Since making her feature film debut in 1972’s Napoleon and Samantha, Jodie Foster has gone on to work with a litany of the most notable directors in the business.

Almost being mauled to death by a lion in her very first movie didn’t dissuade her from following her dreams of becoming an actor, leading to a phenomenal career that’s yielded two Academy Award wins for ‘Best Actress’ and seen her collaborate with the likes of Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Richard Donner, David Fincher, Robert Zemeckis, Spike Lee, and many more.

However, working with one particular actor-turned-director turned out to be a nightmare. Of course, Dennis Hopper had long since carved out a reputation as an unpredictable presence and one of Hollywood’s most notorious hellraisers, so there was always a chance their creative partnership on 1990’s Catchfire would be combustible.

The crime thriller was Hopper’s fifth directorial credit and featured him in a supporting role alongside a star-studded ensemble that boasted Vincent Price, Joe Pesci, John Turturro, Catherine Keener, Charlie Sheen, and Bob Dylan in the tale of Foster’s artist witnessing a mob-sponsored murder and being pursued by Hopper’s obsessed hitman after he’s tasked to take her out.

Panned by critics and an unmitigated catastrophe at the box office, Hopper would even have his name removed from the credits in favour of the famed pseudonym Alan Smithee before editing together his preferred version and releasing it on television and home video under the title of Backtrack.

Foster was hardly alone, though, with screenwriter Anne Louise Bardach calling Hopper “completely insane”, revealing that even though he’d instructed her to craft “a really tight, taut thriller”, the end result was more akin to a “vaudevillian caper.”

It would take Foster years to name the culprit behind her displeasure, after she referred to how she’d “worked with an actor/director who was a major pain”, something she described as “very difficult” for her in more ways than one. Years later, she would confirm it was Hopper she was talking about, to the point where she even warned Meryl Streep against the prospect of following in her footsteps and working with the Easy Rider star.

During an appearance on The Charlie Rose Show, Hopper railed against the sabotage, revealing that Catchfire “blew what I thought at the time was a go project” when “Meryl suddenly said no” on Foster’s urging. The damage was already done, though, and that extended to the actor and filmmaker openly blasting the theatrical cut of his own movie, which he distanced himself from in unequivocal terms.

Taking aim at production company and distributor Vestron Pictures, Hopper would make sure everybody knew Catchfire “is not a film by Dennis Hopper”. Instead, it was “directed by some idiots at Vestron” who removed half an hour of footage he’d shot in the editing suite and discarded all of his music choices.

Catchfire may not have been Hopper’s movie, but Backtrack – 18 minutes longer and with an alternate ending – certainly was. Either way, it proved to be one of the biggest disasters of Foster’s career on a critical and commercial level, whatever it was called, with her misery being compounded by her dealings with the maverick in charge of the set, which got so heated it ended up drawing Streep into its orbit long after the fact.