We have the impression that the cinema is regulated like clockwork. The directors read a script, rely on the cinematographers to achieve the desired rendering and ask the actors to recite their lines. It’s not totally wrong. But, often, what marks in a film, what it brings new, appears as if by magic during the shooting. Blame it on a stupid sentence or a butt dropped by an actor and kept in the editing.
1. Indiana Jones and the gun scene
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The infamous scene where Harrison Ford just guns down the guy waving his saber is because Harrison Ford, like the crew, was suffering from food poisoning, because the person in charge of buying the food for everything everyone had rushed to the nearest boui-boui. The script called for him to fight with his whip, but the actor didn’t have the strength. A solution had to be found. The scene has become cult.
2. The giggles when the suspects appear in Usual Suspects
The scene must have been very serious. The problem is that Benicio del Toro chained the prouts. Suddenly, everyone laughed, and the scene went from serious to hilarious.
3. The sound of lightsabers
Sound engineer Ben Burtt was walking around his apartment with a broken microphone cable. Passing in front of his TV, the microphone picked up the sound of the TV and produced this characteristic sizzle. That’s pretty cool, because initially lightsabers weren’t supposed to produce sound. Which would have been very bad.
4. Daniel Craig coming out of the water in Casino Royale
Everyone was criticizing Daniel Craig before he even started filming Casino Royale. Still, he imposed himself as a maxi-muscle James Bond quite quickly and by mistake. The scene where he comes out of the water was not included in the script. Craig just had to put down Caterina Murino on his bullshit horse from the fleet like a fat redneck. Except that he tripped over a sandbank and had to come out of the water, bulging out his chest, doing his Ursula Andress upside down and yelling a big “you can’t test” at the opposite Pierce Brosnan.
5. Django Unchained and the Blood of Leonardo DiCaprio
In Django Unchained, Leonardo plays an angry and dangerous bastard. During the scene at the table where he gets angry, he started banging on the table and breaking a crystal glass in his hands. The thing was not planned, and DiCaprio began to piss blood, while playing his character. The scene was saved from editing and DiCaprio suffered stitches.
6. Dustin Hoffman nearly gets run over on the set of Macadam Cowboy
The director of tarmac cowboy, John Schlesinger, was not allowed to shoot in the streets of New York. The scene where we see Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight wandering in the city was therefore shot in scred, in the middle of real passers-by. When Hoffman crosses the street, he is heard yelling at a cab, “Hey! It’s up to me! (“Hey, I’m walking here!”), because the taxi in question really burned a fire, and it really nearly killed Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. The replica is one of the most famous and brings an additional dimension to the character’s lost character.
7. The Professional Village
When it spins The professional, George Lautner is behind in his work and lets the delegated team supervise the construction of the African village whose attack is to open the film. The African village is based in the Camargue, for information. Except that when he arrives, the day before the first day of filming, he realizes that the huts of the village are too far from each other; impossible to obtain the desired plans. Crap system: Lautner takes up position 500 meters from the village and shoots the shots with a telephoto lens. The maneuver gives the sequence a documentary side that serves the purpose of the film and anchors it even more in the reality of the time.
8. The Laureate’s pending end
The final scene of Winner, by Mike Nichols, was supposed to end with a shot of Elaine’s hand grabbing Benjamin’s, aboard the bus they just jumped on after Benjamin interrupted Elaine’s wedding to another man. But Mike Nichols had asked one of his assistants to stand near the bus and shout “Cut!” “. He didn’t, because he wasn’t used to it. From this latency was born the poetic end of the film, showing Benjamin and Elaine looking ahead, as if ultimately indifferent to each other, focused on an uncertain future.
9. Goldfinger and the electrocution of Oddjob
We know the character of Oddjob, the fat Asian always smiling who kills people with his metal hat in Goldfinger, the third James Bond. At the end of the film, Oddjob is electrocuted against a railing by the indestructible Bond while trying to recover his hat. Except that, during filming, actor Harold Sakata was really electrocuted. He didn’t die. But not far.
10. The cult replica of Jaws
The producers of Jaws thought the film was average and refused to extend the money needed for the team to have a decent-sized boat. Suddenly, as soon as something started to go wrong, everyone complained, laughing: “We need a bigger boat. Suddenly, when he sees the shark for the first time, Roy Scheider cannot help slipping the sentence to Richard Dreyfuss. Who has since become one of the most famous in cinema.
We could cite other adjustments that led to the improvement of the film, such as Brando who, not content with not respecting his commitment to lose weight before the shooting of Apocalypse now, gained 25 kilos between the day of his hiring and his arrival on the set, forcing Coppola to film it in the dark and from a low angle. A bad for a good.
Sources: Filming Stories, Cracked, Vix