Who Was the Director Scott Eastwood Called a 'Piece of S#@!' on Joe Rogan's Podcast?

Scott Eastwood went on The Joe Rogan Experience last month, but because each episode is 412 hours long, the quote is just now surfacing. What happened is that Scott Eastwood did the thing where a celebrity dangles a juicy piece of gossip in front of you and then refuses to let you have it (see also Nick Offerman and Rebecca Ferguson). The quote came wedged between a supplement ad and roughly six hours of the two of them workshopping how you’d knife your way out of a whale, probably. Eastwood claims he worked on a movie where someone “famous” walked away mid-production, stiffed the investors, and refused to pay anyone back.

“I just worked with somebody and, without saying any names, people get too famous for too long and think the world owes them something,” Eastwood said. “They decided after we’d already spent a bunch of money that they just didn’t want to work with this other person and didn’t want to do the job.” When he suggested the person repay the money, the response was “I’m not gonna do that.” And here’s the kicker, the detail that sent me down a two-hour rabbit hole to nowhere: “It was their directorial, their story, their thing.”

Rogan, to his credit, immediately tried to do our job for us. “You can say a name and then we’ll edit it out,” he offered. Eastwood demurred. And that, unfortunately, is the whole story. Eastwood gave us no title, no genre, no year, and a director described so vaguely that the “other person” they refused to work with could be anyone from a actress to a caterer.

But I’m a nosy b*tch, and I needed a suspect, so let’s rule out the obvious one first.

It’s not De Noche. In 2024, Joaquin Phoenix bailed on Todd Haynes’ NC-17 gay romance five days before cameras rolled in Guadalajara. Sets were built. Distributors had already bought it. Losses were reportedly huge, and Phoenix had brought the project to Haynes and co-written it. On paper, “their story, their thing” fits Phoenix. Pedro Pascal has since ridden in to save the movie, which is now actually shooting.

Here’s the problem: it wasn’t Phoenix’s thing to direct. Haynes directed De Noche; Phoenix was the star and co-writer. Eastwood specifically said “it was their directorial,” which means the person who walked was the one calling action. Phoenix wasn’t. And the much bigger problem is that Scott Eastwood was never anywhere near that production.

Which brings us to unfortunate truth: this almost certainly isn’t a movie any of us have heard of.

Look at what Eastwood has actually been doing. His last few years are Alarum, Tin Soldier, Stolen Girl — the kind of low-budget, straight-to-VOD action pictures that get financed by one rich guy, shot in Bulgaria or wherever and dumped onto a platform with a poster that’s 70 percent Scott Eastwood’s jaw. His two 2026 releases with actual theatrical footprints, Lucky Strike and Regretting You, are other people’s fully-completed films. Nothing on his IMDb is a self-directed auteur passion project that detonated in pre-production, because a movie that detonates in pre-production never makes it to IMDb in the first place. It has no trades coverage because at Eastwood’s current tier, a financier and a first-time actor-director can blow up an entire movie and the industry press won’t so much as blink. De Noche got twelve Variety articles because it had Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Haynes attached. The Scott Eastwood VOD thriller that died on the vine got zero, because it had Scott Eastwood attached.

So no, I can’t give you a name. I don’t think anyone can. Eastwood’s story is vague enough that even a determined idiot with a search bar hits a wall. He named zero names. And he did all of it in the middle of a monologue about work ethic and doing the right thing and how his 96-year-old father raised him to be a put-your-boots-on, go-to-work man, although the moral-high-ground bit doesn’t sit that well when you’re using it to subtweet a peer you won’t identify to a hundred million podcast listeners.

The only way to know for sure is to get Eastwood back in a chair and refuse to let him leave until he talks. Then again, maybe that’s the wrong Eastwood strategy. His father spent twelve minutes at the 2012 RNC interrogating an empty chair and got roughly as many concrete answers out of it as I got out of this podcast, so perhaps the family approach to accountability is to demand it loudly from a piece of furniture that was never going to name names.