Woody Scares George Hamilton

George Hamilton may be in his fifth decade of movie-making, but that didn't stop the 62-year-old actor from getting nervous on the set of Woody Allen's latest film, Hollywood Ending (opening Friday). The tanned thesp says that Allen — notorious for not letting castmembers read his scripts in advance and for giving little to no feedback on their performances — kept him in the dark most of the time.

"I didn't really know what my character was about until part-way through the movie," Hamilton says of his role as a hovering studio exec. "He would never tell me if I was doing it the right way, only if I was doing it wrong. I thought, either [Allen] is the most brilliant man, or one of the biggest scams in Hollywood — and I love it either way."

Hamilton — who acknowledges he was hired more for his suave Hollywood image than his artistic talents — wasn't the only one put off by the director's unorthodox methods. "He's sort of like an alien," he says. "When I did my first scene with him, I was taken in a room like the CIA at Langley and de-briefed by every actor: 'What's he like?' 'Did he talk to you?'

"What's even scarier is that you don't know if you might be fired right off the set," says The Godfather, Part III vet. "He's almost like a mobster I met once, who put his gun on the table and said, 'You know why I'm powerful? I have six bullets in that gun. If I use one of them, I'm not so powerful.'"