Troubled Production / Film Serial Offenders Creators

"Sam was spontaneously dishonest at every level; he was also splendid company for anyone who enjoys con men, as I do."

— Gore Vidal on Sam Spiegel, Palimpsest

Some directors seem to be magnets for troubled productions.

---

Cameron, James

James Cameron has directed some of the most financially successful films of all time...but not without cost in the form of consistently troubled productions. His problems with the Terminator films he was involved in are covered in that franchise's folder on the Serial Offenders: Franchises subpage.

• Cameron's directorial debut was the 1981 film Piranha Part Two: The Spawning. According to Lance Henriksen, making this movie was the most trying time in Cameron's life production-wise. Producer Ovidio G. Assonitis wanted to spend only $300,000 on the film (even though he had made a deal for $500,000), which meant that they had to cut costs wherever they could.
  • The film's original director was Miller Drake, who had started his career in Roger Corman movies, but disagreements over the script led to him being fired. Production was a mess, with Cameron, who had been working as special effects supervisor for Corman, having to make a number of the rubber flying piranha models himself.
  • After the first week of shooting, the set harmony was disturbed by some discussions about the work between the director and the producers (Assonitis, asked to verify the day-to-day activities, arguing with most of Cameron's choices), so while Cameron was only responsible for the shooting, most of the decisions were under Assonitis' authority.
  • Due to budget limitations, the crew was composed essentially of Italians, none of whom spoke English. Some, however, did have prior experience with horror/fantasy movies, so they were able to satisfy Cameron's requirements to some extent.
  • Henriksen was told that they couldn't afford a uniform for his character and that he should play the role in his own plain clothes, to which Henriksen objected, insisting that a harbor patrolman couldn't do his job without a uniform as if he's some plain clothes undercover cop. The situation was resolved when Henriksen noticed a sharp-dressed waiter the same size as him and asked him to sell his uniform for 75 bucks of his own money. He also had to use whale-shaped pins as his police badge and epaulets that showed his rank. Additionally, Henriksen had to carve the wooden gun in his holster by himself.
  • As Cameron wanted an explosive finale, he added to the script that Henriksen's character jumps out of a helicopter to save his drowning family. The helicopter had been used by Jamaican police to chase drug smugglers and was flown by a professional pilot. However, a boat snuck under the chopper at one point and nearly hit Henriksen's legs, so the pilot had to raise the chopper quickly, and Cameron accidentally dropped the shooting camera into the sea, which was never recovered. Both Cameron and Henriksen considered themselves lucky to still be alive after that. Additionally, during his scripted jump, Henriksen almost broke an arm and his boots immediately started filling up with water as soon as he landed, so he almost drowned.
  • To make matters worse, Assonitis didn't like the way that Cameron was shooting and fired him as well, taking over directorial duties himself. Cameron was not allowed to see his footage and was not involved in editing. He broke into the editing room in Rome and cut his own version while the film's producers were at Cannes but was caught and Assonitis recut it again. However, when he presented his version of the film to Warner Bros., they didn't like it and decided not to release the film. The movie was only released two years later by a smaller company that normally distributed pornographic films. Years later, a different distributor allowed Cameron to create his own cut.
• Aliens was one of Cameron's most contentious productions and one of the few times when his Jerkass demeanour is kind of understandable.
  • The British crew thought Cameron was a tyrannical and incompetent substitute for Ridley Scott, and his workaholism clashed with their regular tea breaks and relaxed attitude towards production. The crew insulted his wife Gale Anne Hurd, implying that she was only getting producer's credit because she was married to him. Cameron also had to contend with a walkout after firing First Assistant Director Derek Cracknell, who constantly undermined his authority, though he was eventually reinstated. Cameron also had problems with cinematographer Dick Bush, who wouldn't light the alien nest the way he wanted (Bush was a very old-school DP, who lit the scenes to his content, while Cameron was a very visually involved director) and was replaced by Adrian Biddle (who had never DP'ed a feature before). Michael Biehn ended up replacing James Remar as Hicks a short way into production.
  • Unsurprisingly, production wound up behind schedule and the crew had to work at a breakneck pace to finish the film in time for its July 1986 release date. This fell particularly hard on composer James Horner, who had to write the score without access to the movie (which was still being filmed and edited) and record it in four days at an outdated studio. In turn, Cameron and editor Ray Lovejoy (who himself had come within a hair's breadth of being fired and replaced by Mark Goldblatt until he impressed Cameron with his work on the final battle sequence) had to hack it in places to match the film without his input. Horner swore off working with Cameron for the next 11 years.
• The Abyss had 40% of its live-action photography take place underwater, a risky proposition even in the best conditions.
  • It was filmed in two specially constructed tanks in an abandoned nuclear plant near Gaffney, South Carolina,^note "abandoned" as in its construction was never finished, not as in "it was used and decommissioned" which required experimental technology and equipment to allow the underwater scenes to be filmed right. Over six months of six-day, 70-hour work weeks ensued, and the production had to be delayed when the main water tank sprung a leak on the first day, requiring dam-repair experts to fix it. Later, the crew was forced to film only at night after a lightning storm tore up the tarpaulin covering the main tank.
  • It's significant that Cameron himself declared The Abyss the worst production he was ever involved in. It's the only one where he had to spend most of his time hanging upside down in decompression tanks from filming underwater; he even said he had to review the footage in this position. He also almost drowned Ed Harris through Enforced Method Acting, which resulted in the one and only time an actor has ever actually punched him. Cameron himself nearly drowned during production, too, when his diving suit malfunctioned while he was weighed down at the bottom of the giant water tank during filming.
• True Lies:
  • While not suffering from quite the on-set tribulations as prior films, the film went massively over budget. Initially budgeted as $60 million, the final tally was estimated between $100 to $120 million, making it the first film to be budgeted above $100 million. Most of the budget was being paid by Fox, which had knock-on effects on Strange Days (which was also being funded by Fox and under the same production company, Lightstorm Entertainment).
  • In 2018, Eliza Dushku accused the film's stunt coordinator Joel Kramer of sexually abusing her after gaining the trust of the 12-year-old's family, being so brazen as to publicly nickname her "Jailbait" on set. She also alleged that a stunt that went wrong and hospitalized her with broken ribs was actually a deliberate sabotage by Kramer after an adult friend of Dushku's confronted him, as a threat to do even worse if she told anyone else. Cameron was quick to support the accusations, saying he would have had "no mercy" for Kramer if he'd had any idea what was happening.
• Titanic (1997) was quite possibly the most troubled of productions that Cameron helmed. Many, including Cameron, predicted that the film would be as disastrous as the ship itself before it shattered box office records and swept award shows.
  • Long fascinated by the story of the Titanic, Cameron began working on the film after seeing the 1992 Documentary Titanica and wanting to dive to the wreckage himself. Although Fox executives were skeptical at first about Cameron, who had made his name on action films, pitching an Epic Film described as "Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic", they ultimately greenlit the picture. Initially budgeted at $75 million, the (for the time) steep cost made them partner with Paramount on the film to share the burden.
  • Cameron made twelve dives down to the Titanic wreckage to shoot footage, both for research purposes and to use for the film itself. These dives were high-risk, as the wreckage rested at a depth of 12,480 feet, a depth that only five craft in the world were capable of safely descending to in 1995. Cameron acquired research vessels from Dr. Anatoly Sagalevitch, who only agreed due to the poor economy of Russia at the time. One such dive resulted in a collision between a submersible and the wreck, damaging both.
  • Between the dives and the six months of research he conducted, Cameron became intent on historical authenticity. Gaining access to blueprints long thought lost, the film crew built a set for the Titanic that was nine-tenths the scale of the original, requiring a massive studio complex and water tank to be built at the cost of $57 million. Materials and parts were sourced from the original ship manufacturers when possible, and the interiors were exactly reproduced when able, and historians Don Lynch and Ken Marschall were brought in to verify their authenticity. This attention to detail alone drove the film over its budget. The press wasted no time drawing comparisons to Waterworld, which was fresh in many minds as a similarly over-budget, water-themed, chaotic production.
  • Shooting was what cemented Cameron as a Jerkass Control Freak. Stories quickly spread of Cameron terrorizing cast and crew alike, verbally assailing them for the slightest error^note which led to several crew members half-jokingly stating that Cameron had a psychotic alter ego named "Noremac Mij". Early tests of the final plunge of the ship resulted in so many injuries that Cameron was forced to alter the sequence. Kate Winslet chipped a bone and suffered bruises so impressive that the makeup artists took photos for reference. Illness was also rife on the set, with Cameron keeping cast members in cold waters for entire days of filming at a time. Cameron was unapologetic, going as far as to buy ad space in trade papers to defend himself from hostile media coverage.
  • Perhaps the most notable incident was when an unknown person laced food with significant amounts of PCP during shooting in Nova Scotia, resulting in 50 people, including Bill Paxton, being hospitalized for overdosing. To this day, it's unknown if it was a nearly Deadly Prank, an attempt at murder, a mistake, or any other reason, as the culprit was never found.
  • Between pre-production and filming, the film fell so far behind that its release date was pushed back from July to December. The cost for special effects mounted to $40 million, placing the budget at $200 million^note not counting marketing costs, which some sources estimate at no less than an additional $250 million, making Titanic the most expensive film in history at that point.^note adjusted for inflation, it cost more than the Titanic ship had in 1911 Cameron would cut an entire hour of footage to wrestle the runtime to three hours, but panicking executives demanded an additional hour of cuts, to which an irate Cameron replied: "You want to cut my movie? You're going to have to fire me! You want to fire me? You're going to have to kill me!" Cameron did offer to forfeit his share of the gross income to placate the execs, which was reluctantly accepted.
• The sequel to Avatar was first announced in 2010 but then delayed several times over the ensuing decade because Cameron didn't consider the special effects technology advanced enough for his vision. One sequel became four sequels, the original composer tragically died in a plane crash, and the COVID-19 Pandemic interfered with post-production. The first sequel, The Way of Water, finally released in December 2022 - a Sequel Gap of 13 years. Cameron's team reportedly spent five whole years working on the script(s) and didn't even commence filming until late 2017.

Cimino, Michael

The late '70s saw Michael Cimino reach critical acclaim with his war drama The Deer Hunter and it seemed he had nowhere to go but up... until a pair of famously troubled productions (particularly the first one) not only severely damaged his career, but ended the New Hollywood era as a whole.

• Heaven's Gate is practically synonymous with "ambitious films gone horribly wrong", to the point that it inspired an entire book, Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate^note  later re-subtitled Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate by Steven Bach, the only studio executive to be involved with the film from start to finish. According to Bach:
  • Cimino had wanted to make a film about the Johnson County War, an 1892 battle between rich Wyoming landowners and European immigrant settlers, since 1971; the good press surrounding his 1978 film The Deer Hunter and its dual Oscar wins for Best Director and Best Picture finally gave Cimino the industry clout to get United Artists to agree to finance the film, with initial budget estimates starting at $7.5 million but rising to $11.6 million by the time production began.
  • The first signs of trouble appeared during casting of the female lead. The male leads - Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, and John Hurt - were more character actors than box office stars when casting began in 1979, and UA hoped that they could bolster the cast's marquee power with a high-profile lead actress, but after Jane Fonda and Diane Keaton rejected the role, Cimino insisted on little-known French actress Isabelle Huppert, whose English was hesitant and heavily accented. United Artists insisted that another actress be found; Cimino threatened (not for the last time) to take the film to Warner Bros., and UA capitulated (even afterwards, Bach at one point told Cimino to his face that his leading lady was so unappealing that the audience was going to wonder why Kristofferson and Walken "[weren't] fucking each other instead of her").
  • Filming began at Glacier National Park in Montana in April 1979 and was expected to finish in June, with a projected release date of December 1979. However, Cimino's almost fanatical dedication to his artistic vision for the film meant the shoot was five days behind schedule after just six days, and the delays and inflated costs grew from there. Getting to the filming site from the cast and crew's hotel in Kalispell took two hours each way. Many cast and crew members were on site (and on the payroll) for months just to complete a few hours of shooting. Cimino insisted on taking full advantage of the location's natural beauty by shooting many scenes at twilight, scenes which could thus only be shot during a time window of a few minutes each day, and he once held up filming for several hours while waiting for a cloud he liked the look of to roll into shot. Cimino also insisted on countless retakes; a single-second shot of Kristofferson cracking a whip took an entire day and 52 takes to film.
  • The glacial pace of filming was not the only factor in the skyrocketing costs. Upon deciding that the spacing of buildings on either side of a street on an outdoor set "didn't look right", Cimino ordered both sides torn down and rebuilt.^note  A crew member even pointed out, to no avail, that it would be easier and cheaper to just tear one side down and build it twice as far back. A 19th-century locomotive was shipped on flatbed rail trucks from Colorado; as it was too big to fit into the modern tunnels, it had to take a longer and more expensive route to Montana. Cimino put an irrigation system in the rocky field in which the climactic battle sequence was shot so that it would be green with grass at the beginning of the battle, and red with blood at the end of it. And of the masses of footage shot by Cimino, an unusually high fraction was printed for possible inclusion in the finished film (far exceeding the part of the budget devoted to printing); ultimately, of over 1.5 million feet of exposed film, 1.3 million feet were printed, amounting to 220 hours of raw footage.
  • To make matters worse, Cimino's contract stated that he would not be penalised for any cost overruns incurred in completing and delivering the film for its December 1979 release date, so while costs spiralled, he was protected from breach of contract lawsuits. He clashed repeatedly with UA executives, who at several points considered simply scrapping the film, unloading it on another studio (unsurprisingly, they couldn't find any takers), or firing Cimino and replacing him.^note  Bach mentions approaching "A Famous Director", widely believed to be David Lean, who refused to replace Cimino out of concern at incurring the wrath of the DGA (even his conversation with Bach was against DGA regulations, hence Bach does not name him in Final Cut); Norman Jewison was also approached but declined.
  • UA was able to cut one cost associated with Cimino, though. Wondering why they were paying so much money to rent the land they were filming on, they went to check the local tax records to find out who the owner was. It turned out that it was none other than Cimino himself.
  • Location shooting in Montana finally wrapped in October 1979,^note  By this point, local cars sported bumper stickers reading "To Hell with Heaven's Gate", and Cimino had a very public falling out with production manager and longtime friend Charlie Okun at the wrap party. with only a Harvard-set prologue and Rhode Island-set epilogue to film. However, Harvard refused permission to film on campus, so the prologue was instead shot at Mansfield College, Oxford.^note  John Hurt had returned to England in a hurry after filming wrapped in Montana to honour his commitment to The Elephant Man - a role he took to stave off the boredom of waiting long hours to do nothing on the Heaven's Gate set - and took a few days off to film his scenes in the Harvard segment. Though this was the only part of the shoot to finish on time and on budget, Cimino was refused permission to film near Christ Church on Sunday and had to prepare and shoot the scene in secret just after dawn before the Sunday morning services. The final production budget came to nearly $40 million, over three times the original figure.
  • Despite Cimino's attempts at press secrecy, the film was already beginning to draw negative publicity during shooting. Les Gapay, a freelance journalist, landed a job as an extra, then sold the story about the catastrophic time and budget overruns.^note  Although the story did include some exaggerations; though the shoot ran behind schedule and over budget, the cast and crew were on generally friendly terms with each other throughout, but the journalist portrayed them as constantly fighting. With similar problems on UA's Apocalypse Now fresh in the press' memories, they began dubbing Heaven's Gate "Apocalypse Next". The shoot also attracted controversy for (mostly, but not wholly, exaggerated) claims of animal cruelty, with live cockfights being filmed,^note  Willem Dafoe made his (uncredited) feature film debut in these scenes; he later claimed that his role was supposed to be larger, but Cimino fired him in a fit of anger for laughing at a joke told by an extra during a prolonged lighting setup. livestock entrails being used for some of the gorier scenes, and a horse being killed during the filming of a special effects scene for the climactic battle sequence. The film is still on the American Humane Association's "unacceptable" list.
  • The sheer volume of raw footage meant that the Christmas 1979 release date had long since become unfeasible, and the date was pushed back to Christmas 1980. Cimino changed the locks on the editing suite to ensure that he could cut the film his way. His work print of the film, screened for UA executives in June 1980, was a staggering 325 minutes long;^note  The battle scene alone was as long as most feature films, clocking in at about an hour and a half. under threat of dismissal as director, Cimino agreed to cut the film down to 219 minutes for a trio of premieres in New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles in November 1980.
  • The New York premiere was a disaster, with the audience reacting with indifference to the story and struggling to hear the dialogue, and critics, led by Vincent Canby of The New York Times (who, in a much-quoted review, called the film "an unqualified disaster"), tearing it to shreds. A humiliated Cimino withdrew the film before its Los Angeles premiere, announcing that he wanted to edit it further.^note  Contrary to rumour, Cimino made this decision himself, not at UA's command. He finally trimmed it down to 149 minutes for general release in April 1981; this time, the critics were not so much merciless as disappointed,^note  Roger Ebert said that while he saw films that were objectively worse in 1981, no other film had left him feeling so let down, and he named Heaven's Gate his personal worst film of the year. and the film, the final production and promotion budget of which came to $44 million, made just $1.3 million in its opening weekend and was quickly forgotten by audiences. Although it received a more positive response in France (particularly at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival) and the UK, its worldwide gross was just under $3.5 million.
  • The film left a veritable bloodbath of dead or dying careers in its wake. Michael Cimino is the most noted victim; he only made four further films, all largely ignored by critics and audiences. Kris Kristofferson's leading man potential withered, and he turned his attention back to his music career. Although the film's effect on United Artists is sometimes overstated,^note  The studio had already been on unsteady financial footing for much of the late 1970s, prompting many employees to jump ship to form Orion Pictures; Heaven's Gate was not even UA's most expensive film, an "honour" that goes to Moonraker. it was an influential factor in its parent company, Transamerica, deciding to sell UA to MGM in 1981, ending its 62-year existence as an independent studio.^note  The cost overruns are also sometimes blamed for UA being unable to fund an Oscar campaign for Raging Bull, which lost Best Director and Best Picture to Robert Redford's Ordinary People. Heaven's Gate itself managed just one Oscar nomination in 1981, for Art Direction (which it lost to Raiders of the Lost Ark). Interest in Westerns also declined for most of the 1980s, and the film is generally credited with hastening the demise of New Hollywood and the auteur director movement.
  • The reputation of Heaven's Gate has, however, improved in the years since its initial release. Cimino assembled a 216-minute "director's cut" of the film which won acclaim at film festivals in 2012, and Kris Kristofferson and supporting cast member Jeff Bridges still speak fondly of their experiences making and seeing the film.
• The production of The Sicilian, while nowhere as well-known (or troubled) as Heaven's Gate, still deserves a mention:
  • The film was an adaptation of the Mario Puzo novel, and Puzo was paid $1 million for the rights. Producers David Begelman and Bruce McNall hired Cimino, but Cimino butted heads with Begelman over the screenplay and casting - Cimino wanted Christopher Lambert to play the lead, but Begelman (understandably) didn't want a French actor to play an Italian-American in an English-language movie. Begelman and McNall eventually caved so that production could move forward. Meanwhile, Gore Vidal had been hired for major rewrites and sued the Writer's Guild of America and screenwriter Steve Shagan for a writing credit.
  • Production itself was relatively smooth, and, while the film did go over-budget and behind schedule, this was mostly because of delays that were out of Cimino's control. There was one exception - some shooting locations were controlled by actual mafia men, who were disrupting the shoot. Cimino suggested Begelman and McNall meet the criminals, which they did, finding out that the mobsters wanted parts in the movie. The producers decided to incorporate them in minor roles and as extras, which gave Cimino access to new shooting locations and local labour.
  • This relative smoothness was not to last - in post-production, Cimino disappeared for months in editing, finally delivering a 150-minute cut of the film which he refused to make any changes to. However, in his contract, Cimino had the right to final cut only if he delivered the film at under 120 minutes. Things got worse when the distributor, 20th Century Fox, flatly refused to distribute the film unless it came in under two hours. Once this information was relayed to Cimino, he became enraged, and, days later, he delivered a cut of the film with all of the action scenes removed, which brought it under 120 minutes but angered the producers.
  • Things really hit the fan when, in response to Cimino's cut, the producers took Cimino to court, claiming he had cost the studio money and violated his contract. The producers hired Burt Fields, a lawyer who had earlier represented Warren Beatty in his battle for final cut on Reds, and who, in doing so, established legal precedent that a filmmaker's contractual right to final cut was absolutely binding.
  • When producer Dino De Laurentiis was called to the stand to testify on whether Cimino was given final cut, De Laurentiis said:
    De Laurentiis: Final cut? I no give-a him final cut.
    Fields: But we've seen the contract.
    De Laurentiis: Have you seen the side letter?
  • Turns out, when Cimino signed his contract with De Laurentiis - a contract which did give Cimino final cut privilege - attached to it was a side letter, written by De Laurentiis, that stated Cimino did not have final cut on an earlier film, Year of the Dragon. The producers argued that, because Cimino withheld the letter, he was intentionally defrauding them. The judge agreed, and Begelman personally reinstated the action scenes and cut the film down to 115 minutes for release, without Cimino's involvement. The Sicilian was eventually released in 1987, to negative reviews and commercial indifference. A 149-minute "Director's Cut" did emerge, and, while it has received better reviews, with critics finding it more cohesive, reception was still average at best.

Cinestate

In its short life, Dallas-based independent studio Cinestate enjoyed a meteoric rise with its Direct to Video action and horror films whose populist "grindhouse" tone defied Hollywood trends, only to crash and burn just as quickly when, in 2020, its leading producer Adam Donaghey was arrested for the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. With that, allegations poured out concerning just how toxic the average Cinestate set could be, between long work hours, injuries, and repeated sexual harassment from Donaghey and others, and the role that Cinestate's heads Dallas Sonnier and Amanda Presmyk had in covering it up. Within weeks of the allegations, following a fumbled attempt at damage control from Sonnier, Cinestate closed its doors, with Sonnier later relaunching the studio as Bonfire Legend in 2021.

• On the set of Satanic Panic (2019), the cast and crew were made to work long hours with no overtime pay, with Donaghey inputting fewer hours on their time cards than they actually worked (which is technically wage theft) and threatening to destroy the careers of any crew members who objected - and with Cinestate's dominance of the Dallas indie film scene, that was not an idle threat. He also forced actress Ruby Modine (daughter of Matthew) to shoot a sex scene with a production assistant who was a fanboy of hers despite her objections.
• Production on VFW saw a costume designer quit her job due to sexual harassment from lead actor Fred Williamson, and Sonnier and Presmyk recommending in response that female crew members adopt a buddy system when working with Williamson. Three crew members wound up quitting the film industry entirely due to their experience. There was also an especially brutal case of Enforced Method Acting where they shot the fight scenes in the film by simply having the actors beat the crap out of the extras for real, a glaring no-no on the set of any film that isn't a combat sport documentary or a Professional Wrestling production.
• Run Hide Fight, the final film that Cinestate produced, was also caught up in the scandal that destroyed the company. The film took place in a high school and had hundreds of teenagers as extras, so Donaghey's presence on set was especially worrying for the crew given that the allegations against him were already widely rumored by this point, and many crew members walked off the set for this and other reasons. Those other reasons included the opening hunting scene, in which a real deer was killed on camera (averting No Animals Were Harmed) in violation of Texas film and hunting regulations, with Donaghey belittling a hair and makeup artist who voiced concerns about the scene (and who quit her job the next day in response). With the revelation of Donaghey's scandals during post-production causing Cinestate to go out of business, Run Hide Fight's distribution was ultimately picked up by, of all people, Ben Shapiro, a right-wing pundit and owner of the news website The Daily Wire who was getting into the film business and saw the movie as one that was in line with the values he wanted to promote.

Coppola, Francis Ford

Many of the films that put Francis Ford Coppola on the map in The '70s were among the most notoriously troublesome shoots in Hollywood history. Even in 1991, The New York Times quoted an executive on this:

Francis Ford Coppola may be the one major filmmaker who invariably makes problem pictures. "Things are often out of control on his set," said the executive.

• Shooting went smoothly on Coppola's first feature,^note He had directed a couple of softcore pornos prior to this the indie horror flick Dementia 13, but post-production was a different story. Despite having been given total creative control of the film, and having delivered the gory Psycho clone demanded by producer Roger Corman, Corman stormed out of the screening room upon seeing the rough cut and demanded changes. Among said changes were new scenes (not shot by Coppola) that featured a joke character who was killed off by the film's axe murderer, plus a tacked-on prologue tying into the film's promotional gimmick,^note A so-called "D-13 Test" which quizzed moviegoers on whether they were psychologically ready to watch the film both of which were added just to pad out the runtime. Ironically, Coppola's problems on Dementia 13 would be downright quaint compared to what was in store for him...
• The Godfather, as described in this Daily Telegraph article, and also dramatized in the miniseries The Offer. Everyone involved seemed surprised that the film was completed, let alone successful as it was.
  • To begin with, pretty much everybody involved was only in it for the money. Mario Puzo, the author of the original book, sold the film rights to Paramount for $12,500 (rising to $50,000 if it was filmed) after having only written a hundred pages, chiefly because he was in debt to his bookie. Coppola, meanwhile, hated the book and only took the job of directing the film because a) his production company, American Zoetrope, was out of money, and b) Paramount pushed hard for him on account of him being Italian (which it was hoped would assuage the concerns of Italian-American groups). Even then, Coppola was only brought in after several established directors like Costa-Gavras and Arthur Penn declined.
  • Even with Coppola at the helm, various groups made their feelings known about the film's subject matter. Producer Al Ruddy had his car windows shot out by gangsters attempting to derail the film's production, and the Italian-American Civil Rights League (founded by real-life Mafia boss Joseph Colombo) accused the film of promoting stereotypes and threatened to boycott it. You'll probably notice how the movie never uses the terms "Mafia" or "La Cosa Nostra", as that was part of an agreement reached with the IACRL, who were surprisingly amicable toward the production once an agreement was reached.
  • Coppola's relationship with Paramount executives was chaotic: they hated the casting, the lighting, the writing, the music, the length, everything. For one, Paramount wanted to jettison the novel's period setting for modern-day New York. Equally controversial was the casting of Marlon Brando, which Coppola pushed hard for and Paramount pushed just as hard against due to his star power having seriously waned at the time, as well as a a string of flops and his prima donna reputation. Coppola faked a heart attack in order to get the Paramount executives to relent. Al Pacino wasn't popular with the Paramount brass, either, as they preferred an established star like Robert Redford and were unimpressed by Pacino's screen test and early rushes. Pacino himself shared their doubts about his performance, planning to quit the film early in production until Coppola convinced him to stay.
  • Production wasn't that troubled on set, apart from a delay due to Pacino twisting his ankle, but it's a miracle no significant problems emerged. James Caan roughed up Gianni Russo for real while filming Sonny's beating of Carlo, and Coppola got no respect from the crew, many of whom thought that the movie was a piece of crap and that he didn't know what he was doing; several of his assistant directors openly complained to the studio brass. Coppola expected to be fired at any point, and indeed, the executives were considering replacing him with Elia Kazan. Coppola also got into vicious arguments with cinematographer Gordon Willis over his treatment of the actors, with broken props and doors often resulting from the arguments.
  • All the way through post-production, Coppola feuded with producer Robert Evans over the film's style and pacing. One particular argument involved Evans demanding that Coppola include an intermission after Michael murders Solozzo and McCluskey. Later, Evans demanded that Coppola cut the film down to 135 minutes, to which he complied, only to be chewed out afterwards for "ruining" the film. Afterwards, Coppola re-edited it to its original length without complaint. (However, in the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, Evans claims that the opposite occurred, that Coppola delivered a fast, two-hour film and Evans demanded a "saga".)
  • Despite the film's ultimate success, the experience left the entire cast and crew profoundly drained. Ruddy later said, "It was the most miserable film I can think of to make. Nobody enjoyed one day of it." Unsurprisingly, it proved increasingly difficult to reunite the cast and crew for the sequels.
• The Godfather Part II was easier only by comparison. After the first film, Coppola joked that the only sequel he'd make would be Abbott and Costello Meet the Godfather, and it took a lot of arm-twisting from Paramount to change his mind.
  • Coppola stated his terms up front: he would only return if Paramount would a) give him complete Auteur License, b) produce his pet project The Conversation in return, and c) ensure that Robert Evans has nothing to do with the movie. To Coppola's surprise, Paramount complied with his requests; their only concern was his decision to include "Part II" in the title. However, Al Ruddy (with whom Coppola had a good relationship with the first film) refused to return, leaving Coppola to produce it himself.
  • Shooting in the Dominican Republic (standing in for Cuba) proved the biggest problem, as nonstop rainstorms delayed filming for weeks, while Al Pacino, Lee Strasberg, and several crew members came down with tropical illnesses. Pacino took three weeks to recover, while Strasberg was so debilitated his infirmity was written into his character. There were also concerns about the parallel storylines of Vito and Michael, especially after Coppola delivered a disastrous rough cut, forcing a last-minute re-edit.
  • The cast caused trouble as well. Pacino caused headaches throughout production, demanding a massive salary and heavy script rewrites. He frequently complained about Coppola's slow pace, yelling, "Serpico only took nineteen days!" and threatening to quit. Richard S. Castellano (Clemenza) refused to return, leading to Michael V. Gazzo's eleventh-hour casting as Suspiciously Similar Substitute, Frank Pentangeli. Gazzo himself caused difficulties through heavy drinking; Coppola claims that Gazzo was drunk filming Pentangeli's Senate testimony. James Caan demanded the same salary as the first film for his brief cameo as Sonny; Marlon Brando backed out at the last minute. But all of that was chump change compared to Coppola's much-anticipated next film...
• Apocalypse Now, a case so famous that it has its own documentary dedicated to its production, called Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Coppola himself summed it up by saying, "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam," and famously explained that "the way we made [the film] was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." Let's see, where do we start?
  • Like many projects here, Apocalypse Now was a modest idea subjected to development creep. John Milius and George Lucas conceived the film in 1969 as a low-budget docudrama modeled after The Battle of Algiers. Gradually, Milius expanded his script into a surreal black comedy based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As Lucas focused on other projects and Milius was reluctant to direct it himself, Coppola took over in the mid-1970s, toning down the story's humor and emphasizing its surreal qualities. Fresh off The Godfather Part II, Coppola convinced United Artists to back the project, and the film's tumultuous production began.
  • Filming in the Philippines went on for a year, going nine months behind schedule and $17-19 million over budget.^note The initial budget was projected at $12-14 million but wound up coming in at $31.5 million. Among other setting-related problems, Typhoon Olga in May 1976, combined with constant rainfall, destroyed most of the sets and totally ground production to a halt for six weeks. The United States military refused to lend Coppola any military equipment due to the film's unflattering portrayal of the Armed Force and the plot's order to kill Colonel Kurtz. Coppola instead had to borrow local military equipment, and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos disrupted production by recalling the equipment he had lent to Coppola to fight against the Communist insurgents in the South.
  • There were also problems with the various cast members. Marlon Brando was cast as Colonel Kurtz, being his usual prima donna self. He showed up to the set morbidly obese rather than with the muscular physique that was called for, leading to the decision to film him solely from the shoulders up. Worse, when he arrived on set, he had read neither the script nor Heart of Darkness like he had been told to. He also insisted on changing his character's name to Leighley, then insisted on changing it back after finally reading the novella.^note  Which required the briefing scene to be redubbed.
  • Several actors were disgruntled because Coppola forced them to sign seven-year term contracts with his production company. Unsurprisingly, many cast and crew members were drunk or stoned while filming; Dennis Hopper got a teenage Laurence Fishburne addicted to heroin. Hopper also clashed with Brando over what Hopper claimed to be a misunderstanding; he then decided to deliberately antagonize Brando whenever he could, resulting in Brando refusing to share any scenes with him.
  • Meanwhile, settling on the actor who would play Captain Willard was its own ordeal. Steve McQueen was interested in the role and was involved early in production, but frequently clashed with Coppola over wanting to reinvent Willard's character into the cool badass he was accustomed to playing. The prospect of shooting in the Philippines caused McQueen, and later Al Pacino, to pass on the project.^note Eventually the search got so frustrating for Coppola that he threw his five Oscars out of a window, breaking four of them. When his favorite pick, Martin Sheen, had to decline due to scheduling conflicts, Coppola turned to Harvey Keitel and cast him as Willard, but Keitel was fired after only a few weeks into filming because Coppola wasn't satisfied with his performance.
  • Coppola shaved his beard to disguise himself when he traveled back to the US to find a new lead, hoping to keep rumors of production troubles out of the press (it didn't work). Sheen, now available, took over the role of Willard and soon became dangerously immersed in the role as filming resumed. Filming the hotel scene, he drunkenly cut his hand open shattering a mirror, and begged the crew to keep filming rather than get medical attention. He later suffered a heart attack in an unrelated incident and had to struggle a quarter-mile to get help. The heart attack meant that his brother, Joe Estevez, had to fill in as a body double filmed from the back until Sheen recovered enough to resume filming.
  • The corpses at Kurtz's compound were real and obtained from a man who turned out to be an actual graverobber. The cast and crew were grilled by the local authorities as the bodies were removed from the set. The ending had to be rewritten on the fly, and the script was frequently discarded for improvisation. Most notably, the ending was changed from its action-heavy original due to neither Sheen nor Brando being in any sort of state to film it.
  • Even post-production was no walk in the park. For one thing, the Philippines had no professional film laboratories at the time, meaning the raw camera negatives had to be shipped to the US to be processed. Coppola never saw a shot on film until after returning to California. The entire movie was shot blind. For another thing, Coppola had to edit several miles of film to create the final cut. The set piece on the French plantation, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to film, was thrown out.^note  It did later show up in the extended Redux cut, though. On top of that, Sheen was unavailable to provide the voice-over narration, so, once again, Coppola had to turn to Joe Estevez. All told, post-production took two years.
  • To put the film's disastrous shoot in perspective, Laurence Fishburne lied about his age in order to be cast as a 17-year-old in the movie when he was actually 14. By the time the movie was released, he actually was 17 years old. The film took the heaviest toll on Coppola himself, who lost 100 pounds, threatened suicide several times, and attempted it once. The film also severely strained his relationship with his wife Eleanor, not least when he had an indiscreet affair with a production assistant.
• One from the Heart, while not nearly as turbulent as Apocalypse Now, had such dire consequences for Coppola that it earned the nickname "One Through the Heart".
  • Initially meant as a small $2 million musical for Coppola to recover and raise money after the sheer hell of Apocalypse Now, he quickly grew more ambitious. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was initially tapped to finance the film (and offered Coppola $2 million to direct, a record at the time), but Coppola chose to buy the rights himself for his production company American Zoetrope, wanting full creative control and a chance to experiment with new techniques dubbed "electronic cinema", which would serve as a precursor to the digital era of filmmaking that took off in the 2000s.
  • The budget ballooned due to Coppola exclusively filming on lavish, stylized sound stages (reportedly 10 miles of set was built to recreate the various Las Vegas locations of the film). The ever-rising costs put Zoetrope on thin ice in terms of finances, and Coppola was in a constant scramble for funds. MGM pulled out as a result of the financial issues. Coppola managed to strike a deal with Paramount to distribute the film, but the film had ended up wildly over budget at $26 million.
  • Paramount screened an unfinished workprint to would-be theater exhibitors in August 1981, reportedly due to recently passed laws regarding "blind bidding" by theaters. The response from exhibitors was viciously negative, with those who viewed it giving quotes such as "one of the 10 worst movies I've ever seen". Coppola went on the defensive, claiming they were judging the film from an unfinished workprint that was missing key music and effects, although others would later claim the workprint was only missing a few effect shots.
  • The film proceeded to miss its planned Christmas release date, and Paramount refused to put it up for Oscar screenings. This strained the relationship between Coppola and Paramount to a breaking point. When Coppola made preview screenings in January 1982 without Paramount's permission, they pulled away despite the film already being booked in theaters. Columbia Pictures picked up the film at the last second, but it only made it to 44 theaters in eight US cities, making a grand total of $636,796 during its box office run.
  • The staggering financial failure of the film left Coppola bankrupt and buried under bank interest; between 1982 and 1992 he would declare bankruptcy three times, and spend the rest of The '80s and The '90s as a cinematic gun-for-hire to recover debts. American Zoetrope only survived in name and was reduced to a "virtual studio" without production facilities, with set elements and props from this film auctioned off to try and make a return on production costs.
• Although numerous troubled productions have resulted in body counts, few are as infamous in this respect as The Cotton Club - and a gangland-style execution is just the tip of the iceberg of the shoot's problems.
  • Former Paramount studio chief Robert Evans (who, as mentioned earlier, was a nemesis of Coppola during filming of The Godfather) had the idea of producing and directing a film about the 1920s Harlem speakeasy in 1980 but struggled to spark interest among backers in Mario Puzo's script (early donors included Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi^note The uncle of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose money Evans had to return after rejecting his suggested script changes). Through Miami drug dealer Lanie Jacobs, he was introduced to New York impresario Roy Radin, who offered to help raise the necessary funds. However, Jacobs expected a share of the profits and a production credit for her efforts, which Radin refused. In June 1983, Radin's bullet-riddled corpse was found in the desert outside Los Angeles, and Jacobs was later convicted of ordering his murder and sentenced to life without parole. Although suspicions also fell on Evans, his involvement was never proven. In his memoir The Kid Stays In the Picture, Evans says that experience made the early 1980s, during which he was arrested for trying to smuggle a large quantity of cocaine into the country and required to organize anti-drug events with the big stars he knew as community service, the "good half" of the decade for him.
  • Radin's murder alone would render The Cotton Club a troubled production, but as efforts to tweak the script continued to founder, Evans brought in his former foe Francis Ford Coppola to work on the script, and ultimately gave him the reins of director. Coppola, already reeling from the troubled productions and financial failures of Rumble Fish and One from the Heart, saw the film as an opportunity to get his career as a director back on track, just as Evans hoped to do the same for his career as a producer following the troubled productions of Popeye and Urban Cowboy. This inevitably set the stage for an epic battle of egos between the old enemies, who had drastically different creative visions for the story, characters, and visuals of the film.
  • Enticed by a script by Mario Puzo and the promise of funding from Las Vegas casino owners Edward and Fred Doumani, Paramount offered Evans the talents of Richard Gere as leading man and access to their studio facilities along with further production funds. However, determined to re-establish his reputation as a major player in Hollywood, Evans turned down the latter offer in favor of the services of Orion Pictures, who were in the business of marketing and distributing films rather than producing them, meaning that Evans would need to raise more production money and find a studio in which to shoot the film, causing further delays and adding to the already bloated budget.
  • Upon being appointed director, Coppola added to the budgetary woes by firing the film crew Evans had assembled en masse (in some cases requiring large payoffs) and hiring his own crew members, including a music arranger who commuted via Concorde between the shoot in New York and a regular engagement in Switzerland. His quasi-improvisational approach to directing the actors meant the script was in a constant state of flux, and actors would frequently spend all day on set without shooting a single frame of film. There were frequent clashes between Coppola and Gere, who insisted on showing off his (modest) skills on the cornet in the film and seemed more concerned about possible damage to his reputation than about the film itself.
  • Filming finished in March 1984 with a final budget of $47 million (nearly three times initial estimates), and the battle between Evans and Coppola continued during post-production. A lawsuit filed by Evans against Coppola, the Doumani brothers, and Orion resulted in Evans being given a flat fee and a producer credit, but yielding complete creative control over the film to Coppola. The film was released in December 1984, and although Siskel & Ebert both named it one of the year's ten best films, most critics were more muted in their enthusiasm, and its final domestic gross was just $25.9 million. Although Evans and Coppola continued to produce and/or direct films, their careers as major players in Hollywood were over.
• Coming full circle, The Godfather Part III.
  • The project had been in Development Hell for over a decade, with Paramount reportedly spending millions to produce numerous scripts written throughout the '70s and '80s and other directors attached. Coppola repeatedly refused Paramount's overtures to helm the film until financial woes forced him to take it. After accepting, Paramount gave Coppola and Mario Puzo just six weeks to write the script, and a hard year to complete filming. Coppola and Puzo initially wanted to call it The Death of Michael Corleone, emphasizing it was a standalone "epilogue" rather than a direct sequel. In an ironic reversal of Part II, Paramount insisted on the numbered title.
  • Again, the biggest problems involved the cast, who weren't any more eager than Coppola to revisit the franchise. Al Pacino and Diane Keaton both demanded massive salary hikes: Pacino initially demanded such an exorbitant amount that Coppola threatened to open the movie with Michael's funeral. Robert Duvall refused to return over a pay dispute, while Joe Spinell died just before filming started, forcing Coppola and Puzo to create replacement characters.
  • All this paled in comparison to the film's biggest production woe: the casting of Michael's daughter, Mary. Several actresses were considered for the role, including Rebecca Schaeffer, who was murdered by a stalker on the day of her audition, before Winona Ryder was cast. Ryder, who was highly in-demand at the time, showed up in Rome with then-boyfriend Johnny Depp and fell ill, with doctors later diagnosing that she had extreme exhaustion due to her demanding schedule. When she dropped out at the last minute, Coppola had to scramble for a replacement actress due to the compressed filming schedule — and asked his daughter, Sofia Coppola, to step in to the part.^note To show how fast this occurred, Sofia would later write in her diaries for the production of the film, which were republished in Vanity Fair, that she was going to take a shower when Francis called his wife, Eleanor, and asked her to ask Sofia to take the part. Mere hours later, and despite having heavy reservations over the decision, Sofia had already completed a costume test and was filming. While Sofia did have some acting experience (with bit parts in films like The Outsiders and Rumble Fish), and had performed table reads with the rest of the Godfather III cast as a stand-in before Ryder was supposed to start filming, to say this caused a backlash within the production crew was an understatement. (Only Andy García, who played Vincent, really supported the casting, as he was already comfortable reading dialogue with her.)
  • As noted in online retrospectives, the crew made their disdain for Sofia known, while Paramount attempted to pressure Francis into changing his mind on the casting, up to and including sending producers to Rome to try to convince him — yet, Coppola had Protection from Editors and refused to budge, both because he believed in his daughter and wanted to get the movie out on time. The situation got so bad that crew members were allegedly mocking Sofia to her face. While the film ultimately turned a profit, critical reviews of the film were mixed, with much of the media coverage of its behind-the-scenes turmoil leading to venomous criticism leveled at both Sofia's performance and Francis' decision to cast her..
• Megalopolis, Coppola's decades-long passion project, descended into this as of January 2023, as detailed here by The Hollywood Reporter:
  • Coppola originally conceived of Megalopolis, a science-fiction epic about a utopian-minded architect who sets out to rebuild New York City after a disaster, around the time he was making Apocalypse Now in the '70s, and admitted in a 2007 interview that his agreements to direct Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jack (1996), and The Rainmaker were made to help him to get out of debt and fund this project. Coppola held table reads and shot thirty hours of second-unit footage in 2001, but the 9/11 attacks (which are said to have eerily resembled the early script's triggering incident) caused him to discard the footage and put the production into hiatus.
  • Upon reviving the project twelve years later, Coppola raised eyebrows by announcing that he would fund the film himself using $120 million partly accrued by selling off portions of his California wineries. He attempted to employ new virtual production technology similar to that used in The Mandalorian, which caused the budget to expand, but mounting challenges and costs led to Coppola firing almost his entire visual effects team and pivoting to traditional greenscreen methods. Coppola's production designer Beth Mickle and supervising art director David Scott left not long after, with a source stating that the film had no art department left.
  • Then came distribution. When Coppola screened the film to various studio executives in March 2024, most in attendance proved reluctant to sign a deal after finding the film too convoluted and "experimental" to appeal to a mass audience. One of the few sources quoted by The Hollywood Reporter who enthusiastically supported what was screened admitted that the film would never find a home at their studio.

Dante, Joe

Cult filmmaker Joe Dante has had his fair share of difficult productions.

• Piranha had some documented production problems, including last-minute cast changes, underwater cameras that kept breaking down, union woes, and unusable second unit footage. It still became one of New World Pictures' biggest hits.
• Post-production of Gremlins was a nightmare due to the gremlin and Mogwai animatronics never working properly. On the DVD Commentary, Chris Walas, the creator of the animatronics, calls working on Gremlins the closest thing he's had to a complete mental breakdown — likely one reason he and his crew passed up the opportunity to do the sequel in favor of The Fly (1986) (see the "0 to G" page for the challenges that posed).
• Production for Explorers was thrown into turmoil when three top executives at Paramount Pictures left to join other studios — Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg for Disney, and Barry Diller for 20th Century Fox. As a result, Dante — who had already been working on a time crunch by joining the project in late 1984 with a projected August 1985 release date — was told by Paramount that the release had been pushed up to early July and that the cast and crew were to just stop working; whatever they had managed to finish would be what they would put in theaters as the final cut. Not surprisingly, Explorers would be criticized for its patchy story and underwhelming climax. It also had the misfortune of being both released on the same weekend as Live Aid and the weekend after the release of megahit Back to the Future, sealing its fate as a Box Office Bomb.
• Joe Dante described the production of Looney Tunes: Back in Action as "a nightmarish year and a half of [his] life that [he would] never get back", and an experience he wasn't eager to repeat.
  • Dante's biggest headache came from Warner Bros. Feature Animation, which handled animated films at the time. Warner Bros., who, like other studios, was eager to ride the coattails of the 1990s Disney Renaissance, had no conception on how to actually produce animation, and slapped together animation teams without understanding the effort their work took or having any infrastructure in place. The studio rushed films into production before they were properly prepped, truncated their schedules, and engaged in top-heavy micromanagement, leading to high turnover rates and scripts being repeatedly retooled. As a result, of the six animated flicks Warner Bros. Feature Animation put out in its fourteen-year existence, five were Box Office Bombs.
  • When Space Jam became the studio's first success (and their only one at the time), Warner Bros. spent years trying to get a follow-up off the ground, floating ideas like having the Looney Tunes star in movies with Jackie Chan, Jeff Gordon, Tony Hawk, and Tiger Woods. (Space Jam wouldn't get a true sequel until A New Legacy twenty-four years later.)
  • When Dante joined the production for Back in Action in the early 2000s, he found himself caught in the middle between Warner Bros. execs who weren't really interested in making the movie and studio marketeers who did, with the two sides not agreeing to what the tone and humor of the film would be. Lacking any basic understanding of how the animation process works, Warner Bros. executives demanded for dialogue to be changed even after the animation for that dialogue had been produced. They also believed the movie wasn't funny, which led to 25 gag writers being hired, but only one writer being credited.
  • What well and truly killed the movie was once again Warner failing to choose a proper release date for the film, just as it killed each of WBFA's previous projects. Originally set for release in July 2003, it was abruptly moved to November when Warner claimed that Finding Nemo was hogging the family audience at that time. However, the studio had effectively moved it from the frying pan to the fire, placing it in the middle of a particularly intense competition at the box office, amidst films like Brother Bear, The Cat in the Hat, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King... all of which had far more advertising. Not to mention, the initial invasion of Iraq that triggered the Second Gulf War would occur that week, even further distracting the intended audience. With little-to-no promotion and no faith from Warner Bros., the film flopped hard at the box office, only making a total of $68 million on a budget believed to be around $80 million, directly resulting in the shuttering of Warner Bros. Feature Animation, killing any goodwill Dante still had in Hollywood, and almost singlehandedly ending any popularity the Tunes still had at the time. It wasn't until 2011 that they had a particular revival on Cartoon Network once more (whereas it was a staple of the net beforehand), but they wouldn't see theater again until Space Jam: A New Legacy in 2021.
  • All that said, the film does have a following of sorts despite mixed reviews, many fans in particular citing it as a better representation of the characters than either of the Space Jam films.

Gilliam, Terry

Terry Gilliam comes close to being a Trope Codifier for the troubled production, thanks to everything from Hostile Weather, to severe Executive Meddling - as well as being a director of nearly limitless ambition and vision.

• Brazil was subject to such severe Executive Meddling that it inspired a book, The Battle of Brazil, and Gilliam felt obliged to place a full-page ad in Variety begging producer Sid Sheinberg to reverse the changes he had made and released the film as originally intended.
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen went over budget, the plane that had the costumes and prop were stuck in an airport in another country due to a customs strike, a lot of the animals for the film died and had to be replaced, etc. Producer Thomas Schuhly acted like a prima donna, refusing to sign forms and refusing to get along with the English crew and the complex relationship between the UK crew and the Italian crew. And because Columbia Pictures was undergoing a regime change at the time and the new bigwigs didn't want to support a film this troubled, they didn't put much money into the marketing campaign or even give it a wide North American release, and it flopped. Eric Idle called it "A truly horrible experience and even remembering it is a bit of a nightmare." Like Brazil, it inspired a book about its troubles, Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam and the Munchausen Saga.
  • Sarah Polley, who was nine years old at the time of filming, described it as a traumatic experience. "[I]t definitely left me with a few scars ... It was just so dangerous. There were so many explosions going off so close to me, which is traumatic for a kid whether it's dangerous or not. Being in freezing cold water for long periods of time and working endless hours. It was physically gruelling and unsafe."
  • As a harbinger of the film's series of unlucky incidents, the start of filming had to be postponed for a week due to Dante Ferretti's elaborate set not being ready in time. A crane collapsing into it didn't help matters, postponing the film's start by another week.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
  • The film had loads of different directors replaced before deciding to hire Gilliam, executives wanting to update the book's setting to The '90s, and no firm budget when starting.
  • The writing process also took forever. Alex Cox and Tod Davies wrote a screenplay for the movie, only for it to be rejected by Hunter S. Thompson himself. Because of that, Gilliam had to write another one in just ten days (though he solved that problem by taking large chunks of the book and writing it in script format. Plus, he had the help of Tony Grisoni). Afterwards, there were problems with the Writers Guild of America after requesting to take Cox and Davies' names off due to their script being heavily rewritten. When Gilliam thought that he might lose the argument, he shot a scene explaining that "no matter what is said in the credits, no writers were involved in the making of the film" as a failsafe. When the decision came to credit him and Grisoni first and Cox and Davies second, Gilliam was mad about sharing credit, later burning his WGA card during a book signing.
  • Filming in a casino was hard thanks to having to film between two and six in the morning, not having many extras, and having the extras actually gamble.
• Although its pre-production began in 1998, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote remained incomplete for nearly twenty years thanks to a maelstrom of difficulties including the logistics of filming near a NATO bombing range in Spain, the destruction of sets by a flash flood, the illness of the lead actor and the withdrawal of other stars due to other projects, to name just a few. Its problems are documented in the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha. After many years of trying to get the film back in production, filming finally wrapped up in 2017. And then, just as it was ready for release in 2018, Gilliam was hit with a lawsuit by producer Paul Branco. Branco was originally supposed to produce the film through his company Alfalma Films, but couldn't secure funds in time. Fortunately, it still premiered as the closing film of the Cannes Film Festival and got released in France on the same day. Unfortunately, Amazon Studios, who funded much of the production, pulled out of distributing it in the US. It was later reported that Gilliam lost the court case with Branco and no longer controlled the film. It was later clarified that Gilliam still owned the rights as he did not shoot a frame under Branco's company, but he still had to pay a settlement as he did not terminate his deal properly.
• The Brothers Grimm had Gilliam deal with interference from the Weinsteins, actors dropping out and his cinematographer being replaced. The conflict got so bad, production had to shut down for two weeks.
• Against all odds, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was completed despite the sudden death of its lead actor - and with a refreshing lack of Fake Shemp, thanks to a bit of Real Life Writes the Plot, to the extent that Heath Ledger was actually given a screenwriting credit.

Huston, John

John Huston made some very fine films over the course of a very long career. Not all of them were easy.

• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre went over budget and took longer to film than expected. Reportedly, Humphrey Bogart got so impatient with the delays (largely due to wanting to participate in a boat race) that he griped and complained on set about it, to the point where Huston pulled his nose at dinner one night.
• The African Queen was shot on location in Africa, a rarity in those days. The results weren't pretty: handling the heavy Technicolor cameras was hard, the cast and crew got sick (Katharine Hepburn had to keep a bucket beside her while filming the organ scene that opens the film so she could vomit between takes; only Huston and Humphrey Bogart escaped illness, due to consuming nothing but canned goods and whiskey) and had several close brushes with wild animals and venomous snakes (especially because Huston chose the location wanting to hunt, and Bogart got interested in that as well - something which even became a Clint Eastwood movie), the title boat sunk and had to be raised twice, the ship's boiler nearly fell on Hepburn, army ants infested the set... Says something Hepburn's book recounting the shoot was named The Making of The African Queen: or How I Went To Africa With Bogie, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind.
• Beat the Devil started out having its screenplay written by Claud Cockburn, the author of the novel the film was based on. However, Cockburn didn't finish the screenplay in time for the shoot, and what he had written was mostly unworkable, forcing Huston to hire Truman Capote to polish up what they could salvage from Cockburn's screenplay while writing new material during the shoot. In several cases, Huston and Capote were literally writing new pages and handing them to the actors minutes before the cameras were due to roll. Astoundingly, the shoot otherwise wasn't overly problematic, other than some mild bickering between Huston and Humphrey Bogart... at least until Bogart was injured in a car accident, forcing Huston to resort to filming scenes with a body double and Jennifer Jones for a couple of days. Even when Bogart recovered enough to resume working, they couldn't find a decent dentist to replace the teeth Bogart had lost in the accident, forcing Huston to rely on, of all people, a young Peter Sellers to overdub some of Bogart's lines in the finished product. The finished product ended up flopping at the box office, and Bogart — who invested a substantial amount of money into the production, and lost nearly all of it — ended up blaming Huston, resulting in the two never working together again.
• In his autobiography, Huston called his 1956 adaptation of Moby-Dick, "The most difficult picture I ever made". Filming was delayed by cast injuries (Gregory Peck, who did not use a double, injured his kneecap, Richard Basehart broke his ankle while jumping into a longboat, and Leo Genn slipped a disk and caught pneumonia before shooting had finished) and bad weather which caused the budget to overrun. And then there was the white whale. A ninety-foot model was built for $30,000. A tug pulled it out into the Irish Sea and after two shots were completed, the towline snapped and the whale quickly sank. A second whale was built on a barge but a storm also sank it without a trace. Finally, a third whale was built and again the towline snapped. Huston had had enough. He climbed into the whale and shouted, "Lose this whale and you lose me!" He stayed aboard as two crew members swam under the whale, grabbed the line, and reconnected it.
• The Roots of Heaven, a "save the African elephant" film from 1958 he made for 20th Century Fox, is a lesser-known but brutal example of a troubled production.
  • William Holden was initially cast in the lead role, attracting a supporting cast that included Orson Welles, Errol Flynn, Paul Lukas, Herbert Lom, Eddie Albert, and Fox studio boss Darryl Zanuck's then-girlfriend Juliette Greco. However, with location shooting about to begin (on an inflexible schedule), Holden was informed that he was still under contract to Paramount, and in a desperate scramble to fill the role, Huston cast British character actor Trevor Howard. Howard's lack of marquee power prompted the promotion of Errol Flynn to the top of the bill, despite his character's secondary role.
  • Location shooting was done in Fort Lamy, French Equatorial Africa (now N'Djamena, Chad). As Darryl Zanuck (who was present for the shoot, perhaps out of concern at leaving Greco unsupervised on a shoot with noted womanisers Huston and Flynn) recalled when appearing as a mystery guest on What's My Line?, temperatures soared to over 130 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and only cooled to 95 degrees at night. The cast and crew had to shower four or five times a day to wash off the sweat, and their drinking water supply had to be flown in. On some days, the drive to the shooting location and back took four hours. Such was his frustration with the location shoot that Zanuck swore he would never again make a film in Africa.^note  Although he was proud of the location footage's complete avoidance of dubbing, process shots, and transparency plates.
  • Moreover, as had happened during the shooting of The African Queen, almost every person involved contracted amoebic dysentery and/or malaria except for Huston and Flynn, who had brought copious amounts of alcohol which kept the sickness at bay. Greco, in particular, was very seriously ill during the shoot, while Eddie Albert developed an almost fatal case of sunstroke. A total of 920 sick calls were made by the 130-person cast and crew during the six-month location shoot. During the lengthy delays, Huston would often disappear on big game hunts.
  • Things didn't improve when production moved to studios in Paris for the interior scenes. Greco suffered a recurrence of her illness and had to be hospitalised, while Flynn also had to be rushed to hospital after coming down with malaria. The production was at least able to save some money when Orson Welles waived the fee for his cameo as a gesture of gratitude to Zanuck for helping to finance his 1952 adaptation of Othello.
  • Errol Flynn's alcoholism had become a round-the-clock problem, and he was frequently at odds with John Huston (with whom he had brawled at a Hollywood party a decade earlier). At one point, he provoked Huston into a fight; while Flynn was a former amateur boxer, the years of fast living had taken a heavy toll on him, and Huston, himself a former professional boxer, flattened Flynn with a single punch. The film was Flynn's last major Hollywood project; he died the following year.^note  Nevertheless, Flynn said in his 1959 autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways that he enjoyed making the film more than any other of his career. Huston, meanwhile, cited the film, which was a hit with neither critics nor audiences, as an example of how some of the worst shoots can result in the worst films.
• The Unforgiven:
  • The film's projected budget of $3 Million expanded to $5.5 million. The original screenwriter JP Miller was replaced by Ben Maddow, the original director Delbert Mann was replaced by Huston, and plans for Richard Burton in the role that eventually went to Audie Murphy were scrapped when Burton demanded equal billing with Burt Lancaster, with the latter refusing (as he was also producer on the picture).
  • Production was suspended for several months in 1959 after Audrey Hepburn broke her back when she fell off a horse while rehearsing a scene. Although she eventually recovered, the accident was blamed for a subsequent miscarriage she suffered. According to several published biographies of Hepburn, she blamed herself for the accident and subsequently all but disowned the film, although she did complete it when she was well enough to return to work. Hepburn took the next year off work in order to successfully have a child, and returned to the big screen with Breakfast at Tiffany's.
• The Misfits, the last completed film for both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, was by all accounts an unhappy film to make:
  • Filming took place in Nevada in peak summer temperatures of over 100 degrees thanks to production of Monroe's previous film, Let's Make Love, lagging behind schedule due to a Screen Actor's Guild strike. Huston took advantage of the location to spend long nights drinking and gambling instead of sleeping, causing him to occasionally doze off on set, and forcing the production company to cover his gambling losses, contributing to the film going over budget. Gable was particularly annoyed by Huston's carousing, especially his penchant for bragging about his massive losses at the gambling tables. The film's ballooning budget caused United Artists to shut down production, and it took two weeks of meetings in New York and Los Angeles to get it reopened.
  • Almost the entire cast were having severe personal problems, but none more so than Marilyn Monroe, whose marriage to the film's scriptwriter, Arthur Miller, was collapsing; she objected to how he had written her character and felt he had turned John Huston against her, and within weeks they were only speaking to each other through Monroe's acting coach, Paula Strasberg (wife of Method acting guru Lee Strasberg). In the early weeks of filming, she sought solace in the arms of her Let's Make Love co-star Yves Montand during weekend visits to her doctors in Los Angeles, trysts that stopped after gossip columnist Hedda Hopper printed a quote from Montand claiming that they were just his way of ensuring her romantic scenes in the film went smoothly (Monroe knew that he only said this to avoid hurting his wife, Simone Signoret, but she was still deeply stung by his words). Meanwhile, Miller began an affair with photographer Inge Morath, whom he later married after his divorce from Monroe became final.^note  They remained married until Morath's death in 2002. Miller based his final play, 2004's Finishing the Picture, on his experience making The Misfits. Miller was also constantly re-writing the script, regularly throwing Monroe into a panic over having new lines to remember at short notice.
  • As her marriage to Miller disintegrated, Monroe sank into a pit of depression and drug addiction so severe that there were many days when she showed up late and/or in no condition to work, if she showed up at all - this despite her daily calls being for 10am rather than the usual 9am, a concession to the fact that she would never be on time for a 9am call. Huston, who later said he was "absolutely certain that she was doomed" during shooting, put the film on hold for two weeks in August 1960 while she went to detox (also partly to cover his tracks as United Artists became concerned over the effect his gambling losses were having on the film's budget; fortunately, the film's insurance provider paid for her treatment). As she was noticeably hollowed out by the experience, most of her close-ups following her release were shot in soft focus.^note  Her punctuality problems worsened during the abortive shooting of her next film, Something's Got to Give, leading to her firing. Although she was re-hired, she died before shooting could resume, and the film was left half-finished.
  • Clark Gable was likewise in poor health when filming began, having been a heavy smoker since his mid-teens (leading to clearly audible damage to his voice) and a heavy drinker until not long before filming began, and he had twice had severe chest pains in the previous decade which may, with the benefit of hindsight, have actually been heart attacks that were never diagnosed. It took two attempts for him to pass a medical insurance physical before filming began, and only because he had spent the entire week before the second physical in bed without smoking or drinking. Bored with constantly waiting for Monroe to arrive on set, he asked Huston to help him pass the time by allowing him to do some of his own stunts, including being dragged across a dry lake bed by a truck at 30 mph. He was also flummoxed by the Method acting embraced by Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach (all of whom had studied acting under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio), which he described as like an alien religion to him.^note  Although he was so impressed by Clift that he frequently showed up on set on days when he was not on call just to watch Clift work. He also felt his own performance in the film was one of the best of his career; Arthur Miller said that Gable, after watching a rough cut of the film, told him "... it's the only time I've been able to act." When shooting wrapped, he quipped, "Christ, I'm glad this picture's finished. She damn near gave me a heart attack." The next day, he suffered a severe coronary thrombosis. He died in the hospital from a heart attack just ten days later. A devastated Monroe blamed herself for his death.^note  For the most part, relations between Gable and Monroe on set were cordial; though he sometimes found her habitual tardiness irritating, he also quipped that he was paid the same whether she was on time or not. Columnist Louella Parsons claimed the delays Monroe's lateness caused were a contributing factor to his death, although the more likely reality is that Gable's years of heavy smoking and drinking finally caught up with him.
  • Among the other cast members, Clift had been struggling with drug problems ever since he had been seriously injured in a car accident in 1956, and he and Monroe required onset doctors. Monroe allegedly said of working with Clift, "It's good to meet someone who's in worse shape than I am."^note  Huston cast Clift in the lead role in his next film, Freud: The Secret Passion, and for that film, it was Clift's drug problems that caused the shoot to go over time and over budget, rendering him uninsurable and unemployable. He only made one other film, the largely forgotten The Defector, in an attempt to show that he was fit to play the male lead in Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye opposite his close friend Elizabeth Taylor; he died before filming began on the latter. His final conversation with anyone before his death came when he told his housekeeper "Absolutely not!" when she asked if he wanted to watch a TV screening of The Misfits that evening. Thelma Ritter's health problems were much more minor, as she was rushed to hospital after suffering from exhaustion as the shoot shuddered to a close. Wallach had no health problems but did receive a verbal jab from the cinematographer about him not having a career.
  • After Gable's funeral in November 1960, Huston, Miller, and producer Frank Taylor wanted to get the film into cinemas before the end of December to make Gable eligible for a posthumous Best Actor nomination at the following year's Oscars, but post-production had only just begun, and the film did not have a musical score - composer Alex North had not even seen a rough cut of the film, so he had no idea what he was writing for. By early December, it became apparent that the film would not be ready by the end of the year, and although North finished writing and recording the score in just three weeks, the film was released in February 1961, and Huston's hopes of securing Gable a posthumous Oscar nomination were dashed.^note  The only nomination the film received was a Director's Guild of America nomination for Huston. He lost to Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, and Robert Relyea for West Side Story (1961).

Landis, John

John Landis made some acclaimed comedy films in the late Seventies and the Eighties...and is responsible for one of the most notorious on-set accidents in Hollywood history.

• While it's obvious from all the on-screen mayhem why The Blues Brothers cost so much to make (they actually dropped the Ford Pinto from a mile up, requiring a special FAA permit), there were a lot of other issues that aren't obvious on screen, as this ''Vanity Fair'' article showed:
  • Universal won a close bidding war with Paramount for the project, and of course they were overjoyed to have John Belushi, coming off a year when he'd starred in both a top-grossing film and a top-rated TV show and had a number one single. But they didn't have a script. After an experienced writing partner was unable to help him, Dan Aykroyd, who'd never even read a movie screenplay before, much less written one, took his time writing it. He delivered a 324-page monstrosity formatted more like free verse. Landis spent two weeks just cutting it down and converting it to something filmable.
  • The script was finished but the studio and the creative people hadn't settled on a budget. After the first month of filming in Chicago, where Landis kept Belushi under control and things went well, they finally saw it: $17.5 million. "I think we've spent that much already," Landis half-joked.
  • And then things went to hell. Belushi went everywhere in Chicago when he wasn't on set—and when he did, everybody was slipping him vials and packets of coke. That was in addition to what he could procure, or had already procured for himself, often consumed in his trailer or at the private bar on set he had built for himself, his longtime friends, the cast, and any visiting celebrities. Carrie Fisher, who Landis had warned to keep Belushi away from drugs if she could, said almost everyone who had a job there also dealt, and the patrons could (and did) score almost anything there. Aykroyd, who unlike Belushi or Fisher kept his use under control, says there was money in the budget set aside for coke for night shoots.
  • After Belushi's late nights partying, he'd either be really late for unit calls, tanking almost a whole day's worth of shooting, or only an hour or two late ... but then he'd go back to his trailer and sleep it off. One night, he wandered away from the set to a nearby house, where Aykroyd found him conked out on the couch after he'd raided the owner's fridge. On another, Landis went into Belushi's trailer and found a gigantic pile of coke on a table inside, which he flushed down the toilet. Belushi attacked him when he came back, Landis knocked him down with a single punch and Belushi collapsed into tears.^note It should be noted however that this incident, or at least Landis punching Belushi, while widely reported during the film's production and after Belushi's death, was denied by Landis himself after it was depicted in the Belushi biopic Wired.
  • Meanwhile, there was Executive Meddling to deal with. Fuming about the skyrocketing cost of the movie, Universal kept trying to get the filmmakers to replace the blues and soul stars like Aretha Franklin and Cab Calloway with more contemporary, successful acts like Rose Royce. Landis stuck to his guns, but because he did, some large theater chains refused to book it into theaters in white neighborhoods.
  • The production returned to Los Angeles for the last month of shooting, already way behind schedule and over budget. Fortunately Belushi calmed down and got it done. But right before shooting the final scene, which required him to do all sorts of onstage acrobatics while performing at the LA Palladium in front of an audience of hundreds of extras, he tried out some kid's skateboard... and fell off and seriously injured his knee. Lew Wasserman, the studio head, called the top orthopedist in LA and made him postpone his weekend until he could shoot Belushi up with enough anesthetics to get him through filming.
  • Fortunately the movie was a box-office smash that has since become a Cult Classic.
• His segment for Twilight Zone: The Movie, starring Vic Morrow, was supposed to climax with a scene where his character Bill Connor rescues two children during The Vietnam War. Landis chose to use Morrow, My-Ca Dinh Le, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, the two non-professionals hired to play the children for the scene, rather than stunt doubles, despite the presence of helicopters and explosives. In fact, proper work permits had never been obtained for the kids (to circumvent child labor laws; their families were also paid under the table using the production's petty cash fund). The lengthy setup for the scene at the Indian Dunes ranch near Six Flags Magic Mountain on Thursday, July 22, 1982, delayed filming until the early hours of July 23, which also violated laws about work conditions for child actors. Even though the pilot and special effects people were experienced pros, the mix of controlled explosives and a low-flying helicopter was still very risky, and around 2AM the worst happened—shrapnel from an explosive got caught in the copter's rotor, causing it to crash near the three actors, killing them all. This led to nearly a decade's worth of lawsuits, changes in the law about child actors doing stunts, and fewer helicopter scenes in movies thereafter until CGI made it possible to put them in digitally. Landis was acquitted of manslaughter charges in 1987. While the film he signed on to specifically to get a break from the immediate wake of the scandal — Trading Places — ended up released the month after Twilight Zone and became one of his biggest hits, and he would remain a bankable director for the rest of the decade (only Into the Night lost money), the disaster understandably cast a long, dark shadow over his career that remains to this day. It also abruptly ended Landis' friendship with Steven Spielberg, who was co-producing the film with Landis. The tragedy happened right when E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was dominating the summer box office, so media reports constantly mentioned Spielberg's name in connection with it. There were even reports that he was on set when the accident occurred, which were quickly debunked.
• Beverly Hills Cop III tarnished Eddie Murphy's career and was a partial Creator Killer for Landis, and looking back, it's not hard to see why:
  • Murphy was averse to creating a third film in the series, claiming that he didn't like Cop II's over-reliance on similar gags and character motivations to that of the first in various talk show appearances. He claimed that if he were to get involved in a third film, it would be because Paramount Pictures footed a giant paycheck for him... and that's exactly what happened when they forked over $15 million for him to reprise his role.
  • Like its predecessors, the film was fraught with problems deciding on a plot or script. Many ideas were batted around, including one where Axel would journey to London, England to arrest a pair of criminal brothers after his colleague Jeffrey is killed trying to arrest them, and teaming up with a British detective (envisioned to be played by either Sean Connery or John Cleese) to find the culprit. Another unused script idea had Foley, Rosewood, and Taggart going to London to rescue Captain Bogomil (Ronny Cox), who was being held hostage by terrorists during an International Police Convention. However, numerous problems, such as scripting issues and the budget, caused pre-production to drag out to the point that John Ashton and Cox had to drop out, due to obligations to other pending film projects. Cox would later claim in 2012 that the script was the big reason why he refused to return for the film, and his character simply isn't mentioned or referenced in the finished film.
  • Murphy showed up on-set looking downbeat and not giving the kind of trademark energy he used to, with various reasons given as to why that was the case. Interviews with Landis and Bronson Pinchot (reprising his role of Serge) lay the blame with Murphy being depressed over a string of underperforming films or outright flops (including The Distinguished Gentleman and Harlem Nights), causing him to act morose throughout the shoot. For his part, Murphy claims that he wanted to play Axel Foley as an older and wiser detective who didn't use as much of his trademark snark or Bavarian Fire Drill tendencies. Whatever the case may be, his performance was singled out for criticism by reviewers after the fact.
  • Paramount cut the budget from a planned $70 million to $55 million after the box-office gross for The Distinguished Gentleman was tabulated. Despite that, the budget spiraled out of control, with planned start dates pushed back amid script concerns.
  • Despite earning $119.5 million at the box office, the film was seen as a disappointment and put the kibosh on Landis' directing career for several years (the failure of Blues Brothers 2000, listed below, finished it off), while Murphy was left in a box-office slump for several years until 1996's The Nutty Professor reversed his fortunes. The lackluster nature of the script and production also left a planned fourth installment in Development Hell for nearly three decades, until it was announced by Netflix that they had inked a deal with Murphy to produce the film for the streaming service in 2020.
• Like its predecessor, Blues Brothers 2000 had a problematic production:
  • John Belushi died from a drug overdose a couple of years after the original film's release, leaving the follow-up in limbo (during which time co-stars John Candy and Cab Calloway also died) for the better part of two decades. During that timespan, it was widely assumed that Belushi's younger brother James Belushi would be the obvious candidate to co-star with Dan Aykroyd in a sequel. In the end, however, he turned it down, ostensibly because of a schedule conflict, resulting in John Goodman being cast in the entirely new role of Mighty Mac.
  • When Aykroyd and Landis presented their first draft script to Universal, the studio responded by saying their script was essentially just a carbon copy of the first film, except with Belushi's character swapped out for Goodman's...which Aykroyd later admitted was actually a valid criticism. Unfortunately, what the studio did next would ultimately send the project down in flames, as they decided they wanted the film to appeal to a younger audience, and forced the insertion of a Tagalong Kid sidekick to Aykroyd and Goodman, while also forcing a Genre Shift that made the film much more overt fantasy than the first one.
  • The actual shoot wasn't quite as problematic as that of the first film, but Aykroyd and Goodman had to work essentially for free in order to get the film produced under the less-than-adequate budget that they were given. Aykroyd and Landis became increasingly despondent due to the continued Executive Meddling throughout the shoot, which resulted in the two threatening to quit, until the studio counter-threatened them with a lawsuit for breach of contract. Still, they roughed it out and eventually finished the shoot.
  • Unlike the first film, 2000 was critically mauled and a Box Office Bomb, completely destroying Landis' career and sending Aykroyd into a career slump that would last well into the following decade, with Goodman probably only avoiding the same fate via his role in the same year's hugely acclaimed The Big Lebowski.

Lean, David

Sir David Lean's later films are noted for their exotic locations, epic storylines... and intensely troubled productions.

• The Bridge on the River Kwai famously climaxes with a train wreck on a collapsing bridge. Fittingly, the production of the film was itself a train wreck almost from the start.
  • The script was initially adapted by Carl Foreman from the book by French author Pierre Boulle. After Lean was chosen to direct, producer Sam Spiegel brought him and Foreman together to work on the script and was delighted to see the men take an almost instant dislike to each other, feeling that many great films were born from such animosity. Unfortunately, they hated each other so much that Foreman eventually resigned and was replaced by Michael Wilson. Since both Foreman and Wilson were on the Hollywood blacklist, the screenwriting credit (and Oscar) went to Boulle, who did not even speak English.^note  Foreman and Wilson were awarded retroactive - and posthumous - Oscars for their work on the script in 1984. When Columbia executives read the script, they objected to the lack of any romantic subplots, and Lean was forced to shoehorn in an affair between Commander Shears and a British nurse at the military hospital.
  • Lean and Spiegel differed widely over Kwai's focus. Lean was more interested in the prison camp rivalry between Colonel Nicholson and Saito; Spiegel felt the novel's action-adventure elements (namely the commando storyline, a subplot in the book) deserved more focus. Early scripts featured elaborate action scenes like an elephant stampede, an army ant attack, and even a submarine battle, which Lean adamantly vetoed. The finished film is a compromise, making the commando story more prominent without diminishing Nicholson and Saito's plot. Concerned about American box office, Spiegel changed Shears (a British character in the book) into an American POW who escapes from the camp, then is dragooned into helping destroy the bridge.
  • The role of Nicholson was offered to several actors, including Spencer Tracy (who declined as he felt the role had to be played by an English actor), Charles Laughton (who balked at the prospect of a location shoot in the tropical heat), and Laurence Olivier (who chose instead to direct The Prince and the Showgirl), before Alec Guinness was cast after a "summit meeting" with Spiegel and Lean. Guinness, at the time known more as a comic actor, was dismayed by the dull characterisation of Nicholson in the script and wanted to play the role as more light-hearted and sympathetic, while Lean insisted that he play Nicholson as written; the two men fought constantly over how the character should be portrayed. In the scene in which Nicholson reflects on his military career, Guinness felt that his face should be shot in closeup, and when he asked Lean why he decided instead to film Nicholson from behind, Lean exploded in anger.^note  Guinness did, however, ultimately regard his performance in the film as the best of his career; the Academy agreed and gave him the Oscar for Best Actor.
  • Location scouts found that the actual River Kwai was a mere trickle, so, at Jack Hawkins' suggestion, production was set up near Kitulgala in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The remote location required a special construction of a bungalow complex to house the cast and crew. Though Lean was right at home in the tropical climate, most of the other personnel suffered from the intense heat and humidity. They were frequently forced to call in sick and had to share the area with snakes, leeches,^note  Though the swamps through which the demo squad treks were specially constructed - the local swamps were too dangerous to use for filming - the leeches were real. and other wildlife. The slow pace of filming resulting from Lean's rampant perfectionism did not help. Furthermore, Spiegel did not allocate money for extras, so the British soldiers were mostly played by crew members and Ceylon natives wearing Caucasian makeup.
  • Although the river posing as the Kwai in the film may have made for a more photogenic location, the strong currents nearly claimed several lives. During the shooting of a scene in which a Japanese soldier falls from the bridge, stuntman Frankie Howard was swept away by the strong current, as was prop technician Tommy Early when he dove in after Howard. Though both men were rescued, Howard contracted a stomach illness during the shoot and had to be flown to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London; sadly, he did not recover. Lean himself was also nearly swept away by a current when he went for a swim in the river during a break in filming; he had to be rescued by actor Geoffrey Horne (who played Lieutenant Joyce).
  • The spectacle of the construction and destruction of the bridge itself provided some of the film's most memorable images, as well as some of the production's most troublesome moments. In the film, the bridge is built in two months; the actual construction took eight months and required 500 men and 35 elephants. The elephants would take breaks every four hours to lie in the water, whatever the wishes of the construction crew. When the cameras were set up to film the bridge's destruction - with an audience including the Prime Minister of Ceylon - a cameraman was unable to get out of the way of the intended path of the explosion in time, and Lean halted filming. The train crossed the bridge safely but crashed into a generator on the far side. The cameras were set up again the following day for the take that went into the finished film...
  • ... but it very nearly didn't make it into the film at all. Filming took place during the Suez Crisis in 1956, so equipment that would normally have been transported by sea instead had to be transported by air.^note  As Ceylon had no film processing facilities, each day's footage had to be flown to London to be processed and then back to Ceylon for viewing. The film of the bridge's destruction failed to arrive in London as scheduled, and a worldwide search was undertaken. To the crew's horror, the cans of film were eventually found in Cairo, where they had been sitting on the airport tarmac in the hot sun for a week. The prints should have been ruined, leaving the film without its climactic scene, but somehow they survived undamaged.
  • Finally, Spiegel was determined to release the film before the end of 1957 to make it eligible for the year's Academy Awards. However, because of the chaotic production, by early December 1957, the film still had no music score - no one had even been hired to compose it. The composer ultimately hired by Spiegel, Malcolm Arnold, had to write and record the score in just ten days.^note  His compressed time limit did pay off, as the film was the big winner at the 1957 Oscars, with awards going to Spiegel for Best Picture, Lean for Best Director, and Arnold for Best Score. It was also a hit with audiences, topping the year's box office charts.
• Lean's next film after The Bridge on the River Kwai was Lawrence of Arabia. Somehow it managed to be a worse experience than Kwai.
  • First, it's worth noting that filmmakers had been trying to make a Lawrence movie since the mid-'20s. Two of the better-known examples were an Alexander Korda epic in the '30s with Laurence Olivier as Lawrence, and a '50s Rank Organisation picture starring Dirk Bogarde. Both films fell apart due to political pressure: the former because of fear of alienating Turkey in the run-up to World War II; the latter because of a coup d'état in Iraq, where the film was set to shoot. Lean and Spiegel narrowly beat a competing project, an adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play Ross, to the screen.
  • Spiegel originally planned an All-Star Cast. At a press conference, he announced Marlon Brando as Lawrence, Horst Buchholz as Sherif Ali, Laurence Olivier as Feisal, Kirk Douglas as the journalist Bentley and Cary Grant as General Allenby. Unfortunately for Spiegel, every single one of them declined.^note Spiegel did secure Anthony Quinn as Auda, and Jose Ferrer for the minor role of the Turkish Bey by paying him $25,000 plus a custom-made Porsche. Omar Sharif and Jack Hawkins, originally cast in minor roles,^note Sharif was originally to play Tafas, Lawrence's guide killed by Ali at the well; Hawkins was initially cast as Colonel Brighton were re-cast as Ali and Allenby, respectively, after Buchholz and Grant declined. Still angry over Kwai, Lean resisted casting Alec Guinness as Feisal but Spiegel insisted. One oft-repeated anecdote claims that Spiegel feigned a heart attack to trick Lean into changing his mind.
  • After Brando bowed out, Lean and Spiegel settled on Albert Finney as Lawrence. They were impressed enough with Finney, a relative unknown, that they filmed an elaborate screen test. Finney declined the role, however, after Spiegel demanded that he sign a multi-picture contract. ^note He made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning instead, becoming a star in his own right. At this point, Katharine Hepburn, who'd worked with Lean on Summertime, suggested a young Irish stage actor struggling to break into films: Peter O'Toole. Thus the film had its leading man despite adamant objections from Spiegel, who had been irritated by O'Toole's flippant ad-libbing when he auditioned for the film adaptation of Suddenly, Last Summer (which Spiegel had produced).
  • Casting was complete, but the screenplay was not. Michael Wilson worked on the screenplay for over a year, then was summarily dismissed by Lean for unsatisfactory work. Unfortunately the cast and crew were already in Jordan and waited for weeks before a new writer was hired. Robert Bolt's tenure as screenwriter got off to a rocky start when he was arrested for taking part in a CND demonstration in London, forcing Sam Spiegel to bail him out of jail. Bolt then showed his gratitude by granting a press interview where he slammed Spiegel and Lean as egomaniacs. Eventually Spiegel invited Bolt to live on his private yacht in Aqaba, mostly to keep an eye on him.
  • Logistics filming in Jordan were a nightmare. For a start, gaining rights to film there required intense negotiation: Spiegel brought in Anthony Nutting, a former British Foreign Office official, to secure King Hussein's approval.^note  Nutting had resigned over the Suez Crisis, earning him wide respect in the Arab world. Not coincidentally, he had also written a biography of Lawrence. The crew commandeered tanker trucks full of fresh water from Aqaba and airlifted frozen food to the location every day. Lean and crew had to meticulously sweep the desert sands free of footprints and tire tracks between takes. Outbreaks of illness laid many crew members low. O'Toole's on-set drinking caused tension with Arab extras. The Jordanian government initially cooperated with the production but proved leery about filming in cities like Aqaba and Maan.
  • Lean and Spiegel's already testy relationship soon reached the breaking point. Spiegel rarely visited the set, but constantly complained long-distance about Lean's "wasting" money and allegedly poor footage. On one visit he showed up with William Wyler in tow, threatening to replace Lean if he didn't work faster. Lean eventually got back at Spiegel by sneaking into the dailies a shot of him flipping Spiegel off... in 70mm. Unsurprisingly, Lawrence marked their last collaboration.
  • Eventually shooting in Jordan got so expensive that the production moved to Spain. More difficulties arose: production designer John Box had to build the Aqaba set from scratch. The crew had difficulty finding camels and camel riders. O'Toole nearly died filming a battle scene when he fell off his camel and injured himself on another occasion. Edmond O'Brien (playing Bentley) had an onset heart attack and Arthur Kennedy was flown direct from New York to replace him. Flash floods in Almeria delayed filming. Lean and his actors grew increasingly tense; Lean once exploded at Jack Hawkins for trying to lighten the mood on set. Finally, Lean couldn't find suitable locations for the climactic battle and there was a final move to...
  • Morocco. The crew took up residence at an old Foreign Legion encampment in Ouarzazate, with no air conditioning in 100-plus degree F temperatures. Lean argued with his second unit directors on how to film the battle, firing one (Andre de Toth). ^note Lean set the tone earlier in the production, explicitly telling his crew "I loathe second unit directors." More diseases broke out among crew members. Procuring camels again proved a problem. The main difficulty however came with the extras. Soldiers from the Moroccan army were employed without pay, which they understandably resented. During off hours they actually took potshots at cast and crew, Lean included. Others deserted between takes and never came back.^note And even this didn't end the location shooting: Lean reportedly sent a small second unit crew to California to film some additional desert footage just as he began editing the film.
  • Having survived an arduous production, Lawrence encountered several PR disasters up to its release. Professor A.W. Lawrence, the title character's brother, threatened to sue the filmmakers, then tried to discredit the movie through interviews and editorials. An ugly scandal arose when Spiegel again refused to credit Wilson. A Writers' Guild arbitration found in Wilson's favor, but Bolt still received sole credit.^note This wasn't rectified until a '90s video release; Lean and Bolt adamantly opposed adding Wilson's name to the 1989 restoration. Wilson also received a retroactive - and, as with Kwai, posthumous - Oscar nomination in 1995. O'Toole attended press interviews drunk, drawing more bad attention. Finally, Lawrence received its American premiere during a newspaper strike in New York, and the few critics who saw it gave overwhelmingly negative reviews.^note  Bosley Crowther dismissed it as a "dull, thundering camel opera", while Andrew Sarris called it "dull, overlong, and coldly impersonal".. For all that Lawrence became a smash hit, and eventually an all-time classic, with ten nominations and seven wins at the 1962 Oscars,^note  Another Best Picture award for Spiegel, another Best Director award for Lean, Best Score for Maurice Jarre, Best (Color) Cinematography for Freddie Young, Best (Color) Art Decoration - Set Decoration for John Box and his crew, Best Film Editing for Anne V. Coates, and Best Sound for John Cox. Only Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, and Robert Bolt went home empty-handed. but it overcame a lot getting there.
• Lean followed his jungle and desert epics with a winter epic in Doctor Zhivago, and its production provided more of the same chaos as the previous two films.
  • Producer Carlo Ponti won a bidding war for the film rights to Boris Pasternak's novel, and wanted it to be a spectacle on the same scale as Lawrence of Arabia, so he hired many of the same crew members, including David Lean, scriptwriter Robert Bolt, composer Maurice Jarre, and production designer John Box. He wanted location shooting to take place in the Soviet Union but was refused permission by the government due to the content of the novel. Scandinavia was deemed too cold for a lengthy film shoot, while Yugoslavia was ruled out for both the cold weather and the obstructive bureaucracy; the location shooting was mostly done in Spain. Construction of the Moscow set in a suburb of Madrid took nearly eighteen months while filming itself fell behind schedule as Lean hoped to shoot scenes during each of the various seasons as depicted in the novel. Unfortunately, the winter scenes did not go as planned due to the unusually mild winter, and they were instead mostly filmed in summer in temperatures as high as 90 degrees Fahrenheit, with marble dust and plastic snow standing in for actual snow and the actors' profuse sweating requiring frequent makeup touchups.^note  Some of the winter scenes were filmed in more appropriate weather in Finland and Canada.
  • Lean originally offered the title role to Peter O'Toole, but O'Toole turned it down, not wanting to repeat the miserable experience he had had working on Lawrence; Lean never forgave him for the slight. O'Toole's Lawrence co-star Omar Sharif, a big fan of the novel, initially auditioned for the role of Pasha and was surprised to be cast as Yuri Zhivago. However, as an Egyptian playing a Russian, he had to undergo a strenuous make-up process each day, involving shaving his hairline by 2-3 inches (which then had to be waxed every three days as it grew back), straightening his remaining hair, and taping his eyes back.
  • Part of Ponti's motivation for buying the rights to the novel was the prospect of seeing his wife, Sophia Loren,^note  Well, sort of; Ponti divorced his first wife, Giuliana Fiastri, in Mexico in 1957 to marry Loren, but divorce was illegal in Italy at the time, and Ponti and Loren annulled their marriage in 1962 to avoid charges of bigamy and "concubinage". At Ponti's suggestion, all three corners of the triangle moved to France, where divorce was legal, to become French citizens. Fiastri formally divorced Ponti in 1965; he re-married Loren in 1966, a union that lasted until his death in 2007. As such, Ponti and Loren were not technically married during production of Zhivago. cast as Lara, but Lean dismissed her as "too tall". Jane Fonda turned down the role, not wanting to face a nine-month shoot in Spain, so Lean ultimately cast Julie Christie after seeing her in Billy Liar.^note  Fonda later changed her mind, but it was too late; she later said that of all the roles she had rejected, she regretted turning down the role of Lara most of all. Relations between the two were difficult at first, as Christie struggled to give Lean the performance he wanted and initially refused to wear the red dress that so captivates Zhivago's attention; as Lean was essentially incapable of buttering up his actors, he had to ask Box to persuade her for him. When shooting returned to Spain from Finland, Christie was so overwhelmed by Lean's demanding direction that she collapsed from exhaustion. They did eventually develop a good working relationship that became a lifelong friendship, but they never made another film together.
  • The relationship between Lean and Alec Guinness had become certifiably toxic; Lean frequently insulted not only Guinness's performance as Yevgraf Zhivago but also Guinness personally. Guinness recalled Lean mocking him as too old for the character and saying his "face was too fat onscreen," a criticism Guinness neither understood nor appreciated. This treatment generated a rift between the two men that would last nearly twenty years.
  • The original director of photography was Nicolas Roeg, but he resigned after creative differences with Lean led to a major falling out between the two. Freddie Young, the director of photography from Lawrence of Arabia, was offered the job, and though he was reluctant to work with Lean again after the exhausting experience of shooting Lawrence, he eventually agreed but needed two weeks to re-shoot the scenes that Roeg had shot before his resignation.
  • The political climate in Spain (under far-right authoritarian leader Francisco Franco) made it a risky country in which to shoot a film about the Russian Revolution. The scene in which the crowd chants the Marxist anthem, "The Internationale", was filmed at 3am; the police, thinking an actual Marxist revolution was taking place, descended on the shoot and insisted on staying until the scene had been filmed. The mostly Spanish extras, fearful that the police would arrest them as Communist subversives, had to pretend not to know the words to "The Internationale".
  • During shooting of a scene in which Zhivago pulls a young mother onto a train after first pulling her baby onto the train, the actress playing the young mother, Lili Murati, panicked when Sharif grabbed her hand; a miscommunication between the two ultimately resulted in Murati falling under the train's wheels. Fortunately, she had bunched up and thus avoided having her limbs severed, while her thick clothing also protected her from serious injury.
  • Like Lawrence before it, the film continued to stumble in its first weeks in cinemas. Critics thought the film too long, the love affair between Zhivago and Lara too soap operatic, and the depiction of historical events too facile. Jarre's score, especially "Lara's Theme", was widely dismissed as "syrupy". Lean later said that during the first few weeks, "you could hurl boulders in the theatre and not hit anyone." However, the film and especially "Lara's Theme" eventually caught on with audiences, netting five awards from ten nominations at the 1965 Oscars^note  Including repeat awards for Freddie Young for Best Cinematography, Maurice Jarre for Best Score, and John Box and co. for Best Art Decoration - Set Decoration (Color), and first time wins for Robert Bolt for Best Adapted Screenplay and Phyllis Dalton for Best Costumes. and having one of the ten highest box office takes in cinema history (adjusted for inflation).^note  Although in contrast to Kwai and Lawrence, it isn't the highest-grossing film from its year of release, as 1965 also saw the initial release of The Sound of Music.
• Lean simply couldn't escape this trope after the mid-1950s; the Irish love story Ryan's Daughter should have been a breather film after the more ambitious trio of The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago, but it still managed to turn into a severely troubled production.
  • A location scouting expedition led Lean to declare Ireland's Dingle Peninsula the perfect place to shoot the film, which he expected to take three months and be on a similar scale to Brief Encounter.^note  The locals were delighted by the money and publicity filming brought to the region, which continues to reap the benefits to this day. Instead, it took over a year and was on a similar scale to Zhivago, complete with a budget overrun of £4 million. Lean wanted most of the love scenes on the beach to be filmed in sunny weather, forgetting that south-west Ireland is known more for mist and gale force winds than sunshine; the weather was so uncooperative that the sunlit beach scenes were instead filmed at Noordhoek near Cape Town in South Africa.^note  Noordhoek was chosen due to its similarity to Dingle Bay, but the resemblance is superficial at best; the sand in the sunny beach scenes is visibly whiter and finer, while the sky and the sea are a much deeper shade of blue. Ironically, Lean had to wait for a year for a suitably dramatic storm to strike the Irish coast for a pivotal scene in which the villagers wade into the sea to retrieve a shipment of weapons intended for the IRA. Leo McKern, who played publican Thomas Ryan, nearly drowned and nearly lost his glass eye to the rough seas, and was so frustrated by the slow pace of filming that he swore he would never act again (his "retirement" ultimately only lasted a few years). Production was also delayed by accidents, such as two vehicles sinking in a local peat bog. Nor did Ryan's long gestation endear Lean to MGM, who soon regretted giving the director carte blanche after Zhivago. At one point, MGM President James Aubrey arrived in Ireland to demand that Lean pick up the pace. Lean responded by shutting down production until Aubrey left the country.
  • Lean also had trouble casting most of the film's major roles (with two exceptions: Sarah Miles, then on her first of two marriages to the film's scriptwriter Robert Bolt, was cast as Rosy Ryan,^note  Miles had been proposed by Lean as a possible Lara in Doctor Zhivago; at the time, Bolt dismissed her as "just a north country slut". He married her several years later. while Lean's former frequent collaborator John Mills was cast as mute village idiot Michael, though he expressed reservations about being typecast). He initially offered the role of Catholic priest Father Collins to Alec Guinness, but Guinness, himself a devout Catholic, sent the script back with a long list of objections to the character's portrayal (Guinness was also still angry at Lean for how he had been treated during filming of Doctor Zhivago). Lean thanked him for his suggestions and gave the role instead to Trevor Howard, who was undergoing marital difficulties during filming. When Howard's wife, Helen Cherry, paid a visit to Ireland but stormed out of a party after an argument with him, she was nearly killed in a car accident on the treacherous narrow, winding roads. Howard's experience on set was similarly accident-plagued; he was rushed to hospital after falling off a horse, and he and Mills nearly drowned when a fishing boat scene went badly wrong, forcing them to be rescued by frogmen.
  • The role of Rosy's husband, schoolteacher Charles Shaughnessy, was intended for Paul Scofield, but he was in the middle of a theatre contract. Producer Anthony Havelock-Allan suggested Gregory Peck, who expressed interest in the role, but Lean ultimately cast Robert Mitchum, believing that casting against type always had interesting results. Mitchum almost turned down the role, as he was undergoing a personal crisis at the time (he told Lean that he was seriously contemplating suicide when he was cast; when Bolt heard of this, he told Mitchum that as long as he finished "working on this wretched little film" first, he would pay for his burial), and he described working with Lean as "like constructing the Taj Mahal out of toothpicks". Havelock-Allan later recalled that the awkwardness of co-ordinating the dates when Mitchum and Miles were both available put such a strain on pre-production that filming began without a proper shooting script. Eventually, relations between Mitchum and Lean became so strained that they only communicated with each other through Miles. Mitchum also planted marijuana trees behind the hotel accommodating the cast, giving many cast and crew members (and locals) their first experience of the drug.^note  As problematic as the production was, Mitchum later said that he felt his performance in the film ranked among his best, that Lean was one of the best directors with whom he had worked, and that he regretted the film was so poorly received.
  • But the most troublesome role proved to be that of Rosy's lover, Shell-Shocked Veteran Major Randolph Doryan. The role was originally offered to Marlon Brando, but he was forced to drop out when production of Burn! lagged behind schedule. Lean finally cast American actor Christopher Jones on the strength of his performance in The Looking-Glass War without bothering to meet him first... only learning after production began that the film had been shot to hide Jones' diminutive stature and that his high-pitched voice had been dubbed. Jones and Lean clashed frequently, with Lean finding Jones' voice and performance so unsuited to the square-jawed soldier he had envisioned that he had Doryan rewritten as traumatised into near silence by his trench experiences, with his aide-de-camp, Captain Smith (Gerald Sim), given the extra lines. Jones' voice was ultimately dubbed by Julian Holloway (which Jones only discovered when he saw the finished film), but his performance was one of the most harshly criticised aspects of the film.^note  In his review of the film, a young Roger Ebert said of Jones, "An actor could hardly express less without playing a corpse."
  • Jones and Miles also grew to dislike each other, making filming of their love scenes awkward for all involved. Not only was Jones in mourning for his close friend (and possibly ex-girlfriend) Sharon Tate, who was murdered by the Manson family during production, but he was also engaged to Olivia Hussey,^note  The engagement was ultimately broken off. and was simply not attracted to Miles. This particularly frustrated Lean, who was looking forward to taking advantage of more relaxed film censorship and showing love scenes on camera instead of cutting away to something symbolic; instead, he had to fall back on the old techniques. Miles admitted in her autobiography that at one point, she conspired with Mitchum to drug Jones' breakfast to make him get over his disgust at filming the scene where Rosy and Doryan have a tryst in the forest, but Mitchum overdid the dosage, rendering Jones near catatonic for filming of the scene and leading him to believe he was having a nervous breakdown. Not long afterward, he had a similar brush with death to Helen Cherry when he crashed his sports car on the local roads. A combination of grief over Tate's death and his negative experience working on the film prompted Jones to retire from acting; he only made one other film.^note  Said film was 1996's Mad Dog Time, which Roger Ebert notoriously described as the first film he had seen which didn't improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same amount of time.
  • Then came its release. MGM was expecting Ryan's Daughter to repeat the huge success of Zhivago, and unveiled it with a suitably lavish publicity campaign and roadshow release. Unfortunately, the movie was roundly savaged by critics, who typically complained it was too grand in scale for a modest love story. Lean took this criticism extremely personally; at a meeting of New York film critics he was confronted by Pauline Kael, Richard Schickel, and others who seemingly took delight in insulting Ryan.^note It was here that Schickel asked Lean "Can you explain how the man who directed Brief Encounter could produce a piece of shit like Ryan's Daughter?" Lean singled out this particular comment as causing him to reconsider a career in film directing. This time, critical scorn matched audience indifference, and Ryan's box office take proved mediocre. It earned four nominations at the 1970 Oscars^note  It won two: Best Supporting Actor for John Mills as Michael, and Best Cinematography for Freddie Young, his third Oscar in a row for a David Lean film. and eventually turned a profit, but fell short of MGM's hopes for a massive blockbuster. Lean wouldn't make another film for fourteen years, which was...
• A Passage to India (1984). Compared to the others, Lean's final film was a breeze, with even the Indian location shooting going smoothly. Except that Lean, his stars, and his crew were constantly at each others' throats.
  • Alec Guinness testified in his diaries to the toxic atmosphere on set, resulting in cast and crew insulting Lean behind his back, and occasionally to his face. Judy Davis, cast as female lead Adela Quested, told Lean "You can't fucking well direct," and claimed he didn't understand women. Victor Banerjee, cast as Dr. Aziz, argued with Lean over the character's accent, calling him "obnoxious" and a hack compared to Satyajit Ray, with whom he'd just finished filming on Ghare Baire. Peggy Ashcroft, who played Mrs. Moore, disliked Lean's altering the novel and "lack of respect" for her co-stars. James Fox also suffered near-constant, unmotivated insults from Lean over his performance as Fielding, but, unlike his co-stars, he mostly shrugged them off. Finally, of course, was Guinness himself: playing the Indian mystic Godbole, he spent weeks learning an intricate Hindu dance, only to have Lean cut the entire scene in post-production. This proved to be the final nail in the coffin of their relationship; neither man ever spoke to the other again.
  • It wasn't just the cast who grew tired of Lean's prima donna behavior. Santha Rama Rau, who had previously written a 1960 stage adaptation of India, was originally contracted to write the screenplay. Though Lean rejected her script as unsatisfactory, Rau discovered that Lean incorporated much of her dialogue into the finished film anyway; ultimately, she received a screen credit after threatening a lawsuit. Lean also disliked his cinematographer Ernest Day, eventually "promoting" him to assistant director and sending Day to film superfluous landscape and crowd scenes that didn't make it into the final movie. India still proved to be a hit with critics and audiences and netted eleven nominations at the 1984 Oscars,^note  It won two: Best Supporting Actress for Peggy Ashcroft and a third Best Score win for Maurice Jarre. but Lean never directed again.^note  Not for lack of trying; filming on his all-star, big-budget adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo was six weeks from starting when Lean died of throat cancer in 1991.

Peckinpah, Sam

"Bloody" Sam Peckinpah was known for his rebellious, uncompromising attitude to filmmaking. Even his closest friends confessed that he could be a pain to work with.

• This trend began with Peckinpah's very first film, The Deadly Companions...in this case, not of his own making. Here the problem was star Maureen O'Hara, who along with producer Charles FitzSimmons (O'Hara's brother) micromanaged the production, constantly overruled the freshman director and demanded rewrites and re-shoots on the fly to recenter the film from Brian Keith's character to O'Hara's. Many key scenes were re-shot or cut in post-production; Peckinpah was particularly chagrined that FitzSimmons re-edited the climactic scene where Keith shot Chill Wills' villain in the back into something more conventionally heroic. Peckinpah, not having the clout to push back against O'Hara or FitzSimmons, went along with it, though it's probable that the experience informed Peckinpah's later problems with obnoxious producers and domineering stars.
• Ride the High Country was relatively calm and uneventful for a Peckinpah shoot, but his initial plan to shoot the entire film on location in the Sierra Nevada Mountains (where the story was set) got scuttled by an October snowstorm that delayed filming. Studio executives ordered him to return to Hollywood and finish the film on studio backlot sets (though the gold mining town of Coarsegold was created at the oft-used Bronson Canyon site in Griffith Park). The studio loathed the finished film and stuck it onto the bottom half of a double bill, only to have it get rave reviews from critics.
• Major Dundee:
  • Things first began to fall apart when Columbia kept changing things — the shooting schedule, the budget, the film's final running time — much to Peckinpah's chagrin. To accommodate the changes, the script, which had been rewritten already by Peckinpah from Harry Julian Fink's script of a basic Western adventure story to a Moby-Dick-esque study of the title character, a US Cavalry officer who would do anything for glory, was again rewritten, this time by Oscar Saul; it was still being reworked throughout filming, which accounts in part for the finished film's choppiness. One of the more egregious additions was the romance plot with Senta Berger's Teresa. (Some idea of what Fink and Peckinpah's original script looked like can be gleaned from a novelization published in 1965, which adds several scenes and whole subplots while changing the fates of several characters. The romance is completely absent.)
  • So Peckinpah started drinking. Heavily, even by his standards. And then showing up this way on set. He began firing people for the most insignificant things and threatening everyone else to the point that the film's star and Peckinpah's friend Charlton Heston frequently had to pull his costume's cavalry sabre on the director repeatedly. Peckinpah fell for actress Begoña Palacios, who played a minor character in the film,^note The Mexican girl whom Tim the bugler falls for, and it's implied sleeps with, in the village Dundee liberates from the French and spent much of his time courting her rather than directing.
  • It didn't help either that Heston and co-star Richard Harris hated each other. They'd worked together previously, on The Wreck of the Mary Deare, and their antipathy carried over into Dundee: Heston called Harris a "professional Irishman" while Harris labelled Heston a "holy Joe." Senta Berger recounted the two engaging in macho posturing, like Harris hiking his boots up to seem taller than Heston. Heston was so annoyed by Harris's general behavior (he frequently showed up late on set, and argued with Peckinpah and his costars) that he lodged a formal complaint with producer Jerry Bresler.
  • Word of this got back to the studio, which aggravated matters by moving the wrap date up a full month. They were reportedly going to fire Peckinpah as well until Heston saved his friend's job by making the ultimate sacrifice—he said he would forego his salary and do the whole film for free. Even so, Peckinpah's drinking got even worse. This time he often wandered away from the set, and Heston reportedly directed much of the later scenes.
  • When principal photography was finally over, Columbia broke its contract with Peckinpah and hired editors itself to put the film together. The film was cut from a reported 155-minute run time to 121 minutes, with a poorly-matched musical score by Daniele Amfitheatrof (featuring a title march by Mitch Miller and his Sing-Along Gang) added. Critics regarded the finished film as an interesting failure; however, stories of Peckinpah's difficult behavior percolated throughout Hollywood. He was fired from his next film, The Cincinnati Kid, and spent several years blackballed by Hollywood studios.
  • Peckinpah eventually recouped his reputation with a TV production of Noon Wine, then made The Wild Bunch, which is sort of a semi-remake of this film. For years there was a debate as to how much the released version represented what Peckinpah had really wanted to do, and only in 2005, two decades after his death, was a version released that tried to be true to his original vision. This version runs 138 minutes, 17 minutes longer than the original studio cut, and adds a new sound mix and a completely new score by Christopher Caliendo.
• Ironically, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, a film shot on desert locations was plagued by constant rain. With shooting delayed, the cast and crew spent most of the time drinking. Peckinpah, as usual when his alcoholism flared up, became irascible, and fired dozens of crew members over the course of production. Adding to the chaos, Slim Pickens, cast in a major supporting role, came down with pneumonia, and there was even an outbreak of gonorrhea among the crew. The film went over schedule and over budget, and Warner Bros. wasn't willing to give the film much support on release, despite its scoring exceptionally well with test audiences.
• Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was filmed almost entirely on location in Durango, Mexico. Dust storms, hot weather, and defective cameras delayed shooting from the start. Much of the cast and crew came down with influenza. Peckinpah's severe alcohol problems created tensions with coworkers. In this case, though, Executive Meddling proved the most persistent issue: penny-pinching MGM honcho James Aubrey repeatedly slashed the budget and refused to sanction re-shoots for several key scenes, after which the movie was cut from 124 minutes to 106 minutes, smuggled quietly into theaters and flopped. The film sunk into ignominy (aside from its Bob Dylan soundtrack) until the preview cut resurfaced in the '90s.
• Cross of Iron:
  • Location shooting for this World War II drama was mostly done in Yugoslavia, with the Yugoslav government agreeing to provide the period accurate tanks and machine guns the production needed. Unfortunately, according to the film's star James Coburn, because only a fraction of the $4 million budget promised by producer Wolf C. Hartwig was available when filming began, half the equipment was still held up in negotiations when the cameras started rolling, causing severe delays to the shooting schedule.
  • Peckinpah's alcoholism was as bad as ever, with his preferred drink for this shoot being 180° proof Slivovitz (Šljivovica). Every two to three weeks, he would go on a binge, and the time he needed to sober up again resulted in lost shooting days.
  • The production delays naturally led to budget overruns to the tune of $2 million. On July 6, 1976, eighty-nine days into the shoot and with the last of the money spent, Hartwig and his co-producer Alex Winitsky tried to halt the production before the final scene had been filmed. The original ending was expected to take three days to film in an abandoned rail yard, and the special effects teams had already spent several days wiring pyrotechnics for the shoot. Coburn was so annoyed by the producers' attempted interference that he had them thrown off the set and worked with Peckinpah and his co-star Maximilian Schell to improvise the ending that went into the finished film. Once the final scene was shot, the cast and crew packed their luggage and caught their trains or planes home, as there was no money left for a wrap party.
• Convoy destroyed Peckinpah's career despite becoming his highest-grossing film.
  • The film was an attempt to cash in on the trucking and CB radio fad of the late '70s, using C.W. McCall's "Convoy" as a hook. B.W.L. Norton wrote the original script as a lighthearted action comedy similar to Smokey and the Bandit. He pitched the project to EMI, who offered it to Peckinpah, then finishing post-production on Cross of Iron. Though dubious about the project's potential, Peckinpah agreed on condition that he had complete control over the film. The studio agreed, and trouble promptly began.
  • Peckinpah immediately started rewriting Norton's script, re-envisioning it as a modern-day Western with truckers fighting against crooked lawmen and unfair interstate regulations, while also adding heavy-handed political satire. Unable to give these ideas much weight on their own, Peckinpah encouraged his stars (Kris Kristofferson, Ali MacGraw and Ernest Borgnine among them) to write their own dialogue. James Coburn, working as Peckinpah's assistant director, admitted that "There was no conflict. They didn't know what the fuck was going on."
  • Production began in May 1977 and almost immediately spiraled out of control; within two weeks, Peckinpah was already behind schedule. He refused to deal with producer Bob Sherman, enlisting his actors and crew members to run interference when Sherman visited the set. The budget exploded as Peckinpah spent absurd amounts of time on individual scenes. One major set piece, a barroom brawl, took ten days to shoot. Entire action scenes were re-structured around accidental wrecks and botched stunts which Peckinpah left in the finished film. Then, production halted for several weeks when Kris Kristofferson left the shoot for a concert tour. This did have one beneficial side-effect however, as MacGraw, who had been suffering from long-standing drink and drug problems, checked herself into rehab and cleaned herself up in time for shooting to resume.
  • But Convoy's biggest bugbear remained Peckinpah, whose substance abuse spiraled out of control. He was taking heavy amounts of cocaine, Quaaludes, and vitamin shots that left him both irritable and irrational. At one point, Peckinpah called his nephew David from the set, ranting that Steve McQueen (actor) and the Executive Car Leasing Company were conspiring to kill him^note in fairness, McQueen allegedly sent Peckinpah a threatening note or two early in filming over MacGraw being in the film, as he forced her to retire when the two married earlier in the decade and promptly served her with divorce papers when she came out of retirement for Convoy. He also fired several crew members and assistants as filming dragged on. On the day the climactic funeral scene was set to film, with the cast, crew, and 3,000 extras assembled, Peckinpah locked himself in the trailer for twelve hours, refusing to communicate with anyone. With their director incapacitated, Coburn and the other assistant directors essentially finished directing Convoy themselves.
  • Filming finally wrapped in early September 1977, two months behind schedule and $3,000,000 over budget. A month later, however, Peckinpah was assigned to re-shoot several scenes, which he did without incident. After several months of editing, Peckinpah delivered a rough cut that was nearly four hours long... without bothering to include the final half-hour of the movie. EMI finally lost patience with Peckinpah, booted him off the project, and brought in two other editors to recut the film essentially from scratch; yet again, Peckinpah was barred from finishing his own movie.
  • Amazingly, Convoy became a box office hit when it was finally released in the summer of 1978. However, Peckinpah's meltdown convinced Hollywood studios that he was unemployable. It would be five years before Peckinpah made his next (and last) film, The Osterman Weekend, where he was given little control over the finished product.

Scott, Ridley

Like fellow Alien franchise director James Cameron, Sir Ridley Scott has run into a fair amount of clunky productions himself.

• The original Alien had a smoother production than most of its sequels, but not an entirely trouble-free one.
  • Most of the problems that did occur were in pre-production, firstly when the producers were having trouble finding a studio to back the film, and then when looking for a director. They were initially keen to hire Robert Aldrich, but when they actually met him, they were dismayed to find that he didn't care much for the film's quality and was just looking for a quick paycheck. Several more directors passed on the project, and producer Walter Hill considered directing it himself before a sample of Ridley Scott's work just happened to pass his desk.
  • Production itself was relatively smooth, but it had some problems. Jon Finch, originally cast as Kane, had to drop out by the second day of shooting when he became severely ill due to his diabetes, and John Hurt (the producers' first choice) was cast instead. There was also friction between the producers and screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, who didn't like that Hill had rewritten the screenplay to have more gritty and realistic dialogue. The visual effects team was also sorely underfunded and underequipped, which resulted in cinematographer Derek Vanlint having to gather up all his lighting equipment and lend it to the VFX team at the end of each day.
  • Additionally, Jerry Goldsmith composed a substantial amount of music for the film, only for Scott to throw most of it out and have the finished product largely unscored while replacing some of the music with a Howard Hanson composition and tracking in Goldsmith's music from Freud, enraging Goldsmith and resulting in the two not working together again until Legend (1985) (where the music was also screwed with).
• Blade Runner's creation was a difficult process:
  • Attempts to adapt Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had been going on since the early 1970s. Producer Herb Jaffe attempted to adapt the novel with a script written by his son Robert, but Dick hated the script so much that he threatened violence upon Robert during their meeting. Hampton Fancher wrote a new screenplay several years later that was picked up, but Fancher was eventually distanced from his script for being too protective, and David Peoples created the script that was eventually filmed with Dick's approval. Then, a critical financier went bankrupt at the eleventh hour, leading to some desperate deals shortly before production began.
  • Harrison Ford, cast as Deckard, did not get along with Scott or co-star Sean Young. Young's inexperience at the time led to her breaking character and ruining takes, frustrating Ford, while Scott's directorial style and sudden insistence on Deckard being a Replicant led to many disagreements and flared tempers between Ford and Scott. During a BBC interview in 2006, Scott named Ford when asked "Who's the biggest pain in the arse you've ever worked with?", though Scott admitted they had patched things up by that point.
  • Given the film is mostly set at night, it was filmed at the darkest possible hours, making everyone very exhausted, not helped by the constant fake rain. It even led to a well-known blooper: when Roy Batty releases the dove, the shot of it flying is in bright day because the one during the night shoot got soaked and couldn't be bothered to take off. And the Director of Photography, Jordan Cronenwith, suffered from Parkinson's disease and during the shoot was very weak and in a great deal of pain. By the final month of shooting, he was working from a wheelchair.
  • Towards the end of principal photography, an incident occurred which become known as the "T-shirt War". Scott disparaged American film crews to the British press, commenting that when he asked for something with English crews they would say "Yes guvnor" and go get it rather than ask questions. Makeup supervisor Marvin G. Westmore saw the article and was disgusted. In retaliation, he had shirts printed with "Yes guvnor my ass!". In retaliation, Scott and several of his closer collaborators had shirts made with "Xenophobia sucks" on them.
  • Scott's perfectionist tendencies led to double-digit numbers of takes, including for seemingly innocuous scenes, leading cast and crew alike to wonder if he was out for perfection or just infuriating his producers. It got to the point where the exasperated crew nicknamed the film Blood Runner. The final scene was shot literally hours before the studio was going to step in and remove Scott from the project, having lost their patience with him over the course of the four-month-long shoot.
  • Test screenings were sharply divided over the film, leading to sweeping executive mandates, among them being a less ambiguous ending (which ended up using Stock Footage from The Shining) and Deckard providing narration. The producers themselves called the voiceovers "dull", and Ford said he "went kicking and screaming to the studio" to record them. Ford flip-flopped over the years if he deliberately made them dull in the hope they would be removed, or did the best he could with material he hated.
• Legend (1985) took three years to complete, to the point Mia Sara started production at 15 but had already come of age by its 1985 release. Production was halted twice, once when a whole soundstage burned down (though thankfully with no one inside), and again when Tom Cruise's father died. The extensive make-up that everyone but the two stars had to go through wasn't easy - Tim Curry suffered so much with his claustrophobic demon full body make-up that he eventually injured himself removing it too fast. Also, during post-production, Scott ended up cutting the film profusely and changing its soundtrack from Jerry Goldsmith's orchestra to Tangerine Dream's electronica (both were restored in the director's cut).
• Gladiator went through constant on-set rewrites, to the point where Richard Harris stopped paying attention. Russell Crowe allegedly questioned every aspect of the evolving script and strode off the set when he did not get answers. But that was nothing compared to the biggest problem the film faced - Oliver Reed, cast in what was supposed to be his Career Resurrection, died of a heart attack during filming in Malta before all of his scenes had been shot. Not only did this necessitate having the effects company spend $3 million creating a CGI body double, but it also caused story alterations (his character was supposed to make it through the end of the film, as opposed to dying near the climax).
• Hannibal had a troubled pre-production:
  • The controversy of the novel resulted in key players from The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, Ted Tally, and Jodie Foster) withdrawing from the project, which initially cast doubt on whether or not the film would even get made. Some executives were wary of proceeding without Demme's budget-conscious involvement and feared the price tag might spiral out of control with the notoriously temperamental Dino De Laurentiis at the helm. Media scrutiny was intense.
  • Also complicating things were convoluted legal matters regarding rights to the material and characters, which resulted in a lawsuit between producer De Laurentiis and Universal Pictures (which ultimately was settled, with both parties remaining involved). However, MGM had to be brought into the mix due to their ownership of Clarice Starling, which they obtained after acquiring the assets of Orion Pictures. Further negotiation resulted in MGM acquiring U.S. distribution rights, while Universal would distribute the film internationally.
  • Once Scott was selected as director, the process turned to the screenplay. David Mamet wrote the original draft but was not available for rewrites, causing Steven Zaillian to be brought on. Adapting the novel was a long and arduous process, and Scott was heavily involved. Thomas Harris' ending for the novel was deemed far too controversial and implausible to put on film, so concepts for new endings had to be discussed.
  • After the film was finally on track and Julianne Moore chosen as the new Clarice, De Laurentiis added more fuel to the fire by making unflattering comments about Jodie Foster - mainly his opinions about her lack of sex appeal compared to Moore.
• Kingdom of Heaven got its fair share of production problems:
  • The project originally began as a Russell Crowe vehicle called Tripoli. Screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed) had a script written, Scott signed on to direct, 20th Century Fox greenlit it, sets and art assets were being made, and then things went nowhere. After two tries of getting it off the ground, Monahan began writing Heaven after Tripoli fell apart, as Scott had always wanted to do a movie about the Crusades.
  • The film was hit with Executive Meddling from the start, with the execs being very uncomfortable with the length of the script and the subplot of Eva Green's Princess Sibylla and her son Baldwin V, who briefly rules Jerusalem after King Baldwin IV (Edward Norton) dies. In Scott's words on the 4-disc DVD set and the Ultimate Edition Blu-Ray, he mentioned that studio heads said that the plot "went off on a tangent". The studio demanded Monahan write two different versions of the script: one with and one without the kid. Scott and co. shot the former.
  • Filming was actually pretty smooth, save for an incident in which Orlando Bloom came down with the flu and suffered some hand injuries. Jeremy Irons' character's name was also changed from Raymond to Tiberius to avoid confusion with Brendan Gleeson's Reynauld, which may not have been a bad thing.
  • When filming wrapped up, Fox was bothered by the length of the cut that Scott had presented them (around 186 minutes) and forced him to cut the film down to a measly 145 running time, excising the plot about Sibylla's son, among many other scenes. Their reasoning was that audiences couldn't handle a three-hour film, disregarding successful long movies such as the studio's own Titanic (1997) and The Lord of the Rings. They also mismarketed the film, making it seem more like Gladiator set in the Crusades, rather than the drama that was made. This backfired, resulting in poor box office returns and mediocre reviews (though it did fare better in international markets).
  • Luckily, the film found new life on video in the form of the Director's Cut, which restored the original running time and as a result, received much better reviews than its theatrical version. On top of that, the Director's Cut is also considered an example of how editing can radically change the quality of a film.
• As noted in this interview, the script for Robin Hood (2010) got hit with extensive re-writes, turning it from a Sympathetic P.O.V. story of the Sheriff of Nottingham to a Fight Club-esque story, to the origin story of the title character. Also, regular collaborators Russell Crowe and Scott weren't getting along well on set, which eventually soured their relationship. In addition to that, the film's budget ballooned from $155 million to around $200 million, according to some sources, and around 16 minutes were cut before its theatrical release (which were later reinserted into the home video release).
• Like previous installments in the Alien franchise, Prometheus ran into a lot of this:
  • The film was originally envisioned to be a straight-up prequel to Alien, via a script written by Jon Spaihts (who was in demand at the time due to his previous script being on the unofficial Hollywood "black list" of best screenplays) called "Alien: Engineers". Ridley Scott then contacted Damon Lindelof for advice on the script and was told to rein in many of the parts that made it an identifiable Alien film (including the fact that it was originally set on LV-426, the location of the derelict ship from the first two films) and make it an original creation. This, coupled with Spaihts supposedly constraining Scott's vision, led to Lindelof being hired to rewrite the screenplay. It took another four drafts (and more than a year of pre-production time) to get the script to a point where everyone was happy with it, and even then the cast and crew (as evidenced by their remarks in the Blu-Ray extras) seemed convinced that they were shooting a prequel that led into the original film.
  • The character of Elizabeth Shaw was originally named Elizabeth Watts but was renamed due to fear of confusion for Fox's President of Production Emma Watts. It took the CEO of the company, Tom Rothman, to name the film Prometheus because the filmmakers couldn't decide on what title to use (with their previous suggestion being "Paradise").
  • Following this, the film ran into trouble in the editing room, with a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war between Scott and Fox executives over various aspects of the film. There was much confusion on set and in public forums over whether the film was intended to be PG-13 or R-rated, with Scott stoking the fires for months by apparently submitting to FOX's demand to make a PG-13 cut for theatrical release. The main hangup was Noomi Rapace's "surgery scene", where she removes an alien embryo from her own body via self-surgery. Although the film was eventually released in an R-rated cut, chunks of the plot were taken out in the editing room - notably, a much longer final confrontation between Shaw and the Engineer, and an entirely different Fifield attack sequence that took place just as Weyland and the Mercenaries were leaving for the Engineer ship.
  • Charlize Theron had significant trouble running in the Icelandic shooting location, during the sequence where she and Rapace run from the rolling Engineer ship.
• Even The Counselor wasn't completely safe from this. Scott took up the project after trying to get Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian away from Development Hell (a script was written but the execs wouldn't greenlight it due to the book's grim content). About halfway through filming, Scott's brother Tony died of suicide; the tragedy halted production for a week. After production finished, some of the higher-ups demanded changes, such as trimming down the film's running time (which was reinserted back into the film on video) and redubbing the lines of Cameron Diaz's character Malkina. When the film came out, it was widely panned by most critics, but over the years has become something of a cult classic among fans of Scott and McCarthy.
• Shockingly averted with Alien: Covenant, which might well be the first Alien film that didn't have production problems. The film was filmed in just 74 days, without going over-budget and was finished on time.
• All the Money in the World had the misfortune of being Kevin Spacey's next film immediately after a wave of sexual misconduct allegations (namely, being accused of molesting young men for a long time) became public. Just seven weeks before its release date, Christopher Plummer was brought in to take over his role, requiring bringing back all the cast and crew members involved in every one of his scenes under severe time constraints. Thankfully, the reshoots were finished in just 8 days, managing to make its December 22nd release date. However, controversies surrounding the film didn't end there when the outrageous pay gap between Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams ($1.5 million for Wahlberg as opposed to $800 in per diems for Williams) for the reshoots were publicized. Wahlberg later donated his pay to the Me Too movement, but the damage was done at this point, and Scott was reportedly furious by Wahlberg's actions.^note This was due to the $1.5 million Wahlberg received for reshoots being the result of him having signed up for 80% less than his usual fee. In addition, Wahlberg's contract allowed him to approve co-stars, reportedly refusing to approve Plummer as Spacey's replacement unless he was given his extra pay, which is most likely what angered Scott. Williams for her part later made a comment that she wasn't really bothered by this, as she could have easily made the same demands, given how quickly the negotiations needed to be wrapped up, but chose not to. Nonetheless, the experience made her an activist for equal pay, visibly drawing on the controversy from this film.
• Production for The Last Duel - based on the duel between Jacques le Gris and Jean de Carrouges over claims that de Gris had raped de Carrouge's wife - began in France in February 2020 and soon found itself coinciding with the COVID-19 outbreak, leading to filming in Ireland being postponed indefinitely immediately after the French shoot wrapped. The Irish shoot would ultimately restart that September and finish a month later.

Singer, Bryan

Bryan Singer's behavior on the sets of his films single-handedly turned them into Troubled Productions and made his name infamous in Hollywood circles, even before allegations of sexual abuse and rape derailed his career:

• According to lead actor Gabriel Byrne, production on Singer's debut feature, 1995's The Usual Suspects, was marred by Kevin Spacey behaving like a sexual predator on set, making the other actors so uncomfortable that filming was completely halted for a while. Cast member Kevin Pollak also claims that Spacey raped Singer's much younger (possibly underage) boyfriend, after which Singer refused to direct Spacey any further (leaving an assistant director to take over). The two never spoke again for ten years, and Spacey's behavior didn't become public knowledge until 2017.
• Though it was long assumed that X-Men had a comparatively trouble-free production outside of some effects issues, series producer Lauren Schuler Donner admitted two decades later that this wasn't remotely true:
  • Singer and Christopher McQuarrie were brought on board with the intention of filming in early 1999 for release in that year's holiday season, only for it to have to be pushed back to the following summer after it turned out that McQuarrie had grossly overstated his familiarity with the X-Men comics (as had Singer, for that matter), resulting in him failing to produce a usable draft. This resulted in McQuarrie being fired and a revolving door of writers coming and going over the next few months; the final script ended up being spliced together from a bunch of rejected drafts by David Hayter, then a little-known voice actor who worked part-time as one of Singer's assistants. However, it's also been claimed that McQuarrie and Ed Solomon wrote most of the filmed script but asked for their names to be removed out of anger at the messy process.
  • Casting was a whole other story, with many of Singer's suggested choices raising eyebrows. The producers reluctantly agreed to let him have Rebecca Romijn as the key role of Mystique, despite her acting experience at the time only extending to an episode of Friends and a brief role in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (the studio were a lot happier with Romijn, however, for the reasons you might expect), but drew a line with Singer's initially advocating Michael Jackson for the role of Professor Xavier before he eventually suggested Patrick Stewart.
  • Filming proved quite troublesome, with Singer getting addicted to pain medication for a back injury, reportedly throwing tantrums over the slightest thing, and feuding with several of the actors. Most notably, he'd often send home Romijn without shooting her scenes, after she'd spent hours in make-up. Singer also banned the cast from reading X-Men comic books, causing Kevin Feige — then an assistant of Donner's who was tasked with keeping an eye on Singer — to sneak some comics onto the set for the actors to study.
  • The on-set troubles did have one very unexpected silver lining, however. Feige's first-hand experience of the troubled production of X-Men gave him an idea of what to expect when he ended up being hired to oversee something called the Marvel Cinematic Universe later that decade.
• X2: X-Men United wasn't nearly as troubled as the first film, but Singer's onset attitude caused problems again.
  • Late in production, producer Tom DeSanto grew very concerned about Singer's increasingly erratic behavior. When DeSanto came to the set one day and found the director, along with several crew members, apparently under the heavy influence of narcotics, he tried to halt production out of fear someone could get hurt. This resulted in a long, loud argument between the two of them that almost turned physical at many points.
  • And indeed someone did get hurt. While filming a scene on the X Jet, Singer decided to skip ahead to a scene scheduled for the following day that required a stunt from Hugh Jackman. Because it wasn't supposed to have been filmed that day, the stunt coordinator was not present and Jackman ended up injured and bleeding. Ralph Winter then ordered production shut down, which led the studio to overrule him and summon DeSanto back to LA.
  • The cast, still in costume, responded by confronting Singer in his trailer and threatening to quit if DeSanto left. It was during this confrontation that Halle Berry reportedly told Singer to "kiss my black ass", a story often repeated but given different contexts; according to Alan Cumming, Berry had been telling Singer about several former colleagues who had been similarly addicted to drugs before turning their lives around, to which Singer accused her of being "full of shit" and threatened to fire her or anyone else who broached the topic of his addictions, leading to her angrily storming out. Singer has through his reps denied any of this.
• To what extent isn't fully known, but what is known is that Singer’s habit of being absent from set caused problems on set of X-Men: Apocalypse, meaning Newton Thomas Sigel (the film’s cinematographer) and Simon Kinberg (the writer and producer) had to direct some scenes. Olivia Munn revealed that Singer abruptly left the Montreal set to fly down to LA to deal with a “thyroid problem” (something most on set questioned as to why he didn't treat in Canada), returning after only 10 days while simply texting actors “Keep filming” or “It’s fine. Just keep filming without me” in-between. Sophie Turner revealed that Singer was, in her words, "unpleasant" and implied that the on-set tension between Singer and Rami Malek on Bohemian Rhapsody also happened with her. Oscar Isaac also hated the costume and makeup he had to wear to play Apocalypse, which according to him prevented him from being able to properly move or even turn his head to face the actors due to how restrictive and heavy the full-body suit was. Jennifer Lawrence also described the production as "all chaos, no fun" in an interview and it’s understandably theorized by fans that her experience on this set was the main reason Lawrence decided to leave the franchise, though she came back for Dark Phoenix. Olivia Munn also later complained about Singer's and Kinberg's lack of knowledge of the original comics, revealing that the two knew almost nothing about Psylocke's backstory, and originally wanted the character to wear a generic Movie Superheroes Wear Black outfit, resulting in her having to lobby for something closer to her comic outfit.
• Filming for Bohemian Rhapsody was already suffering heavily from Singer's repeated absences on shooting days to the point that Tom Hollander briefly quit the film while star Rami Malek complained to Fox studio heads, who issued warnings to Singer and actually visited the set to monitor his behavior.^note Tensions between Singer and Malek grew so bad that at one point Singer threw something at Malek, but the two eventually made up, according to reports. Then Singer went AWOL after the Thanksgiving break, not showing up for ten days straight, which proved to be the breaking point for Fox, resulting in his firing. Dexter Fletcher took his place as director, but his work was uncredited.^note Union rules state that a replacement director who has shot at least 51% of a film will get sole credit. While Singer eventually claimed his sudden disappearance was due to "personal health matters", a number of industry insiders suspected that he was hiding in fears of past allegations of rape and sexual abuse resurfacing due to the #MeToo movement which was taking the entertainment industry by storm in late 2017. And then, the day after the film received five Oscar nominations including Best Actor and Picture, an explosive investigative article on those allegations was published in Vanity Fair, which more or less sank the film's hopes of winning Best Picture and made any awards it did win contentious.

Smith, Kevin

Kevin Smith has faced several obstacles during his cinematic career, but there have been times when such hurdles became so overwhelming they nearly derailed his movies.

• Smith's first film Clerks was a very on-the-cheap affair which naturally led to quite a few issues. Most notably, the film's financing was a real-life Absurdly High-Stakes Game for Smith, with him cashing out his life savings and maxing all his credit cards, potentially leaving himself broke and hopelessly in debt if he couldn't actually finish the film and then get it released to any kind of profit. On top of that, filming was done in the real convenience store he worked in at the time, all done late at night, which is the reason for the whole bit with the gum in the locks preventing the window shutters from being raised. And he had to reach deep into his group of friends to populate the film, with one guy in particular playing four roles over the course of the film (Smith calls him their Lon Chaney in the commentary). Luckily, it worked out very well and he's been able to move on to a successful career.
• Coming off of the box office splash of Clerks, producer James Jacks lured Smith and partner Scott Mosier to make their next film at Universal. Unfortunately, Mallrats was set up at the Universal/PolyGram joint venture Gramercy Pictures, which served as the former's low-budget/art-house division, and Smith later said that Gramercy "couldn't market their way out of a paper bag". As such, there was Executive Meddling galore!
  • During casting, the studio did not want Jason Mewes reprising his role as Jay and pushed for either Seth Green or Breckin Meyer to replace him. The only way Smith could avoid this mandate was to have Mewes re-audition for the character. Even then, the execs refused to pay for Mewes' travel fees or hotel costs and were even prepared to fire him on the first day of shooting if they felt he wasn't good enough. Smith let Mewes know about this, prompting him to prove him to give a better performance, and the studio finally caved.
  • However, studio executives got their way regarding aspects of Smith's raunchy humor. In addition to forbidding the use of "penis" or any explicit reference to it and any words meaning "fuck" that isn't "fuck", they also refused to allow Smith to make a joke regarding a woman getting semen in her hair. On the flip side, they pushed for full-frontal nudity, including a brief moment with Joey Lauren Adams.
  • Multiple scenes ended up cut from the film. Most prominently, Smith shot a prologue where TS and Brandi attend the Governor's Ball hosted by Mr. Svenning, only for TS to accidentally shoot at the Governor when the musket of his colonial costume gets stuck in Brandi's hair. It had to be scrapped after test audiences reacted negatively towards it. This resulted in a bunch of ADR work to remove almost all references to the incident, save for Mr. Svenning's encounter with a TV executive over it.
  • Mallrats ended up a Sophomore Slump for Smith as the film both bombed with critics and at the box office. It did sell well on video though, and Universal allowed Smith to make a director's cut 10 years later.
• Smith has frequently spoken of the bad memories he has from shooting Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, mostly owing to Jason Mewes' drug and alcohol abuse turning him into a "ticking time bomb" which threatened to shut the project down at any moment. During pre-production, Mewes would have constant mood swings due to heroin withdrawal, to the point that Smith threw him out of his car on their way to the set one day. Mewes would compensate for his lack of drugs by drinking heavily after every day of shooting and nearly got into a fistfight with producer Scott Mosier when he had to come back one night for a reshoot while drunk (Mewes later said that he was too intoxicated to remember anything that happened during production). When the shoot wrapped, Smith told Mewes point-blank to get sober or he'd never speak to him again.
• Though Jersey Girl turned out fairly close to how Smith wanted, it wasn't for a lack of attempted Executive Meddling on the part of Miramax, who tried to pressure Smith into filming more scenes involving Jennifer Lopez after her relationship with Ben Affleck hit the tabloid headlines. Fortunately for Smith, the epic critical and commercial failure of the "Bennifer" vehicle Gigli caused the studio to quickly retract these requests. Smith also had some trouble dealing with veteran cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (who also worked with Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen) on-set, though later admitted that he was just as much at fault as Zsigmond.
• While production of Zack and Miri Make a Porno was also comparatively smooth, like Jersey Girl there was a fair bit of meddling from the studio involved over the type of humor involved. It was in release where things really went wrong, as the studio had no idea how to market it, cinemas refused to carry posters simply because they had the word "porno" in the title, and an overall lack of marketing caused the film to post underwhelming box-office numbers. Smith also took the reviews — many of which compared him disparagingly to Judd Apatow — hard, sending him into depression and reportedly almost breaking up his marriage.
• Smith and his crew had, according to their own statements, a horrible experience filming Cop Out due to the behavior of his lead actor, Bruce Willis. While they supposedly got along famously when Smith filmed his cameo in Live Free or Die Hard, and expressed interest in working together someday, things went sideways when they actually did. Although Smith has supposedly kept some parts of his experience private, he devoted a whole chapter in his book Tough Shit to his experiences making the movie, as well as told stories at speaking engagements about Willis' behavior (calling him "the unhappiest, most bitter, and meanest emo-bitch I’ve ever met at any job I’ve held down"). Among the few incidents that are known, Willis:
  • Supposedly made Smith feel like crap on the second day of shooting, when (after Smith stopped by and told him he was a huge fan, and after seeing a group of people recognize him) say, "Those are the worst ones."
  • Intentionally flubbed his lines and mannerisms in order to waste time during filming, starting from the first day of filming.
  • Openly refused to stand on his lighting mark in outdoor scenes, then ignored Smith's orders during filming and walked off to the catering table constantly.
  • Said to Smith on one occasion: "I'm Bruce Willis! I've been Bruce Willis successfully for 25 years! How long have you been Silent Bob, motherfucker?"
  • Lectured Smith and his crew on their choice of camera lenses during a sequence shot in front of a green screen.
  • Supposedly threatened to punch Smith during a break from shooting a scene in a hotel room, then denied it when Smith called him on it.
  • For his part, Willis has accused Smith of treating the shoot like a joke and constantly being high off his ass on marijuana while directing... though if Smith's own claims are true, it wouldn't be hard to understand why.

Welles, Orson

One of the many reasons why Orson Welles was never able to fully realise the early promise he showed with his debut, Citizen Kane, was the way black clouds of troubled productions seemed to follow him everywhere he went. Most of the problems involved securing funds, but others involved simply crappy luck.

• Citizen Kane itself just managed to avoid this, as Welles' co-writer Herman Mankiewicz was known as a drunk and a compulsive gambler who had been kicked out of almost every studio for insulting whoever stood in his way. Who knows what he might have done had he not broken his leg in a drunken fall, giving Welles and producer John Houseman the excuse to board him up in a guest ranch and keep constant watch over him as he completed the screenplay.
• The trouble for Welles began with his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons. Though still regarded as a classic, the film is held up as an example of how Executive Meddling can ruin a film beyond all recognition. Welles later said, "They destroyed Ambersons, and 'it' destroyed me."
  • Production itself finished two weeks behind schedule and over $200,000 over budget. The director of photography for Citizen Kane, Gregg Toland, was unavailable, and Welles had a less fruitful relationship with his replacement, Stanley Cortez. Full sets were designed and built for every scene in the film, even the very briefest; as a result, the ratio of set cost to total production budget was higher than it was for Gone with the Wind. Though the film is set in Indianapolis, it was filmed in and around Los Angeles, which meant the studio had to get creative for winter scenes; it took twelve days to perfect the snow effects, and once they began shooting, the cameras and other equipment kept breaking down in the cold. Many cast and crew members (with the notable exception of Welles) came down with head colds as a result. The noisy cameras and cranes also ruined sound recording, forcing the cast to re-dub all of their dialogue at a total cost of $25,000 (more than three times the dubbing budget) as Welles rebuffed suggestions that the equipment noise be sorted out at the source.
  • But worse was to come in post-production; Welles had to leave for Brazil at RKO shareholder Nelson Rockefeller's behest to shoot an anthology film called It's All True to promote the Good Neighbor Policy for US-South American relations.^note  It's All True was ultimately left unfinished after RKO pulled the plug on production, with some of the film re-used by stock footage libraries and over 200,000 feet, mostly from the Welles-helmed segment "Carnaval", thrown into the Pacific Ocean in the 1960s/1970s. The film's editor, Robert Wise, edited the film from Welles' notes and sent him a 132-minute rough cut; Welles sent back instructions to cut a further 22 minutes.^note  Film historians note that among the scenes Welles ordered cut were a pivotal scene in which George prohibits Eugene from seeing Isabel, Eugene's former sweetheart and George's mother, when she is on her deathbed, and point to this as evidence that Welles didn't always know best when it came to his own films. As for the rough cut, it is sometimes claimed that it is still in Brazil somewhere, but if this is true, it has never been found. The 110-minute version was given a disastrous test screening in Pomona in front of an audience of mostly teenagers who had come to see the musical The Fleet's In; the audience laughed during the dramatic scenes, especially those featuring Agnes Moorehead in her Oscar-nominated performance as Fanny, and said on their comment cards that they found the film too depressing, especially the ending in which Eugene visits a now withdrawn Fanny in a crowded boarding house that is revealed in the final shot to be the former Amberson mansion (though 10% of the comment cards were positive; one praised the film and said it was too bad the audience was so unappreciative). RKO chief George Schaefer described it as the worst preview screening he had attended in 28 years in the film business.
  • A second screening in Pasadena (with Welles' 22 minutes of cuts restored by Wise and smaller cuts made elsewhere to make up the difference) was much more well-received by the audience, but panic had already set in at RKO, who decreed that the film would have to be re-cut. Unfortunately for Welles, he was still in Brazil, and as he had ceded control over editing as a gesture of good faith during his contract negotiations with RKO, the editing process was delegated to a team led by Wise, studio exec Jack Moss, and Joseph Cotten, with Wise ultimately handling the lion's share of re-cutting the existing footage and re-shooting scenes (including the new happy ending) to smooth over the changes. Welles was horrified when he heard the film was being re-cut in his absence and begged RKO to send Wise to Brazil with the film so that they could re-cut it together, but wartime travel restrictions made this impossible. A direct line to Welles' hotel room in Rio de Janeiro was put into Moss' office, but Cy Endfield later recalled that Moss wouldn't answer his phone when it rang in case it was Welles with more instructions, and when Welles tried sending lengthy telegrams, Moss threw them away without reading them.
  • All told, between 40 and 50 minutes of Welles' version of the film were cut.^note  Producer Bryan Foy is rumoured to have said that if they had to cut 40 minutes, they should just throw the footage in the air and then grab all but 40 minutes. Worse, the cut footage was destroyed, ostensibly to free up space in the RKO vault, but it is speculated that the true reason was to keep Welles from restoring the cuts upon his return. The changes did nothing to save the film at the box office, where it posted a $600,000 loss (a fortune for a small studio such as RKO). Bernard Herrmann was so angered at the cuts to his score for the film that he had his credit removed under threat of legal action. Welles was even more disgusted, describing the film as having been "edited by a lawnmower", and fell out with Cotten and Wise as a result of their roles in the film's butchery, although he forgave Cotten a few years later after the latter wrote him several letters of apology, and he reconciled with Wise while accepting a DGA Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984.^note  Sources differ on Welles' views on the film later in life. He was reputed to have watched the film in a hotel room with friends in the 1970s, and said that while he didn't like the ending, he thought it was still a good film; on the other hand, director Henry Jaglom (a protégé of Welles) said he persuaded him to watch a commercial-free broadcast on cable in the 1980s, and that while Welles was fascinated for the first hour, he then switched off the set and said, "From here on it becomes their movie."
• After a triptych of films with relatively smooth productions (apart from friction between Welles and the editors or the studios) - The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, and Macbeth^note  Welles' main problem with The Stranger was "supercutter" editor Ernest J. Nims, who believed in cutting anything from a film that didn't advance the story, which Welles said included "all the good stuff" in his own work. He agreed to direct The Lady from Shanghai as a favour to Columbia boss Harry Cohn in exchange for funds to sustain a stage musical version of Around the World in Eighty Days, and fought with Cohn over the final cut - and the cutting of Welles' then-wife Rita Hayworth's iconic long hair for her role as a Femme Fatale. And Macbeth was shot in just 23 days on a shoestring budget, but Welles was ordered to cut two reels and re-dub the dialogue after the approximations of Scottish accents used for the original recording confused early audiences. - Welles, a veteran Shakespearean actor, turned his attention to adapting Othello for the screen. Unfortunately, the film marked the first instance of a recurring theme for Welles productions: shoots that dragged on for years as Welles kept having to shut down production until he could raise the money to continue.
  • Just after he began shooting in 1949, one of the film's Italian producers announced that he was bankrupt, and filming shut down. Welles had to fund the film out of pocket, and the shoot (as documented in Put Money in Thy Purse by Irish stage actor Micheál MacLiammóir, who played Iago in what became his only screen appearance) lasted three years as Welles shot whatever scenes he could with whatever cast, crew, and money were available. The delays meant several roles, including that of female lead Desdemona, had to be recast when the original performers had to honour other commitments, and the scenes involving the now departed actors had to be reshot.
  • To raise money for Othello, Welles agreed to take supporting roles in an assortment of films including The Third Man and The Black Rose; on the latter film, he insisted his character's robe be lined with mink even though it would not show up on the film, and when shooting wrapped, the coat vanished - Welles had taken it to wear in Othello. When Black Rose director Henry Hathaway complained about Welles' theft of costumes and cameras to his boss at 20th Century Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck, the studio mogul, an old friend of Welles, simply laughed it off. Welles was not so lucky with the costumes for the first scene of Act V, in which Iago and Roderigo make a failed attempt on Cassio's life that leaves Roderigo dead; the costumes intended for the scene were impounded, and with no money to get them out, they had to re-stage the scene in a Turkish bath with almost no dialogue.
• Terry Gilliam was not the only filmmaker who sank years and millions of dollars into an adaptation of Don Quixote, and unfortunately for Welles, his version remained unfinished at his death.
  • Welles initially planned to shoot a 30-minute film for CBS entitled Don Quixote Passes By, with the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza dropped into the present day (having already been presented as anachronisms in the source material). He shot colour test footage in 1955 with Mischa Auer and Akim Tamiroff (both of whom he had already directed in Mr. Arkadin) in the lead roles, but CBS found the concept too bizarre and scrapped the project. The test footage is believed lost.
  • So Welles changed direction and decided to shoot a black and white feature film adaptation, using his salaries from acting roles in other directors' films and $25,000 from his friend Frank Sinatra. He initially offered the role of Don Quixote to Charlton Heston (whom he had just directed in Touch of Evil before being forced out of the project), but Heston was only available for two weeks when shooting began in 1957, so Welles instead offered the role to Spanish actor Francisco Reiguera, with Tamiroff returning as Sancho Panza. Patty McCormack, fresh from her star turn in the film adaptation of The Bad Seed (1956), was offered the role of Dulcie, an American girl visiting present-day Mexico City in the film's framing story who would be told of the Don's adventures by Welles (As Himself) and then meet the self-styled knight and squire for herself.
  • Scenes were shot in various Mexican locations from July to October 1957, mostly on silent 16mm film (Welles planned to dub the dialogue himself later) and with a bare-bones script around which the actors were instructed to improvise. True to form, the budget ran out, and Mexican producer Oscar Dancigers pulled the plug on the project before backing out entirely, leaving Welles to fund the film himself. He had to accept roles in commercially viable films (including narration for The Vikings and King of Kings) to raise funds and switched the location shooting to Spain and Italy when the cast and crew and money were all available simultaneously (including filming sequences he described as "the prologue and the epilogue" in Malaga while commuting to Paris to edit his adaptation of The Trial).
  • Filming dragged on for so long that McCormack aged out of childhood, forcing her character to be dropped. Welles later said he hoped to re-shoot Dulcie's scenes with his daughter Beatrice (ten years McCormack's junior) in the role, but shooting went on so long that even she aged out of range for the character. More problematic was Reiguera's declining health; at his insistence, Welles prioritised his remaining scenes so that they were all shot before Reiguera's death in 1969.
  • Unfortunately, even with Reiguera's role completed (and reshoots impossible without stand-ins), Welles never got around to dubbing more than a few scenes as he kept changing his mind about what he wanted the film to be every time he went to Spain (he allegedly told his friend Dominique Antoine that his only path to finishing the film would be never to return to Spain). For example, he originally planned to re-imagine the famous windmill scene by having the Don walk into a cinema showing a mediaeval battle scene and attack the screen with his sword, believing it to be a real battle, but he later sent his cinematographer Gary Graver to Seville to shoot some footage of windmills (the footage was later lost). He claimed in an interview that he had been forced to scrap ten reels' worth of footage in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza visit the Moon after the Apollo 11 Moon landing made such a journey no longer seem like pure fantasy.
  • Even at his death in 1985, Welles was still planning new scenes and had over 1,000 pages of script for the film. Among the directions he considered were incorporating Don Quixote into an "essay" film similar to F for Fake and Filming Othello, potentially called When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote? after a question he had long since tired of hearing.
  • But Welles' death simply inflamed the question of what to do with the surviving footage. Initially, Greek-French director Costa-Gavras and a team of archivists from the Cinémathèque Française assembled a 45-minute compilation of scenes and outtakes, which premiered at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim. However, Welles' mistress and sometime collaborator, Croatian actress Oja Kodar, was left the rights to his unfinished films in his will, and she was keen to see the film completed, so she took such footage as she could access (editor Mauro Bonanni, who had worked on the film with Welles in Rome in 1969, claimed the rights to some of the footage, including the negatives; the Italian Corte Suprema di Cassazione ruled in Kodar's favour in 2017) and travelled around Europe in search of a director willing to assemble it into a completed film before finally finding one in Jesús Franco, second unit director on Welles' Chimes at Midnight.
  • Unfortunately, the fact that Welles had used three different film stocks (16mm, 35mm, and Super 16mm) and stored different reels under different conditions meant the visuals were wildly inconsistent; he had also deliberately mislabelled the cans so that only he would know how to edit the film.^note  Having seen Executive Meddling ruin his visions for The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin, and Touch of Evil, Welles was determined to protect Don Quixote from the same fate. The lack of a screenplay meant Franco and producer Patxi Irigoyen had to re-write and re-record the dub script, which meant the audio shifted in quality almost as often as the visuals. They also had to exclude all footage of McCormack, the rights to which were claimed by Bonanni.
  • The result, entitled Don Quijote de Orson Welles, was released in 1992. Spanish critic Juan Cobos, who had seen a rough cut before Welles' death, said Franco's film bore no resemblance to Welles' vision, while the Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum unfavourably compared it to the 1986 Cannes Film Festival compilation. Consensus remains that the film was better off left as it was at Welles' death - unfinished and, in all likelihood, unfinishable.
• Chimes at Midnight was almost as troubled as Othello.
  • Welles had been pitching the idea of a play called Five Kings - a condensed adaptation of Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), Henry V, Henry VI (Parts 1, 2, and 3), and Richard III - since 1939. By 1960, he had distilled the idea to a Falstaff-centric adaptation of the two Henry IV plays, with some additional dialogue from Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. However, his Spanish backer, Emiliano Piedra, didn't think a Shakespeare adaptation was marketable, and persuaded Welles to shoot an adaptation of Treasure Island alongside the film that became Chimes at Midnight. Welles agreed, but it is believed he only did so to placate Piedra, and never so much as shot a single frame of Treasure Island.
  • The cast members' availability meant that many scenes had to be shot using stand-ins, and any scenes featuring their faces had to be shot all at once; John Gielgud, as King Henry IV, was only available for ten days, while Jeanne Moreau, as Doll Tearsheet, was only available for five days, and Margaret Rutherford, as Mistress Quickly, was available for just four weeks. Welles joked that in one scene that featured seven principal characters, everyone was played by a stand-in shot over their shoulder.
  • Filming began in September 1964, and, inevitably, ground to a halt when the money ran out three months later. Welles was adamant that the film be shot in black and white, scuppering potential offers of funding that were contingent on the film being shot in colour. He was finally able to secure funding from Harry Saltzman in February 1965, and shot the hitherto missing scenes, which included many of Keith Baxter as Prince Hal's longer speeches, Hal's coronation scene, and all of Welles' own scenes as Falstaff (growing stage fright meant that he waited until the end of production to shoot Falstaff's solo scenes).
  • The film's limited budget had an especially adverse effect on sound recording, both on set and in post-production. The rapid camera movements and editing further clouded the dialogue, and dubbing was made even more difficult by Welles' prolific use of long takes and shots of characters' backs to take advantage of actors' presence or compensate for their absence. Spanish actor Fernando Rey, as the Earl of Worcester, and French actress Marina Vlady, as Hotspur's wife Lady Percy, had such heavy accents that their roles had to be completely overdubbed by other actors in post-production.
  • The initial screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966 was a success, but Bosley Crowther of The New York Times took the film to task for the poor sound quality, the confusing editing, and Welles' performance as Falstaff. Saltzman lost confidence in the film in light of the early criticism and gave it almost no promotion, causing it to sink without a trace at the box office. Its reputation has improved in the years since, with the Battle of Shrewsbury sequence still regarded as one of the greatest, most harrowing depictions of a mediaeval battle in the history of cinema, but legal wrangling over ownership of the film (by Saltzman's widow Adriana, Welles' daughter Beatrice, and the families of Piedra and fellow producer Angel Escolano) meant that home video releases were few and far between until 2015.
• The Deep, an adaptation of Charles Williams' book Dead Calm, began production in 1966, and was intended to be a more commercially viable, less "arthouse" film than many of Welles' previous efforts. Unfortunately, it suffered the same "shooting whatever we can whenever the people and money are available" trend of many of his other films, and eventually money and Welles' own interest dried up after three years. Accounts differ on why filming was abandoned (with a climactic explosion left to shoot); lead actress Oja Kodar alleged that Jeanne Moreau was unwilling to dub her lines, while editor Mauro Bonanni claimed that Welles was dissatisfied by acting novice Kodar's performance. The death of lead actor Laurence Harvey in 1973 put a permanent end to filming, and since it never entered post-production, it only exists in work prints with no soundtrack. Dead Calm was ultimately filmed under that title in 1989 with Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill in the lead roles, but The Deep remains unreleased, although there is sporadic interest in polishing what does exist of it.
• Welles' final film, The Other Side of the Wind, took over 40 years to finally see the light of day and it was quite a rollercoaster ride.
  • Welles first got the idea in 1961 when his friend Ernest Hemingway died of suicide. He originally envisioned the film as a tale of an aging bullfighting fan with an interest in a young bullfighter, but the project didn't progress for five years. As Welles kept working on the script, with the working title of Sacred Beasts, he changed the bullfight fan into an aging filmmaker resembling Hemingway as he navigates the changing Hollywood landscape. Welles was unable to get full financial support from investors and like most of his projects, he ultimately funded the film with his own money.
  • Production officially began in 1970, with Welles and his second unit crew filming at the MGM backlot without the studio's consent. To protect their cover, the crew posed as film students visiting the lot while Welles had to sneak in through a darkened van. Everything was shot in a single weekend without sleep and the crew intoxicated with amphetamines, as it was clear they could not visit the lot again and it was already in deep decay. The backlot would officially be demolished a few years later.
  • Filming was disrupted in 1971 when Welles' production company in Europe was deemed a holding company by the US government and fined with a huge tax bill. Welles had to accept whatever job was offered to him to pay the debt off in full, though he used some of the money from his various acting gigs to keep the film's financing alive. During this time, he stated that The Other Side of the Wind was "96% complete", though that was most likely referencing the film-within-the-film sequences that were finished before he had to halt production.
  • In the meantime, Welles made the documentary F for Fake with the Iranian-French-owned Les Films de l'Astrophore. Seeing an opportunity to finish his pet project, Welles struck a three-way deal with the company. He would raise a third of the funds himself while Iranian producer Mehdi Bushehri would supply another third and the remaining funds would come from Spanish producer Andrés Vicente Gómez.
  • With some financial support in place, Welles managed to film new scenes in 1973 whenever cast members were available. For instance, all of Lilli Palmer's scenes were shot in Spain with her being the only cast member present. While in Madrid though, Welles and Oja Kodar (who co-wrote and co-starred in the film) got trapped in a flood for three months and had to relocate to Paris. It wasn't until a year later when filming officially resumed. Prior to this, Welles was unsure if he would play the director character himself, but by that time he settled on fellow filmmaker John Huston for the part.
  • The most crucial element of the film was a party scene, which was shot at Southwestern Studio in Arizona, using leftover furniture made for The New Dick Van Dyke Show. Joining Huston were Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, Norman Foster, and more. Welles also shot more scenes in a private mansion he rented not far from his studios.
  • Just when things were going well, emerging financial mishaps threatened to stop production again. Gómez fled the United States while embezzling most of the film's budget and Bushehri had to put up most of the outstanding budget, which would lead to an ownership dispute. The messy financial meltdown meant that Welles could no longer use the studio and the mansion, so the remainder of the party scenes were shot at Bogdanovich's own house in Beverly Hills. In addition, both Welles and Bogdanovich had to put up their own money to continue production due to a lack of new financial deals. One producer did make what Welles called "a wonderful offer", but investor Dominique Antoine shot it down thinking a better deal would come. One never did.
  • Further complicating matters was the timeframe Welles needed to edit the film, due to its unconventional and experimental feel. It would require an entire year of full-time work, with Welles using the same editing techniques as F for Fake where he used three separate moviolas to simultaneously edit the film. The Other Side of the Wind required two extra moviolas, all circulating a table with a team of assistants to help him. To make matters worse, Les Films de l'Astrophore was under new management who refused to pay for the editing job. As Welles was considered a liability, they threatened to reduce his share of the profits and take creative control away from him for the final cut. This prompted Welles to find more investors that ended up completely fruitless. In spite of the film's growing financial instability, Welles managed to complete principal photography in early 1976, albeit with a few elements unfinished. However, Welles could only edit the film whenever he had time, and by 1979, 40% of the editing was done.
  • Things only got worse from there. The film's primary financer, Mehdi Bushehri, was the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, who got overthrown that year. This made his funds problematic, with Ayatollah Khomeini's government having the film seized due to its association with the Shah's reign, escalating the aforementioned ownership dispute. The original negative was consequently confiscated to a Paris vault, and Welles was only able to get a workprint of the raw footage out of the country. With Welles' passing in 1985, the copy went to Kodar along with his other unfinished projects as part of his will. Another workprint copy was held by the film's cinematographer Gary Graver. Both Graver and Kodar, along with Bogdanovich, critic Joseph McBride (who had a supporting role), and producer Frank Marshall (who was the film's production manager) began a rousing effort to complete the film by trying to get the necessary funds to do so and potentially fix the legal mess.
  • There were more hurdles in store for them. When Kodar screened Graver's rough cut of the film to various A-list directors in the late 1980s and early 1990s for help with the completion, they all declined for one reason or another. Among the ones who turned down the offer, Huston was in very poor health while George Lucas was confused by the footage he saw, finding it too avant-garde for audiences to handle. Another legal headache arose when Welles' daughter Beatrice claimed that she was the true owner of all of Welles' incomplete projects by California law and effectively blocked any attempts to complete the film. This is despite the fact that she only inherited the assets from the death of his widow (and Beatrice's mother) Paola Mori in 1986, and those did not include his unfinished films.
  • Back in Iran, Khomeini's government later found the negative worthless, and the tangled ownership came under litigation. Mehdi Bushehri held tight to his claims that he owned two-thirds of The Other Side of the Wind, but after hearing about the remaining crew's efforts to finish the film, which got to a point where Frank Marshall was showing the rough cut to major studios in the late 1990s but couldn't reach a deal due to the legal troubles, he decided that the best way to recoup his investment was to get the film released. So in 1998, he arbitrated his claims and reduced his shares, resolving some of the legal issues. With a deal in place, Showtime pitched in to help finance the film's completion. These plans were undermined when Beatrice Welles filed a lawsuit later that year. Making matters worse, Kodar could not enforce the late Orson Welles' clause in his will that gives disinheritance to anyone that questions the ownership of Kodar's inheritance, which Beatrice was doing, due to her lack of legal fees.
  • Just when you thought things couldn't get more complicated, Paul Hunt came into the picture. As he was one of the film's original crew members, serving as line producer, assistant editor, assistant camera operator, and gaffer, Kodar approached him to help with an acceptable deal and filled him in with rights holders. Hunt and his producing partner Sanford Horowitz soon formed "Horowitz Hunt LLC" and reached a deal with Bushehri to potentially acquire his rights to the film. Even though their contributions were not as burdensome as the aforementioned issues, they would create another obstacle in the completion process.
  • While the case was going on, Bogdanovich announced in 2004 that plans to finish the film were still in place, but replicating Welles' experimental editing would be a challenge. Two years later, Beatrice Welles made a proposal with Showtime to turn The Other Side of the Wind into a semi-documentary and not release it as a completed film. Kodar was not fond of this idea, and it undermined Bushehri's desires, which his widow kept alive following his death that year. In 2007, a deal was reached where the parties would pay Beatrice Welles either an undisclosed amount, shares in the film's profits, or both. Bogdanovich later claimed that the deal to finish the film was "99.9% finished" and the completed project would come out in 2008.
  • Horowitz Hunt LLC soon obtained Bushehri's rights to the film and planned to release two versions: a completed theatrical cut and Welles' initial 42-minute cut. As the original negative was still locked up in France, Bogdanovich decided to work with the workprint cut and other positive film materials that Kodar kept in a Los Angeles vault. Showtime created an editing suite in the summer of 2008 so the material could potentially be logged in with Bogdanovich supervising the project. Horowitz Hunt LLC then made negotiations with Kodar to obtain her rights to the film, but they could not reach a deal. Beatrice Welles caught wind of this and slapped the parties with an injunction, claiming an inheritance on the negative residing at the LTC Film Vault in Paris and refusing to open it up. As it turned out, Bushehri's attorney failed to formally rebuke Beatrice's claim, and Showtime was forced to halt production and close the editing suite. The network later made it clear that they would only pay to complete the film if all the material was available, which included the negative that required permission from all the estates before it could be obtained.
  • With Bogdanovich still contemplating the project and a legal settlement looking murky, Horowitz and financier John Nicholas renamed the former's venture "Project Welles The Other Side LLC", as Hunt died in 2011. The plan was to finish their negotiations with Kodar and Beatrice Welles so they could access the original stored negative while also providing a chain of title and a clear account of events. In addition, they launched www.projectwelles.com to gain more funds. While they were able to resolve the copyright issues, Showtime failed to reveal a projected budget. This alarmed Kodar as she wanted the completion process done in a professional manner and not to have a repeat of what happened with Don Quixote. By the time Showtime executive Matthew Duda retired in 2012, the network's involvement with The Other Side of the Wind was over.
  • Enter Filip Jan Rymsza, a producer who had been aware of the film for quite some time. He partnered with German producer Jens Koethner Kaul and Frank Marshall in an attempt to salvage the project, and by October 2014, Rymsza's Royal Road Entertainment announced plans to acquire the rights to the film so the completion process could resume. They successfully pulled it off by obtaining rights held by Les Films de l'Astrophore and Bushehri and reaching an agreement with Kodar and Beatrice Welles. The plan was to release it by May 6, 2015, which marks the 100th anniversary of Welles' birth, with Bogdanovich and Marshall overseeing the completion process.
  • These plans were thwarted when it was revealed around that time that the film was not even close to being completed. Around two-thirds of the film still needed to be edited, there was no musical score or opening narration, and two key shots had not been filmed. Royal Road tried to fund post-production by pre-selling distribution rights, but potential distributors wanted to view edited footage rather than the workprint. Undeterred by this request, they launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $2 million so the original negative could be flown from Paris to LA for a 4K scan and it could be edited by Affonso Gonçalves. The goal was lowered by $1 million when potential investors offered to match the amount and Marshall clarified that the objective was to edit the first 20 minutes of the film so they could attract a distributor that would help with the rest of post-production. In the end, the campaign only raised $406,405 and the project once again came to a halt.
  • The final hope to complete the film came in the form of Netflix, who were negotiating a deal with Royal Road in 2016 to finish The Other Side of the Wind and make a companion documentary. Once they got Kodar's approval, the original negative finally came to LA and the completion process resumed with a new post-production team in place. Even Michel Legrand, the composer for Welles' F for Fake, was brought on to compose the score.
  • To make a long story short, the film was finally finished in 2018 and premiered at the 75th Venice International Film Festival that August with Netflix releasing it to the public in November. By that time, most of the cast had passed away with Welles.

---