Diane Keaton Was Fighting, Not Acting, with Her Ex on Set — Her Hardest Role Yet
Reds put Hollywood in the crosshairs, humanizing communism at the height of the Cold War as Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton portrayed John Reed and Louise Bryant’s combustible romance — and for Keaton, the toughest fallout was personal.
Here is a movie that did not make life easy for anyone involved. 'Reds' had the nerve to take a sympathetic look at communism in the middle of the Cold War, dramatize the October Revolution, and stage the messy love-and-work life of John Reed and Louise Bryant without sanding off the prickly parts. But the hardest part of it, at least for Diane Keaton, did not happen in the script.
The day Warren Beatty lit the fuse
One of the film's big confrontations between Bryant (Keaton) and Reed (director and co-star Warren Beatty) kept coming out stiff in rehearsal. According to a behind-the-scenes account, Beatty decided to try something else: he quietly rolled cameras, then needled, interrupted, and pushed Keaton mid-take. No warning. No safety net.
Keaton snapped out of performance mode and into something raw. She stopped reciting and started venting — anger, hurt, the whole cocktail — not just as Louise, but as someone furious at being talked over and boxed in. When Beatty finally called cut, the room reportedly went dead silent. Keaton was shaking and teary, but not backing down. Beatty walked over and, as the story goes, sealed it.
'That is the scene. That is Louise.'
Keaton would later sum it up even cleaner: 'I was not acting. I was fighting.'
That unscripted blow-up became the emotional core of 'Reds' and, by many accounts, one of the defining moments of Keaton's career. Risky method, sure, but the result is volcanic onscreen.
What 'Reds' is actually doing
Beatty was not making a tidy history lesson. The movie tries to hold politics, war, and heartbreak in the same frame, using Reed and Bryant to get there. That ambition — plus the film's sympathetic view of communism — made 'Reds' a lightning rod in 1981. It also paid off: the film won 3 Oscars, including Best Director for Beatty, and scored 9 more nominations, among them Best Picture, Best Actor (Beatty), Best Actress (Keaton), Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson), and Best Screenplay.
Who plays whom
- Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant
- Warren Beatty as John Reed
- Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill
- Edward Herrmann as Max Eastman
- Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman
- Paul Sorvino as Louis C. Fraina
- Jerzy Kosinski as Grigory Zinoviev
- Nicolas Coster as Paul Trullinger
- William Daniels as Julius Gerber
The real Louise Bryant the movie does not have time for
'Reds' keeps its focus tight on a specific, volatile slice of Bryant and Reed's lives. The rest of Bryant's story is rough and, frankly, movie-sized on its own. After Reed died of typhus in 1920, she married American diplomat William Bullitt in 1923. They had a daughter, Anne Bullitt. Bryant tried to keep working as a journalist, but the comfortable, conventional life that came with Bullitt never fit. Their marriage ended in 1930 after he confronted her about a lesbian relationship; she attempted suicide and survived. As her mental health declined and alcoholism took a harder grip, Bullitt took custody of their daughter. Bryant died in January 1936 at age 50 from a brain hemorrhage, after a long fight with a rare, painful disorder. The film nods at her fire; it cannot contain the whole blaze.
Where to watch
'Reds' is streaming on Kanopy and Hoopla.