Cher is looking back on the two directors she didn’t like working with.
In an interview with the U.K.’s Times published Friday timed to the release of the first of her two-part memoir, the singer discussed her acting career and the difficulty of working with two filmmakers in particular.
“There are only two directors I didn’t like: Peter Bogdanovich and the guy from The Muppets,” she said as she reflected on clashing with Bogdanovich on 1985’s Mask and with Frank Oz on 1990’s Mermaids. “I actually got the guy from The Muppets fired. I said, ‘either you’re going or I’m going,’ which is a shame because he’s a really good director, but he had a thing about me. He would go, ‘At least my wife loves me!’”
On the late Bogdanovich, who died in 2022, Cher continued, “He was an asshole. He was not nice to the girls in the film and he was so fucking arrogant. I really, really disliked him.”
It seemed the feeling was mutual as hinted in Bogdanovich’s interview with Vulture in 2019. At the time the director said of Cher, “She didn’t trust anybody, especially men. That’s why she dropped her father’s name, Sarkisian.”
While filming Mask, Cher recounted, “He comes in and says, ‘Cher, where do you think we should film this scene?’ And I say, well, the kitchen is working pretty well, why don’t we do that again? The next morning he arrives on set, eating an egg sandwich, and starts screaming that he’s not going to let me direct this film; I’m a nobody; he can cut me out at any moment. Oh yeah, he was a pig.”
She continued, “Ask everybody: I’m really easy to work with. I’m not arbitrary in the things I say, because it’s right to do what the director wants until you need to speak up. Meryl [Streep] says that if the director wants you to do something you don’t like, you say: yes, yes, yes, I’ll do it that way. Then you do it your way and they don’t even notice. I’ve worked with Bob Altman, Mike Nichols, Norman Jewison … Really great directors whom I respect. I know when to listen.”
Earlier this year it was announced that Dey Street Books, an imprint of the William Morrow Group at HarperCollins Publishers, would publish the first of a two-part memoir this November.
“After more than 70 years of fighting to live her life on her own terms, Cher finally reveals her true story in intimate detail, in a two-part memoir,” the publisher teased. “With her trademark honesty and humor, Cher: The Memoir traces how this diamond in the rough succeeded with no plan and little confidence to become the trailblazing superstar the world has been unable to ignore for more than half a century.”
The upcoming memoir is set to chronicle the singer’s childhood up to meeting and marrying Sonny Bono, while detailing “the highly complicated relationship that made them world-famous, but eventually drove them apart.”
The memoir has been highly anticipated after she first teased she was writing it in 2017. When giving a status update to The Hollywood Reporter last year, Cher quipped, “Well, we’re almost finished because [HarperCollins] goes, ‘Cher, how long are you going to work on this?’ That’s difficult too, but we’re so close.”
Cher: The Memoir Part 1 is available now. Cher: The Memoir, Part Two will follow in 2025.
