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Chris Rock believes that tough love from one of Hollywood’s most notorious, half-cancelled figures helped make him a better filmmaker.
Following a triumphant Toronto International Film Festival premiere for his latest
directorial effort “Misty Green,” Rock sat for a keynote chat on Sunday to discuss his expansive career. The comedian told the crowd his chops were elevated by Scott Rudin, a former producing kingpin who disappeared after harrowing accounts of bullying, verbal abuse and being an “absolute monster” in a 2021 exposé.
In conversation with TIFF chief executive Cameron Bailey, Rock recalled the last film he directed: the 2014 comedy “Top Five,” in which he starred with Rosario Dawson. Rock wrote the film in 2012 during production on “Grown Ups 2,” using his ample downtime thanks to that film’s large ensemble shoot.
“Being number three or four on the call sheet of a ginormous movie means you’re going to have a lot of days off. I wrote [‘Top Five’], and yeah, it’s got a lot of Woody [Allen] in it. It’s got a lot of Mike Leigh in it. It’s got a lot of Alexander Payne in it,” said Rock. “Scott [Rudin] produced it, and he really pushed me in a way. I know people have whatever stories about Scott, [but] I need hard coaching.”
Bailey asked Rock why he needed the Rudin push, to which the former Oscars host said, ”Everybody doesn’t respond to a hug, you know what I mean? I got two daughters. One, you can smile her into excellence. The other one you gotta be like, ‘Hey, what the fuck are we doing?’… Scott really pushed me in a way I hadn’t been pushed in a long time, and it was great. I learned to not settle so for anything … especially when it comes to getting talent. [To] pursue the best of the best of the best for everything — in front of the camera, behind the camera. No compromise.”
Before his public reckoning, Rudin was known to have the grace and subtlety of a chainsaw, especially in giving feedback to talent. Rudin, after all, coined the phrase that came to define the 2014 Sony Pictures hack when he called Angelina Jolie a “minimally talented spoiled brat” in leaked emails (Tina Fey and Amy Poehler would later memorialize the phrase in one of their Golden Globes host monologues).
After four years underground, Rudin resurfaced in 2025 and announced his intentions to return to Broadway, another axis of his show business power that yielded massive hits like “The Book of Mormon” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“A lot of what was said was true. Some of what was said wasn’t true. But I didn’t feel there was any point in responding to all of it because what’s the point of parsing bad behavior? It was bad behavior. I own it,” Rudin told the New York Times last year. “I don’t think I was ever really in the dark about why I was rough on people. I knew why I was rough on people. For a long time, it seemed like a price I could live with.”
