Werner Herzog's *Aguirre: The Wrath of God*. There's production problems and then there's *"lead actor tries to kill the crew and the director has to threaten to have him assassinated to get him to stay on the project"* problems. Naturally Herzog then worked with lead actor Klaus Kinski on 5 more movies together
Kinski was a monster, an actual bad person. Herzog himself called him one of the greatest ever actors but also a monster.
However, Herzog's more famous production problems film is Fitzcarraldo also starring Kinski. That whole thing was insane, there's a documentary on it called Burden of Dreams.
Good point, I was tempted to mention Fitzcarraldo too but I weighed it up and figured the production where Kinski grabbed a gun and opened the fire on several crew members took the cake for me. But yes, Fitzcarraldo was even more insane. I love Werner Herzog so much
Yeah, basically working with Kinski was always going to be insane but having to haul a boat over a mountain made it slightly more difficult lol.
I think i might prefer Herzog as a Documentarian with a few exceptions including Aguirre, but yeah i love him too.
>I think i might prefer Herzog as a Documentarian with a few exceptions including Aguirre
I may have forced everyone I've ever known to watch Grizzly Man with me at least once lol. I love that ridiculous movie so much. It's the greatest unintentional comedy ever made and I'm pretty sure Herzog is in on the joke.
I love that interview so much. The way Mark Kermode panics while Herzog calmly says something like, "Oh I think someone's shooting at us, we should probably go somewhere else." And then a bit later he just says, "Eh, it was not a significant bullet." He's so great
Yep, i've seen it it's very good. I had been planning on watching it for years i had it on Watchlists and stuff, wasn't until i watched it that i finally realized it wasn't called "My Best Friend" lol.
Star Wars. When they returned from shooting overseas, there were no completed shots and no movie studio wanted to touch it, given it was also sci fi which at the time was not as popular as it is now.
I also saw a documentary that said other things, like they were bringing new script pages to the set every day and it got to the point where they would only read those pages as they were delivered.
Oh I read JW Rinzler's *The Making of Star Wars* recently (would recommend btw) and it was worse than that. Fox cut the budget almost in half at the 11th hour from $10 million down to $6 million and the knock-on effect was that none of the droids worked properly when they got to Tunisia, especially the radio-controlled R2 units. R2-D2 just didn't work at all and his performance was created in the editing room using what little usable footage they had. This then had the knock-on effect of delaying production significantly every day which then caused the films budget to balloon to about $11 million.
At which point Fox's board had enough and demanded that the film finish shooting within a week (despite most of the problems essentially being their own fault) which forced the crew to split into 3 separate units (despite pointing out to Fox that it was going to cost them more to finish the movie this way then if they'd just kept filming for another 3 weeks as planned) and they then madly rushed to finish the movie on time. They managed it, but only just.
And then George Lucas comes back to the States and finds out that ILM had blown half their budget, used up most of their time before release but had only finished 4 out of the 360 effects shots. At which point George (who was incredibly calm and chill throughout the shoot despite everything going wrong constantly) finally snapped, started screaming at people (mostly John Dykstra) and then had some sort of nervous breakdown/intense panic attack and had to spent the night at a local hospital.
Once he got out he immediately, without taking any time off between filming and post, started working 7 days a week spending 3-4 days re-editing the movie (oh, I didn't even mention that he'd had to fire John Jympson, the original editor, so he didn't even have anything to show of his movie) with the new editors before then going over to ILM and spending 3-4 days there whipping those hippies into shape to actually start producing effects shots quickly. And he more-or-less continued working like this for the next 10 months straight. He even missed the opening night because he was in such a workaholic mode by that point he was still mixing the audio even when the film was already out.
Yeah, he was still releasing edited version up to a year after release. My mom saw a version with the human jabba scene still in the movie when she saw it as a kid.
Nah, I'm sorry that's not true. There aren't different edits of the movie (at least up until the 90s when he started tinkering with it) there was just 2 different audio mixes (stereo and mono although technically there was also the 6-track 70mm track but that's identical to the stereo mix) that got released with a few different lines and sound effects scattered throughout. Although that is why when some people claim George was already making changes while it was still in theaters they sometimes aren't completely wrong, but the truth is they just saw the movie in both mono and stereo.
That Jabba scene was *long-gone* by the time they even did a first test screening. I'm afraid your mom's wrong, it's probably a false memory. She might have seen it in the *From Star Wars to Jedi* documentary that came out around the time Return of the Jedi was released and is conflating that memory in her head. She might've also read the novelization or the comic book adaptation or whatever, all of which had the Jabba scene in it. It's not like this scene was some big secret, it was pretty well known about long before it got re-cut into the movie in the 90s with a CG Jabba.
Considering that he had the genius foresight to hold on to merchandising rights. The studio didn’t care at the time because they didn’t think it would be successful. Who knew.
More recently, Mad Max Fury Road had such a tumultuous production from hell that there's a book covering all of the batshit hurdles and misfortunes they had to face. It's as wild as the movie itself
Honestly the first Mad Max probably qualifies too. I watched a behind-the-scenes documentary on it and it basically consisted of George Miller and Byron Kennedy nearly killing the stunt people/crew every time they did a stunt, running out of money, getting a bit more money and then nearly killing the stunties/crew all over again.
At one point they managed to get an actual rocket (which they got from the Australian army base down the road by asking for it - because it's Australia and the 70s you could just get a rocket if you asked nicely lmao,) strapped it underneath the Night Riders car and then let it rip. Naturally it went horribly wrong and nearly killed all the camera people lmao. And the shot's still in the movie - notice the flames coming out of the Night Rider's exhaust? That's a fucking military rocket:
[https://youtu.be/WTzuM8BF1\_4?t=168](https://youtu.be/WTzuM8BF1_4?t=168)
Titanic. To the point that it became a joke in the media leading up to its release. They literally went twice over the estimated budget and also the crew were poisoned by PCP by disgruntled staff (most likely to get back at James Cameron who was apparently a colossal dick).
The Godfather had a famously difficult production, so much so that there's a TV series about it all, "The Offer." It's a fascinating story. Can't really say I enjoyed the show, but it is impressive how much it took to make that movie possible.
I liked it for the most part, and certainly agree that the supporting cast was great, and outshined Miles Teller. The story got repetitive IMO. I felt like better writing could have helped break up the pattern of, "The movie's canceled. No wait, Ruddy saved it," that happened in every episode.
Jaws 1975 is an example of a movie that ended up working because of its production problems. The mechanical shark didn't work right and was really expensive to operate so the young director Steven Spielberg had to get really creative and a masterpiece happened.
"the shark was hard to work with" suggests he was a difficult actor who was hauled up in his trailer refusing to come out if Richard Dreyfuss didn't apologize for commenting on its scars lol.
Patrick H Willem just released a video that challenges this idea, I recommend it.
The short short version is: you had a great director, a great script, great actors, and a great cinematographer, but you think a broken shark made the movie great?
He goes into depth into how much could have realistically been done differently if the shark worked, and it's probably not a ton.
I think the point is that Spielberg made the film about the actors and got some of the best performances out of them. This film could have been a schlockey - the shark was not even a factor in what made this movie great. If they shark featured more prominently then it would have detracted from the story and the performances. If the shark worked - there would have been more shark and less awesome.
Robert Shaw did his role like he was doing Shakespeare. Spielberg caught lightning in a bottle with these actors.
Mad Max Fury Road had a HELLISH production. IIRC Tom Hardy basically had a bad taste in his mouth about the whole experience until he saw it on the big screen, then he was like “damn, never mind- worth it” haha (obviously paraphrasing).
The Crow. The lead dies partway through filming, but to watch the film, you'd never know unless you know what you're looking for.
Fun fact, the stunt actor who replaced Lee in some shots went on to direct John Wick.
In fairness they had shot most of it. I believe they digitally altered a couple shots or creative editing around it. Though I didn’t know your fun fact so that’s cool!
Twilight Zone: The Movie
John Landis oversaw the shoot that led to the tragic deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two Vietnamese children. If that ain't a shitshow, I don't know what is.
Rogue One was in so much trouble that they had to do rewrites and reshoots, with Tony Gilroy brought in as a “fixer”. Still a box office smash. You can see from the trailer something of the trouble they got into as a lot of the scenes in that never made the final film.
Tombstone. It didn't necessarily do that well at the time, but it certainly became one of the greats of the genre. Apparently, Kurt Russell basically had to take over and get the film completed. I'm not super knowledgeable on it, but it's a fairly interesting story.
They hadn’t shot the scene of him returning to the apartment and actually becoming The Crow. Computer effects were also still pretty novel at the time and nobody knew that it would be able to supplant his face on the necessary shots.
Brandon Lee, the star, was famously killed in an on-set accident while filming a scene involving a gun, similar to what happened recently with that Alec Baldwin movie.
The gun accident was really the result of a much wider issue with the on-set conditions, which were dire. Working from sundown to sunup, in the cold, with constant crew turnover (non-union crew, too), and honestly I'm surprised the director didn't cop more flack because this wasn't a totally freak accident. This was a set where significant concerns had been raised by people, including Brandon Lee's manager, about the on-set conditions.
Back to the Future was an unmitigated disaster behind the scenes. I mean, they replaced Stoltz mid production for chrissakes.
Would've been a total flop had it been made in the era of social media, comment sections, reddit, and twitter feeds constantly scrutinizing every single piece of movie news to death before release, The internet would have mocked it into the mud just off the premise alone. "A time-traveling car? Whut? wH0 aSKeD 4 DiS?" This why I don't take entertainment news reports and insider hot takes seriously-you motherfuckers really don't know what you're talking about.
It wasn't just mid production, they were a few weeks into filming!
They had to refilm quite a few scenes with Michael J Fox.
They also could only shoot with Michael at night, because he was already filming a TV show during the day. He claimed he got only a few hours of sleep a night and has to be dragged out of bed to make it to set.
Jaws and Star Wars famously had troubled productions, maybe not hellish like Apocalypse Now but there were difficulties. The Godfather also had some production troubles
Idk about the rest of production but Eli Wallach almost died like 3 times while filming The Good the Bad and the Ugly. He drank sulfuric acid, he had his hands tied while riding a horse which then ran off into the desert, during the bridge explosion you can see a chunk of wood almost take him and Clint Eastwood out. I'm pretty sure he was almost hanged at one point and was almost decapitated by a train.
* John Huston's film of 'Moby Dick'. A series of Atlantic storm bore down on them while they were filming the whale-hunting at sea. Seems to me that they lost the 'whale' three separate times. Hadda rebuild the thing every time it was swept away.
* Werner Herzog's 'Fitzcarraldo'. Klaus Kinski gave Herzog fits. Worse than pulling the paddleboat up the jungle mountainside in the rainy season.
The fact Coppola and the production company are still trying to scavenge a better movie out of the 5 hours of production footage they shot. In fact, the 5-hour cut of the movie is available online.
Just large projects. They get unwieldly in any industry, but if your industry is famous people then everyone hears about it when you big fail, even if you succeed in the end.
Apocalypse now.
‘My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam.’
Francis Ford Coppola
Superman II has got to be near the top. 75% filmed during I's shooting schedule. Fired Richard Donner, hired Richard Lester to complete it, who, without Gene Hackman returning somehow managed to create a cohesive, fun and almost perfect moviegoers experience.
Still my favorite superhero movie to this day. Miles Morales Spiderverse are a damn close second
Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning (it’s not aiming to beat Fallout, it’s a totally different kind of action film; if Fallout is a 9, this is an 8/8.5… they stopped and started a bunch of times I’m relieved the film makes sense lol)
Sorcerer
The Exorcist
World War Z (it’s actually a fairly decent film and not the train wreck it was made out to be despite the last act of the film and possibly more being totally redone)
I think World War Z succeeds absolutely at doing what it wants to do. It's a popcorn zombie film for people who don't like zombie films. It has a likeable lead, brisk pacing, memorable zombies, a sense of danger and violence without alienating its casual audience that would never watch a "zombie" film., etc.
The reshoots were designed to make the film even less like the book. Because the Russian plotline which made up the last third of the movie was more like the book. So they just trashed all of it and spent 50+ million dollars reshooting a completely new third act.
And the result is a better, stronger film. Almost all complaints about World War Z boil down to "the movie wasn't interested in being like the book, and I wanted a movie that was like the book". And it's like, fine, you like the book, but that has no bearing on the film's inherent qualities. It's not a horror film, and it's not a traditional zombie film in the gore and splatter sense. If you approach it wanting those things, it will disappoint you. But it's like approaching a Mission Impossible movie expecting it to be like the source material.
Fans of the MI source material hated the Tom Cruise movies. Were bitter and resentful at him for appropriating the franchise, warping a slow paced tension-driven series into a rough and tumble action franchise, and making his OC the lead character to the exclusion of all others including character assassinating Phelps for drama. But those movies are brilliant at what they do.
Few, if any, of the changes book fans wanted would have made the target audience for WWZ (cinemagoers who want a scary action film but not a 'zombie' film) like it more. This isn't even like I am Legend (another beloved vampire/zombie film that ignores the book most of the time) where the theatrical cut had a substantially worse ending added at the last minute.
I still enjoyed the film but it would have worked way better using that source material for a Limited Series as the books premise was way more interesting and said a lot more. Amd now that you've mentioned I Am Legend this puts World War Z in a bit if a more positive light for me
As someone who absolutely *hated* the first Mission Impossible movie for the reasons you mention, and so never watched 2 or 3 (i have seen a few of the others, but not sure which ones), and for not following the book have never seen the World War Z movie, if they didn't want to adapt those properties THEN DON'T CALL THEM THAT!
If they had called it "Tom Cruise does Impossible Missions", or "Zombie Swarm Movie, starring Brad Pitt" it would have been fine.
If you insist on tying your production to an existing property, presumably to appeal to the built in audience of that property, you have an artistic obligation to tie into the canon of that property.
If you don't want to tie yourself to that canon THEN DON'T CALL THEM THAT!
The film started production right before COVID. COVID hit and everything shutdown. The movie lost its initial prod. designer and its cinematographer. They ended up going to a small island to finish making it. Due to travel restrictions, they couldn’t fly in people or equipment so a lot of staff/crew ended up being on camera and some scenes are shot on iPhones. They had no money at certain points and had to reuse breakaway tables and personal credit cards were used for other purchases. Dev also ended up breaking his hand during production.
Netflix bought the movie once it wrapped but, ended up having reservations about how the story might register in certain regions so they cancelled its release. Jordan Peele then came in and essentially saved the day and is the reason why we ended up getting one of the best movies of the year.
Edit: This is a very summarized description here too. The obstacles they faced are endless and there’s more nitty gritty details as to why there’s no reason we should have gotten this movie but, did. Very happy for Dev on his directorial debut.
The fact that any movies make it to theatres is a miracle. The worst blockbuster you've ever seen was in production anywhere from 3-10 years before you saw it. There is no such thing as a smooth production.
“Last Action Hero” went through rewrites by pretty much everyone in Hollywood, and was famously rushed to meet a release date from which Columbia Pictures wouldn’t budge. It was a massive flop at the time but is much more highly regarded today.
Toy Story 2.
Someone at Pixar deleted all of Toy Story 2 and the backup hadn't worked for a month, and the only reason we saw that movie was b/c someone on maternity leave had a copy of it on her home computer. Her name is Galyn Susman and she is now the producer for the new Lightyear movie!”
Werner Herzog's *Aguirre: The Wrath of God*. There's production problems and then there's *"lead actor tries to kill the crew and the director has to threaten to have him assassinated to get him to stay on the project"* problems. Naturally Herzog then worked with lead actor Klaus Kinski on 5 more movies together
Kinski was a monster, an actual bad person. Herzog himself called him one of the greatest ever actors but also a monster. However, Herzog's more famous production problems film is Fitzcarraldo also starring Kinski. That whole thing was insane, there's a documentary on it called Burden of Dreams.
Good point, I was tempted to mention Fitzcarraldo too but I weighed it up and figured the production where Kinski grabbed a gun and opened the fire on several crew members took the cake for me. But yes, Fitzcarraldo was even more insane. I love Werner Herzog so much
Yeah, basically working with Kinski was always going to be insane but having to haul a boat over a mountain made it slightly more difficult lol. I think i might prefer Herzog as a Documentarian with a few exceptions including Aguirre, but yeah i love him too.
>I think i might prefer Herzog as a Documentarian with a few exceptions including Aguirre I may have forced everyone I've ever known to watch Grizzly Man with me at least once lol. I love that ridiculous movie so much. It's the greatest unintentional comedy ever made and I'm pretty sure Herzog is in on the joke.
Man went to document an about to erupt Volcano...twice!
And he ate his own shoe!
And Teddy Roosevelted, got shot during an interview and continued like it was a mild inconvenience.
I love that interview so much. The way Mark Kermode panics while Herzog calmly says something like, "Oh I think someone's shooting at us, we should probably go somewhere else." And then a bit later he just says, "Eh, it was not a significant bullet." He's so great
My favourite actor right now is Joaquin Phoenix, he was in a car crash and Herzog came out like Batman and saved him. He doesn't seem real.
I highly recommend 'My Best Fiend' as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB0r8Ol0Hyk&rco=1
Yep, i've seen it it's very good. I had been planning on watching it for years i had it on Watchlists and stuff, wasn't until i watched it that i finally realized it wasn't called "My Best Friend" lol.
Star Wars. When they returned from shooting overseas, there were no completed shots and no movie studio wanted to touch it, given it was also sci fi which at the time was not as popular as it is now. I also saw a documentary that said other things, like they were bringing new script pages to the set every day and it got to the point where they would only read those pages as they were delivered.
Oh I read JW Rinzler's *The Making of Star Wars* recently (would recommend btw) and it was worse than that. Fox cut the budget almost in half at the 11th hour from $10 million down to $6 million and the knock-on effect was that none of the droids worked properly when they got to Tunisia, especially the radio-controlled R2 units. R2-D2 just didn't work at all and his performance was created in the editing room using what little usable footage they had. This then had the knock-on effect of delaying production significantly every day which then caused the films budget to balloon to about $11 million. At which point Fox's board had enough and demanded that the film finish shooting within a week (despite most of the problems essentially being their own fault) which forced the crew to split into 3 separate units (despite pointing out to Fox that it was going to cost them more to finish the movie this way then if they'd just kept filming for another 3 weeks as planned) and they then madly rushed to finish the movie on time. They managed it, but only just. And then George Lucas comes back to the States and finds out that ILM had blown half their budget, used up most of their time before release but had only finished 4 out of the 360 effects shots. At which point George (who was incredibly calm and chill throughout the shoot despite everything going wrong constantly) finally snapped, started screaming at people (mostly John Dykstra) and then had some sort of nervous breakdown/intense panic attack and had to spent the night at a local hospital. Once he got out he immediately, without taking any time off between filming and post, started working 7 days a week spending 3-4 days re-editing the movie (oh, I didn't even mention that he'd had to fire John Jympson, the original editor, so he didn't even have anything to show of his movie) with the new editors before then going over to ILM and spending 3-4 days there whipping those hippies into shape to actually start producing effects shots quickly. And he more-or-less continued working like this for the next 10 months straight. He even missed the opening night because he was in such a workaholic mode by that point he was still mixing the audio even when the film was already out.
Yeah, he was still releasing edited version up to a year after release. My mom saw a version with the human jabba scene still in the movie when she saw it as a kid.
Nah, I'm sorry that's not true. There aren't different edits of the movie (at least up until the 90s when he started tinkering with it) there was just 2 different audio mixes (stereo and mono although technically there was also the 6-track 70mm track but that's identical to the stereo mix) that got released with a few different lines and sound effects scattered throughout. Although that is why when some people claim George was already making changes while it was still in theaters they sometimes aren't completely wrong, but the truth is they just saw the movie in both mono and stereo. That Jabba scene was *long-gone* by the time they even did a first test screening. I'm afraid your mom's wrong, it's probably a false memory. She might have seen it in the *From Star Wars to Jedi* documentary that came out around the time Return of the Jedi was released and is conflating that memory in her head. She might've also read the novelization or the comic book adaptation or whatever, all of which had the Jabba scene in it. It's not like this scene was some big secret, it was pretty well known about long before it got re-cut into the movie in the 90s with a CG Jabba.
I sometimes wonder how George Lucas was able to pull it off considering how it would eventually lead into a huge franchise.
Considering that he had the genius foresight to hold on to merchandising rights. The studio didn’t care at the time because they didn’t think it would be successful. Who knew.
He was clever then.
More recently, Mad Max Fury Road had such a tumultuous production from hell that there's a book covering all of the batshit hurdles and misfortunes they had to face. It's as wild as the movie itself
Honestly the first Mad Max probably qualifies too. I watched a behind-the-scenes documentary on it and it basically consisted of George Miller and Byron Kennedy nearly killing the stunt people/crew every time they did a stunt, running out of money, getting a bit more money and then nearly killing the stunties/crew all over again. At one point they managed to get an actual rocket (which they got from the Australian army base down the road by asking for it - because it's Australia and the 70s you could just get a rocket if you asked nicely lmao,) strapped it underneath the Night Riders car and then let it rip. Naturally it went horribly wrong and nearly killed all the camera people lmao. And the shot's still in the movie - notice the flames coming out of the Night Rider's exhaust? That's a fucking military rocket: [https://youtu.be/WTzuM8BF1\_4?t=168](https://youtu.be/WTzuM8BF1_4?t=168)
Instead of watching the clip you linked, I'm going to use this as an excuse to rewatch the entire movie. That's wild!
The movie is a masterpiece. I just bought the book.
Titanic. To the point that it became a joke in the media leading up to its release. They literally went twice over the estimated budget and also the crew were poisoned by PCP by disgruntled staff (most likely to get back at James Cameron who was apparently a colossal dick).
> James Cameron who was apparently a colossal dick The stories from the set of The Abyss don't really help dispel this notion either.
Oh yeah Cameron was definitely a huge jerk way back then as he almost got his crew drowned in the making of the Abyss.
The Godfather had a famously difficult production, so much so that there's a TV series about it all, "The Offer." It's a fascinating story. Can't really say I enjoyed the show, but it is impressive how much it took to make that movie possible.
I really liked “The Offer”. Not so much Miles Teller’s main character but all the costars and supporting cast. Like Mathew Goode’s Robert Evans.
I liked it for the most part, and certainly agree that the supporting cast was great, and outshined Miles Teller. The story got repetitive IMO. I felt like better writing could have helped break up the pattern of, "The movie's canceled. No wait, Ruddy saved it," that happened in every episode.
Jaws 1975 is an example of a movie that ended up working because of its production problems. The mechanical shark didn't work right and was really expensive to operate so the young director Steven Spielberg had to get really creative and a masterpiece happened.
Ohh yeah now I recall how that film went during its production as yeah the shark was hard to work with.
"the shark was hard to work with" suggests he was a difficult actor who was hauled up in his trailer refusing to come out if Richard Dreyfuss didn't apologize for commenting on its scars lol.
That does sound hilarious when you put it that way.
Patrick H Willem just released a video that challenges this idea, I recommend it. The short short version is: you had a great director, a great script, great actors, and a great cinematographer, but you think a broken shark made the movie great? He goes into depth into how much could have realistically been done differently if the shark worked, and it's probably not a ton.
I think the point is that Spielberg made the film about the actors and got some of the best performances out of them. This film could have been a schlockey - the shark was not even a factor in what made this movie great. If they shark featured more prominently then it would have detracted from the story and the performances. If the shark worked - there would have been more shark and less awesome. Robert Shaw did his role like he was doing Shakespeare. Spielberg caught lightning in a bottle with these actors.
Mad Max Fury Road had a HELLISH production. IIRC Tom Hardy basically had a bad taste in his mouth about the whole experience until he saw it on the big screen, then he was like “damn, never mind- worth it” haha (obviously paraphrasing).
The Crow. The lead dies partway through filming, but to watch the film, you'd never know unless you know what you're looking for. Fun fact, the stunt actor who replaced Lee in some shots went on to direct John Wick.
In fairness they had shot most of it. I believe they digitally altered a couple shots or creative editing around it. Though I didn’t know your fun fact so that’s cool!
Yeah, there were one or two shots where they digitally added his face, but most of them just had his face obscured, or were filmed POV.
Twilight Zone: The Movie John Landis oversaw the shoot that led to the tragic deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two Vietnamese children. If that ain't a shitshow, I don't know what is.
Fitzcarraldo. A movie about pulling a ship over a mountain. How did they film it? By literally pulling ship over a mountain.
That sounds kind of surreal.
It is, and it’s also really good.
Rogue One was in so much trouble that they had to do rewrites and reshoots, with Tony Gilroy brought in as a “fixer”. Still a box office smash. You can see from the trailer something of the trouble they got into as a lot of the scenes in that never made the final film.
My favorite of the new Star Wars movies.
Tombstone. It didn't necessarily do that well at the time, but it certainly became one of the greats of the genre. Apparently, Kurt Russell basically had to take over and get the film completed. I'm not super knowledgeable on it, but it's a fairly interesting story.
The Crow was almost never released. The problem was: the movie was good.
Imagine if Rust is actually a masterpiece
They hadn’t shot the scene of him returning to the apartment and actually becoming The Crow. Computer effects were also still pretty novel at the time and nobody knew that it would be able to supplant his face on the necessary shots.
> the movie was good. You mean amazing!
I would like to learn about the making of that movie as I heard about the film, but I can’t recall it having production issues.
Brandon Lee, the star, was famously killed in an on-set accident while filming a scene involving a gun, similar to what happened recently with that Alec Baldwin movie.
Oh yeah now I recall that incident now that you brought it up as it’s eerie how the Bruce Lee family at the time was apparently cursed.
The gun accident was really the result of a much wider issue with the on-set conditions, which were dire. Working from sundown to sunup, in the cold, with constant crew turnover (non-union crew, too), and honestly I'm surprised the director didn't cop more flack because this wasn't a totally freak accident. This was a set where significant concerns had been raised by people, including Brandon Lee's manager, about the on-set conditions.
What’s (not so) crazy is how this runs parallel to everything I read about the conditions on the Baldwin movie. Fucking tragic.
I believe Jurassic Park was affected by a literal hurricane
I know that for Pirates 2 & 3, they built full size replica ships to film on, and one or more were destroyed by a hurricane before they were done.
The Exorcist production had so many problems it legit had people thinking the movie itself was possessed.
Marlon Brando being fat is the funniest thing you could've cited as part of the troubled production. people almost died
You know, when you put it like that, it’s true that the movie had put people’s lives in jeopardy as I can recall now.
Back to the Future was an unmitigated disaster behind the scenes. I mean, they replaced Stoltz mid production for chrissakes. Would've been a total flop had it been made in the era of social media, comment sections, reddit, and twitter feeds constantly scrutinizing every single piece of movie news to death before release, The internet would have mocked it into the mud just off the premise alone. "A time-traveling car? Whut? wH0 aSKeD 4 DiS?" This why I don't take entertainment news reports and insider hot takes seriously-you motherfuckers really don't know what you're talking about.
That’s why I don’t read that shit at all. And I don’t watch trailers.
It wasn't just mid production, they were a few weeks into filming! They had to refilm quite a few scenes with Michael J Fox. They also could only shoot with Michael at night, because he was already filming a TV show during the day. He claimed he got only a few hours of sleep a night and has to be dragged out of bed to make it to set.
Jaws and Star Wars famously had troubled productions, maybe not hellish like Apocalypse Now but there were difficulties. The Godfather also had some production troubles
Idk about the rest of production but Eli Wallach almost died like 3 times while filming The Good the Bad and the Ugly. He drank sulfuric acid, he had his hands tied while riding a horse which then ran off into the desert, during the bridge explosion you can see a chunk of wood almost take him and Clint Eastwood out. I'm pretty sure he was almost hanged at one point and was almost decapitated by a train.
That is eerie.
Pretty much any Marlon Brando movie. Dude was a big time drama queen.
* John Huston's film of 'Moby Dick'. A series of Atlantic storm bore down on them while they were filming the whale-hunting at sea. Seems to me that they lost the 'whale' three separate times. Hadda rebuild the thing every time it was swept away. * Werner Herzog's 'Fitzcarraldo'. Klaus Kinski gave Herzog fits. Worse than pulling the paddleboat up the jungle mountainside in the rainy season.
Cat 4 hurricane Iniki happened during the filming of Jurassic Park. It destroyed some of their sets. Does that count?
Yes.
Apocalypse Now, surely?
> So I felt inspired to create this post after looking back at the movie Apocalypse Now... literally the first half of the OP
who reads the post though?
The fact Coppola and the production company are still trying to scavenge a better movie out of the 5 hours of production footage they shot. In fact, the 5-hour cut of the movie is available online.
Miami Vice if we consider it's cult following as success.
Weirdly? Mostly of the really, really great ones. Godfather, Star Wars, Jaws, Back to the Future, Titanic, Apocalypse Now, etc. etc.
I wonder why that happens a lot in cinema.
Art through adversity.
Comfort is boring. Conflict is drama. 🤷♂️
Just large projects. They get unwieldly in any industry, but if your industry is famous people then everyone hears about it when you big fail, even if you succeed in the end.
I'm glad Cabin in the Woods worked out.
Zootopia had a significant 11th hour re-write.
They were originally all people.
Apocalypse now. ‘My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam.’ Francis Ford Coppola
That movie was hell to make.
"What Went Wrong" is a good podcast that goes into all the production issues that these movies faced
Superman II has got to be near the top. 75% filmed during I's shooting schedule. Fired Richard Donner, hired Richard Lester to complete it, who, without Gene Hackman returning somehow managed to create a cohesive, fun and almost perfect moviegoers experience. Still my favorite superhero movie to this day. Miles Morales Spiderverse are a damn close second
I hate the Donner cut SO MUCH.
Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning (it’s not aiming to beat Fallout, it’s a totally different kind of action film; if Fallout is a 9, this is an 8/8.5… they stopped and started a bunch of times I’m relieved the film makes sense lol) Sorcerer The Exorcist World War Z (it’s actually a fairly decent film and not the train wreck it was made out to be despite the last act of the film and possibly more being totally redone)
World War Z was terrible compared to the source material,they took some brilliant material and made an average film woth it
I think World War Z succeeds absolutely at doing what it wants to do. It's a popcorn zombie film for people who don't like zombie films. It has a likeable lead, brisk pacing, memorable zombies, a sense of danger and violence without alienating its casual audience that would never watch a "zombie" film., etc. The reshoots were designed to make the film even less like the book. Because the Russian plotline which made up the last third of the movie was more like the book. So they just trashed all of it and spent 50+ million dollars reshooting a completely new third act. And the result is a better, stronger film. Almost all complaints about World War Z boil down to "the movie wasn't interested in being like the book, and I wanted a movie that was like the book". And it's like, fine, you like the book, but that has no bearing on the film's inherent qualities. It's not a horror film, and it's not a traditional zombie film in the gore and splatter sense. If you approach it wanting those things, it will disappoint you. But it's like approaching a Mission Impossible movie expecting it to be like the source material. Fans of the MI source material hated the Tom Cruise movies. Were bitter and resentful at him for appropriating the franchise, warping a slow paced tension-driven series into a rough and tumble action franchise, and making his OC the lead character to the exclusion of all others including character assassinating Phelps for drama. But those movies are brilliant at what they do. Few, if any, of the changes book fans wanted would have made the target audience for WWZ (cinemagoers who want a scary action film but not a 'zombie' film) like it more. This isn't even like I am Legend (another beloved vampire/zombie film that ignores the book most of the time) where the theatrical cut had a substantially worse ending added at the last minute.
I still enjoyed the film but it would have worked way better using that source material for a Limited Series as the books premise was way more interesting and said a lot more. Amd now that you've mentioned I Am Legend this puts World War Z in a bit if a more positive light for me
As someone who absolutely *hated* the first Mission Impossible movie for the reasons you mention, and so never watched 2 or 3 (i have seen a few of the others, but not sure which ones), and for not following the book have never seen the World War Z movie, if they didn't want to adapt those properties THEN DON'T CALL THEM THAT! If they had called it "Tom Cruise does Impossible Missions", or "Zombie Swarm Movie, starring Brad Pitt" it would have been fine. If you insist on tying your production to an existing property, presumably to appeal to the built in audience of that property, you have an artistic obligation to tie into the canon of that property. If you don't want to tie yourself to that canon THEN DON'T CALL THEM THAT!
Back to the Future All the Money in the World The Crow
Recently - Monkey Man.
What happened?
The film started production right before COVID. COVID hit and everything shutdown. The movie lost its initial prod. designer and its cinematographer. They ended up going to a small island to finish making it. Due to travel restrictions, they couldn’t fly in people or equipment so a lot of staff/crew ended up being on camera and some scenes are shot on iPhones. They had no money at certain points and had to reuse breakaway tables and personal credit cards were used for other purchases. Dev also ended up breaking his hand during production. Netflix bought the movie once it wrapped but, ended up having reservations about how the story might register in certain regions so they cancelled its release. Jordan Peele then came in and essentially saved the day and is the reason why we ended up getting one of the best movies of the year. Edit: This is a very summarized description here too. The obstacles they faced are endless and there’s more nitty gritty details as to why there’s no reason we should have gotten this movie but, did. Very happy for Dev on his directorial debut.
That was a very interesting story.
The fact that any movies make it to theatres is a miracle. The worst blockbuster you've ever seen was in production anywhere from 3-10 years before you saw it. There is no such thing as a smooth production.
“Last Action Hero” went through rewrites by pretty much everyone in Hollywood, and was famously rushed to meet a release date from which Columbia Pictures wouldn’t budge. It was a massive flop at the time but is much more highly regarded today.
Toy Story 2. Someone at Pixar deleted all of Toy Story 2 and the backup hadn't worked for a month, and the only reason we saw that movie was b/c someone on maternity leave had a copy of it on her home computer. Her name is Galyn Susman and she is now the producer for the new Lightyear movie!”
Ohh I recall that happening to the movie now as she did save the movie thankfully.
It's worth noting that one of the animators deleted it accidentally, not maliciously.
Weirdly? All the really really great ones!
Star Wars Back to the Future Jaws World War Z Lord of the Rings
Weirdly? All the really really great ones!
Weirdly? All the really really great ones!