15 of the Most Torturous Movie Shoots in Hollywood History

Wasn't the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre infamous for being a horrible experience to film. I remember reading about people being physically ill after filming the dining room scene.
 
darkwing-buck said:
Check out, "Lost Soul", it's a documentary on the troubles on set for Dr.Moreau.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x37ry6k
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The second part where Brando stops the car to discuss shutting down production and re-writing the script...

Marlon Brando said:
He doesn't know what he's doing... You and I are going to re-write the script. We'll spend 6-8 weeks... I have some ideas about how Dr. Moreau should be wearing a hat all the time, then at the end of the movie he takes off his hat and he's actually a dolphin.
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lmao
 
zoukka said:
Can someone just summarize why that Tommy was in the Room and why people tolerated him?
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As said above, it's his movie. He emerged mysteriously from Germany (IIRC) with loads of money and bankrolled this entire movie, starring, producing, writing, directing, etc. Paying for all of the cast, set rentals, etc directly out of pocket.

IIRC he even bought all the equipment the film was made with - which is insane. Nobody ever buys their own equipment. It's not the done thing. For your film's equipment, you rent. Everything from indie movies to highest-grossing hollywood movies rent their cameras, lighting rigs, etc. But this guy had to buy all of it.
 
What movie was it where a bunch of people offered to kill a co-director or producer for the main director after they finally had enough of the guy's attitude and him firing guns?
 
Wasn't Ed Harris forced to stay underwater longer than agreed on the set of the Abyss because James Cameron wanted a shot of Harris actually drowning instead of just acting like a guy drowning?

That's seriously fucked up. That's actual torture.
 
LordOfLore said:
What movie was it where a bunch of people offered to kill a co-director or producer for the main director after they finally had enough of the guy's attitude and him firing guns?
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You might be thinking of the actor Klaus Kinski, who was threatened with death on both Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo from various people, including his director, Werner Herzog.
 
God these websites are set up like complete anti-reader garbage.

Anyway its funny seeing Justice League and Suicide Squad on the same list as Apocalypse Now and that Herzog movie, and The Abyss aint even on it
 
MetroidPrimeRib said:
God these websites are set up like complete anti-reader garbage.

Anyway its funny seeing Justice League and Suicide Squad on the same list as Apocalypse Now and that Herzog movie, and The Abyss aint even on it
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Apparently reshoots are the most horrible things ever for a movie.
 
Alrus said:
Apparently reshoots are the most horrible things ever for a movie.
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Reshoots and Jared Leto acting wacky on the set for publicity > People almost dying.

Like Aguirre the Wrath of God is an actual nightmare, but they put Fitzcarrarldo on there instead which is fine.

On one occasion, irritated by the noise from a hut where cast and crew were playing cards, the explosive Kinski fired three gunshots at it, blowing the tip off one extra's finger
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Dead rats, tho.
 
Gentleman Jack said:
List could also have been 'every movie with Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman in it'
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Brando's reputation is well known, but I wasn't aware of any of Hoffman's films that were particularly troubled outside of Ishtar. There was that old wives tale about him and Laurence Olivier being at each other's throats while shooting Marathon Man, but I don't think I've come across anything even in the same league what happened on Ishtar.
 
No mention of Street Fighter?

https://www.polygon.com/features/2014/3/10/5451014/street-fighter-the-movie-what-went-wrong

Some excerpts:

The cast met for the first time at an al fresco dinner along the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok. It clicked, netting that euphoria that often hovers over beautiful, young, freshly rich people.

At some point in the meal, a herd of assistants beckoned a frail man to the table, seating the figure across from Byron Mann and Damian Chapa. Neither young actor recognized the mysterious figure as Raul Julia, the commanding Hispanic actor. "He was like half the size he was in Addams Family," says Mann. "He was unrecognizable from four feet away."

Not long before the shoot, Julia had undergone surgery for stomach cancer; the illness would take his life within the year. Because the production crew hadn't been notified of Julia's condition prior to the star's arrival, their shooting schedule didn't consider the low energy and intense weight loss of its lead. Originally, production would have begun with Julia's dialogue-dense scene work, allowing the stunt team to prep and rehearse action sequences for the latter half of the shoot. De Souza knew he couldn't film Julia up close, not like this.
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"If you look in the movie," says Mann, "it's written in the script that I do this incredible kata (a theatrical sword movement) [before I fight Vega in the cage]. At the time, Benny Urquidez — we called him Benny the Jet — was our trainer. Every day, I'd go to Benny and ask if he could teach me this kata. Every day he'd say, let's think about it. Turns out he didn't do swords either. He's a fighter.

"A month later, we're filming in the morning and I hear through the grapevine that my sword kata scene is coming up after lunch. I was literally an hour away from filming this thing. I was shitting bricks. I grabbed a Thai extra. I'd heard he knew sword fighting. He taught me the kata in about an hour."
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"Every day I'd ask if Julia had taken his meds," says de Souza, "and if Van Damme was off them."

Years later, Jean-Claude Van Damme admitted he had a serious drug problem while filming Street Fighter: The Movie. He also confessed to having an extramarital affair with co-star Kylie Minogue.

From the actor's August 2012 interview with The Guardian:

"Yes," says Van Damme, "Okay. Yes, yes, yes. It happened. I was in Thailand, we had an affair. Sweet kiss, beautiful lovemaking. It would be abnormal not to have had an affair, she's so beautiful and she was there in front of me every day with a beautiful smile, simpatico, so charming, she wasn't acting like a big star. I knew Thailand very well, so I showed her my Thailand. She's a great lady."
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"So what was happening," says de Souza, "was that frequently Jean-Claude was supposed to show up at 7:00 in the morning, and he wasn't there. He said he's sick. Actually he was wiped, recovering from the night before. I would have to just make up some shit on the spot because I didn't have him. We'd invent some kind of fight involving Ken and Ryu and a security guard. But it was never rehearsed. It was made up on the spot. I was constantly pulling things out of my ass for the supporting players to do while Jean-Claude was playing hooky."
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Initially, de Souza's production team had planned a nearly two-month shoot, starting with five weeks of on-location and soundstage work in Bangkok and wrapping with a few weeks of major set-pieces and additional stunt coverage on the famed Australian soundstage, the Gold Coast.
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According to those interviewed for this piece, mini catastrophes and major hijinks played out like a B-movie parody of Heart of Darkness, albeit an incredibly dark one. A crew member required medical attention for skin irritation caused by contact with the water of the Chao Phraya River. The line producer suffered a heart attack, and never returned to the production. Another producer, the one in charge of the film's completion bond, unaccustomed to driving on the alternate side of the road, turned into oncoming traffic and collided with a bus, sustaining serious injuries. He too never returned. Later in production, an actor was busted at Australian customs for possession of steroids.
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Furthermore, the men in the cast — young, physically fit and flush with American cash in Thailand — had taken an interest in the local massage parlors. Hunger, rapid weight loss, heat exhaustion: none were a match for the enflamed libidos of twentysomething action stars.
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Apocalypse Now had an entire movie based off of it's filming and another movie completely parodying the first movie based on the filming of Apocalypse Now. That's gotta take the cake.
 
Everyone keeps mentioning The Abyss, but no one is actually telling the story. Since it's not in the article, can someone explain what happened?
 
Akuun said:
Wasn't Ed Harris forced to stay underwater longer than agreed on the set of the Abyss because James Cameron wanted a shot of Harris actually drowning instead of just acting like a guy drowning?

That's seriously fucked up. That's actual torture.
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Not from what I've heard. There was at least one serious accident with Harris during the underwater filming of the fluid-breathing suit, but that was an accident.
 
Andrin said:
Wasn't the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre infamous for being a horrible experience to film. I remember reading about people being physically ill after filming the dining room scene.
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Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth is a nice little doc that goes over some of the stuff that happened.
 
Fitzcarraldo was nuts. Watch Burden of Dreams, an outstanding documentary.

Originally it was to star Jason Robards and was 40% done when he left after he got sick with dysentery and had to quit. That's when Klaus got the role. Mick Jagger was also supposed to be in the film and play Fitzcarraldo's assistant but left after delays took too long and he went back on tour. And then Klaus was Klaus and was just a complete nut job whom everyone hated immensely.

And honestly Hertzog himself is pretty damn nutty in a different sort of way. He didn't simply want to make a movie about the crazy shit Fiztcarraldo did but actually recreate and re-enact them, basically exploiting the native population in much the same way as they were back then to achieve his insane goals. Art imitates life.
 
ThLunarian said:
Everyone keeps mentioning The Abyss, but no one is actually telling the story. Since it's not in the article, can someone explain what happened?
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In short, several people almost drowned, including Ed Harris and James Cameron himself. The former decked the latter in the face after his own particular near drowning experience since Cameron decided to keep rolling the cameras during it.
 
The Twilight Zone should definitely get a mention:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/07/the_twilight_zone_tragedy_how_vic_morrow_s_death_changed_the_way_films_are_made.html

Thirty years ago this week, a Hollywood star was decapitated while shooting a scene for a movie. The actor was Vic Morrow, the veteran star of the TV series Combat. He was killed, along with child actors Renee Chen and Myca Dinh Le, by a falling helicopter during filming of The Twilight Zone, a feature-length adaptation of Rod Serling’s television series.
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FrankCanada97 said:
No mention of Street Fighter?

https://www.polygon.com/features/2014/3/10/5451014/street-fighter-the-movie-what-went-wrong

Some excerpts:
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"Yes," says Van Damme, "Okay. Yes, yes, yes. It happened. I was in Thailand, we had an affair. Sweet kiss, beautiful lovemaking. It would be abnormal not to have had an affair, she's so beautiful and she was there in front of me every day with a beautiful smile, simpatico, so charming, she wasn't acting like a big star. I knew Thailand very well, so I showed her my Thailand. She's a great lady."
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JCVD has such a way with words.
 
Seems like an inaccurate list, descriptions are poor and somewhat vague and to top it off they incorrectly described a snake as poisonous which is probably my top dumb pet peeve. Regret giving this list a click.
 
List kinda sucked. Suprised Twilight Zone isn't on the list. Now THAT must must been a hellish shoot.

Didn't Kurosawa go ham on his actors too? Shooting arrows at them and such?
 
I'm surprised Bonfire of the Vanities isn't on the list.

Apocalypse Now always seemed like the craziest thing this side of Herzog.

Hearts of Darkness is great.
 
Anung said:
List kinda sucked. Suprised Twilight Zone isn't on the list. Now THAT must must been a hellish shoot.

Didn't Kurosawa go ham on his actors too? Shooting arrows at them and such?
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Didn't a helicopter crash killing three actors or something? Now I'm morbidly curious about which movie shoot had the highest death count.
 
I have a vague recollection of a movie I read about on cracked where two characters had a big fight scene and they were so pissed at each other that they legitimately fought and tried to kill each other.
 
FrankCanada97 said:
Didn't a helicopter crash killing three actors or something? Now I'm morbidly curious about which movie shoot had the highest death count.
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I don't think anybody died, but I think its commonly thought that Roar is the most dangerous.
For freak accidents, I think there was a movie from India with a massive death count from an explosion.

edit: see above, Sword of Tipu Sultan is what I was talking about
 
I'd also Nominate Stalker:

In an interview on the MK2 DVD, the production designer, Rashit Safiullin, recalled that Tarkovsky spent a year shooting a version of the outdoor scenes of Stalker. However, when the crew returned to Moscow, they found that all of the film had been improperly developed and their footage was unusable. The film had been shot on new Kodak 5247 stock with which Soviet laboratories were not very familiar.[8] Even before the film stock problem was discovered, relations between Tarkovsky and Stalker's first cinematographer, Georgy Rerberg, had deteriorated. After seeing the poorly developed material, Tarkovsky fired Rerberg. By the time the film stock defect was discovered, Tarkovsky had shot all the outdoor scenes and had to abandon them. Safiullin contends that Tarkovsky was so despondent that he wanted to abandon further work on the film.[8]

After the loss of the film stock, the Soviet film boards wanted to shut the film down, but Tarkovsky came up with a solution: he asked to be allowed to make a two-part film, which meant additional deadlines and more funds. Tarkovsky ended up reshooting almost all of the film with a new cinematographer, Aleksandr Knyazhinsky. According to Safiullin, the finished version of Stalker is completely different from the one Tarkovsky originally shot.[8]

The film uses sepia for the world outside the zone and color footage within the Zone.


One of the deserted hydro power plants near Jägala Waterfall, recently renovated
The central part of the film, in which the characters travel within the Zone, was shot in a few days at two deserted hydro power plants on the Jägala river near Tallinn, Estonia.[9] The shot before they enter the Zone is an old Flora chemical factory in the center of Tallinn, next to the old Rotermann salt storage and the electric plant, now a culture factory where a memorial plate of the film was set up in 2008. Some shots within the Zone were filmed in Maardu, next to the Iru powerplant, while the shot with the gates to the Zone was filmed in Lasnamäe, next to Punane Street behind the Idakeskus. Other shots were filmed near the Tallinn-Narva highway bridge on the Pirita River.[9]

The documentary film Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of "Stalker" by Igor Mayboroda offers a different interpretation of the relationship between Rerberg and Tarkovsky. Rerberg felt that Tarkovsky was not ready for this script. He told Tarkovsky to rewrite the script in order to achieve a good result. Tarkovsky ignored him and continued shooting. After several arguments, Tarkovsky sent Rerberg home. Ultimately, Tarkovsky shot Stalker three times, consuming over 5,000 meters of film. People who have seen both the first version shot by Rerberg (as Director of Photography) and the final theatrical release say that they are almost identical. Tarkovsky sent home other crew members in addition to Rerberg and excluded them from the credits as well.

Several people involved in the film production, including Tarkovsky, died from causes that some crew members attributed to the film's long shooting schedule in toxic locations. Sound designer Vladimir Sharun recalled:[10]

We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris.
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This guys are cool and trendy, they included Justice League, without really that much info.
How about The Abyss, Blade 3?? Mad Max Fury Road?
 
I like when I learn about new things in lists. Not sure how many more times I need to read about Jaws or The Abyss, even in they are the shoots. Maybe a mention in the introduction would be nice, then give me something I don't know, please.

Listing JL is a bit silly though.
 
I wouldn't put Justice League on here yet. Definitely not over films like Jaws, Roar (the movie where lions almost fucked up the entire cast), or The Abyss.

The Shining is the first thing that I thought of when I saw this title. Kubrick mentally tortured Duvall, and took it too far with her.

I almost want to say that the Twilight Zone movie belongs on here due to the real life deaths of one of the main actors and two kids because of John Landis being a stubborn dick.

Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew said:
Anyone has excerpt on what happened during The Abyss?
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During underwater filming, Ed Harris almost drowned. While filming a scene where he had to hold his own breath at the bottom of the submerged set, Harris ran out of air and gave the signal for oxygen. Harris' safety diver got hung up on a cable and could not get to him. Another crew member gave Harris a regulator, but it was upside down and caused him to suck in water. A camera man came over, ripped the upside down regulator, and gave him one in the correct orientation. Later that evening, Ed broke down and cried.
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Ed Harris punched James Cameron in the face after he kept filming while he was nearly drowning.
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During the resuscitation scene, Ed Harris wasn't acting to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in many of the shots. He was yelling at thin air. During the scenes she did appear in, he was pounding and slapping her for real. Mastrantonio stormed off the set when she was informed that the camera broke in the middle of the scene and she refused to perform such difficult sequence one more time.
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Haven't clicked the link yet but if there isn't at least one Alfred Hitchcock/Kubrick film and The Room on this list it's worthless

I'm legitimately surprised that Noah's Ark didn't make this list. Those flood scenes were brutal.
 
bjork said:
What about the one where the guy basically raped the girl during a sex scene, the name of the movie escapes me at the moment.
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Last Tango in Paris probably, because it feature a rape scene and the actress wasn't informed that it was going to happen. Which, uh, is pretty horrifying.
 
new director Joss Whedon has had to oversee two months‘ worth of re-shoots

oh wow 2 months of reshoots oh no that sounds like torture that's like 8 weeks of additional work

give me a break there are movies that have been worked on for decades that never came out
 
Adam_Vania said:
new director Joss Whedon has had to oversee two months‘ worth of re-shoots

oh wow 2 months of reshoots oh no that sounds like torture that's like 8 weeks of additional work

give me a break there are movies that have been worked on for decades that never came out
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Roar was worked on for a decade and multiple people got bitten by lions and had to get tons of stitches. I believe one actress fell off an elephant and almost got stepped on by it.
 
TurnipFritters said:
Last Tango in Paris probably, because it feature a rape scene and the actress wasn't informed that it was going to happen. Which, uh, is pretty horrifying.
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I didn't know until after the watching it for my film studies class that the actress is crying for real in that infamous "go get the butter" scene. I never want to lay eyes on it again.
 
Come and See was pretty hard on Aleksei Kravchenko, the child actor.

They used live ammunition in some of the sequences and apparently this ended up with real bullets whizzing less than a foot above Kravchenko's head. The director thought some of the scenes would be too traumatic for him, so they wanted a hypnotherapist to put Kravchenko into a kind of trance before those scenes but this didn't work and allegedly, Kravchenko's hair started to grey during filming.
 
Cleopatra is actually a great example of a film being the highest grossing movie of the year, and losing money due to a bloated production. It's actually amazing how some of these films turned out either by means of a director of a crazy producer or something of the likes.

Having Justice League & Suicide Squad in here is a case of "too soon", if you ask me. Alien3 might be an interesting example, but I'm not sure that was a difficult shoot, as much as it was behind the scenes production disaster. I mean Fincher didn't even get finale say, because the producers were heavily in control of the production & essentially being assholes.

kurahador said:
I feel sorry for Richard Stanley. Dude retreated and live like a monk now lol.
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I listened to an interview with him a few months ago. He hasn't been able to find funding for any feature films again, but he's making short films for years now.

TP-DK said:
Never heard about The Shining before, Kubrick sounds a bit insane :p
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According to most reports, he was relatively sane, he just preferred literally trying to get the best out of actors, by giving them huge jolts, and shit. A lot of directors seem to like that method too.

zeemumu said:
Haven't clicked the link yet but if there isn't at least one Alfred Hitchcock/Kubrick film and The Room on this list it's worthless

I'm legitimately surprised that Noah's Ark didn't make this list. Those flood scenes were brutal.
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There are actually very few Hitchcock films with true troubled shoots, unless you're referring to what he did to get a so-called "jolt' out of his actors according to some reports. Most of Hitchcock films were made during the studio era, where he likely would have been fired if he stepped out of line as well.
 
Canibal Holocaust was a production mess, from actors going ro deep amazon forest not really knowing what to expect, to animal cruelty, sexual violence and the director being on trial after returning to Italy.
 
Michael Mann's antics making Last of the Mohicans could be the basis for an entire book. It was his passion project so everything had to be perfect. Almost all crew heads were fired or walked off the set. Fox flew an exec down just to stand behind Michael and say "That's good. Move on." Setting up night shots would take so long the sun started rising.

Living conditions for Native American extras included 1 bathroom for 400 people at one location. They went on strike, joined by Day-Lewis, Russell Means and Eric Schweig. Military advisor Dale Dye organized the Red Coat extras to break through the strike line. Means punched the first Red Coat, and was then asked to mediate by the producers. Means suggested Mann was so busy making the movie he wasn't paying attention to how awful the assistant directors were.

Then there's the gossip, which included Mann throwing a hissy fit at two oxen who weren't co-operating, and the Cherokee sending a delegate to Fox solely to say Mann would be killed if he ever stepped foot on Cherokee land again.
 
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