"Santino sucks all the air out of a room."

All photos credit: David M. Russell/Lifetime

The 2-hour Project Runway: All Stars airs on Lifetime this Thursday at 8pm. Competing are prior Runway standouts Chris March, Sweet P, Korto Momolu, Mychael Knight, Uli Herzner, Jeffrey Sebelia, Daniel Vosovic, and Santino Rice.

Recently Tim Gunn spoke with Maureen Ryan of The Watcher and shared a few choice tidbits about what it was like filming All-Stars. Says Gunn, "I was as close to a psychotic breakdown as I’ve ever been."

What nearly put him over the edge? In addition to typical production headaches, Tim had some problems with a particular contestant...

Santino Rice (Season 2)

"I don’t want to give him anymore press. He doesn’t need it. But that Santino Rice -- I was ready to take a cyanide capsule. I mean, he just sucks all the air out of a room."

Gunn goes on to say that he wan't the only one to have problems with Santino: "It was simply soul-sucking. The crew was driven to despair, the producers -- I don’t know how they’ve edited it. I don’t know because Santino was a whirling dervish, 24/7."

"Daniel Vosovic [from Season 2], at least he went through the season with him so he knew what to expect, but nobody else did. They were all horrified. Horrified. They were begging me to do something about and I kept gesturing to him, saying, 'That’s what you get. Deal with it, guys.'"

Problems with Santino aside, Gunn enjoyed seeing the other returning contestants. "Everybody else was wonderful... We had a good time, other than that. "

You can catch the full Watcher interview, where Gunn also provides tidbits on the filming of Project Runway Season 6, here.

Following pages: More photos from Project Runway: All Stars.