with the director telling the New York Times in 2013 that he and the actress “love each other.”

As for Tomlin, she told Movieline in November 2011 that the leaked footage was “humiliating.” She added, “I adore David. I adore him as a talent.”

Look at Me is available in bookstores.

on Entertainment Weekly

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