That still doesn't mean he's going to take orders from Miss Piggy.
Just ask Frank Oz, the director of Brando's latest flick, The Score.
Oz, who found his initial success as a Muppet manipulator and voice of Miss Piggy and Yoda, was behind the camera for The Score--a heist film costarring Robert De Niro, Edward Norton and Angela Bassett--and his experience with Brando wasn't exactly hunky dory.
What was supposed to be a star-studded cool caper shot in Montreal last summer ended up being a behind-the-scenes fiasco as Brando showed why he's become one of Tinseltown's most notoriously difficult-to-work-with actors, according to the new issue of Time magazine.
In The Score, the 77-year-old Brando plays Max, an elderly gay criminal who enlists a semiretired safecracker (De Niro) and a young thief (Norton) to help him pull off the biggest heist of his career.
When Brando, who reportedly received a hefty $3 million for three weeks worth of work, showed up on the first day of shooting, Time reports that he hammed it up for his role by donning dark eye shadow, rosy cheeks and heavy makeup and acting like Truman Capote by way of The Island of Dr. Moreau--not quite the aging crook ready to make a killing Oz envisioned
"He had earnestly worked on his character," Oz diplomatically tells Time. "But my tone was more reality based."
Not quite as "down and dirty" as Oz had hoped for when he hired the erstwhile Godfather, the director constantly had to tell Brando in take after take to "bring it down."
Brando acquiesced, but not without a resounding "F--- you."
One of the biggest rumors to emerge from the set was that Brando shot his close-ups naked from the waist down; but costar Norton says it was only partially true. "It was hot and Marlon was sweating through his suit, so he put on shorts instead of the suit pants," Norton tells Time. "It was the most practical, simple thing."
But at one point Brando refused to let Oz direct him in one of the movie's key emotional scenes. Instead, De Niro directed Brando as Oz watched the action unfold from another room and relayed instruction to De Niro via an assistant director.
Perhaps the ultimate ignominy endured by Oz was the actor's insistence on calling the 57-year-old director Miss Piggy.
"I bet you wish I was a puppet so you could stick your hand up my ass and make me do what you want," Brando reportedly quipped to Oz when the two were in the same room together.
If that wasn't bad enough, Oz reportedly didn't have an easy time with De Niro or Norton, either.
De Niro reportedly reworked all the film's heist scenes because the script wasn't realistic enough, even going so far as to bring in a shady buddy with a history of cracking safes as a technical consultant to show how it's done.
"There's no point in doing it if there's no authenticity," De Niro says in the article.
And Norton got in his own two cents by changing a fair amount of the script's dialogue in his scenes with De Niro.
"There were moments on this movie when Bob and I disagreed," Norton says. "When Frank and I disagreed intensely and when Frank and Marlon butted heads. But the assumption that conflict is bad is wrong. It's just creative wrestling."
And according to early notices, the tension pays off. Time reports the $70 million crime flick earned high marks at several test screenings and the buzz over the film is growing faster than Brando's waistline.