What Really Happened on the Set of the Weirdest Movie Ever?

hey 42 here everyone knows how successful titanic was we've all seen it romeo and juliet on the world's most famous sinking ship but do you know how close the movie came to not getting made titanic was the most expensive movie ever produced at the time so expensive in fact that two movie studios fox and paramount had to team up to attempt to finance it these were the days before mickey mouse owned literally everything but as you can imagine two studios fighting over a movie's direction is laden with issues but this wasn't any old movie this was a james cameron movie a director famous for his tyrannical approach to directing his staff actually wear t-shirts that read you can't scare me i work for james cameron that's no lie after five days of what i can only imagine was an ocean of suits running backwards and forwards a deal between the two studios was signed at 2am and the movie shoot was about to begin little did they know how many problems would soon follow the film was almost immediately under-budgeted and studio executives began to get the sense that this giant epic about a sinking ship was about to sink under its own financial burden their first clue probably should have been the fact that rather than build a normal movie set james cameron decided to build a gigantic water tank that contained an almost life-size replica of the actual ship that's not a joke he wanted a near full-scale rms titanic 90 the size of the original with a poop deck that could rotate 90 degrees into the air identical to how the ship looked as it sank and he wanted that in a 7 million gallon open air tank the largest ever built naturally he went about this by using 10 000 tons of explosives to blow a crater in mexico for his tank then hired over 1 500 construction workers to build his ship and i mean why not who needs cgi when you have 10 000 tons of ammonium nitrate and a sociopathic director whilst all this was going on the studios began to suspect that the budget issues were in fact a con job instigated by the other studio and more suits began to scurry back and forth argue and cause problems until a new deal was formed not that cameron cared he was busy making his movie and it turns out building the ship wasn't enough he wanted everything replicated and i mean everything plates knives even the exact wallpaper used on the real ship he even demanded that he get a special russian submarine to explore the wreck of the actual rms titanic not the one he built the one at the very bottom of the atlantic ocean and once filming began so did a raft of new issues filming in the water left countless crew members coming down with coals flu and even kidney infections the stars feared they were drowning kate winslet chipped her elbow insanely a disgruntled crew member spiked the crew's soup with pcp one of the most dangerous drugs in the world 50 people were hospitalized including actor bill paxton people were rolling around on the floor hallucinating and james cameron managed to vomit before the drug took hold of him the person responsible was never caught but i'm guessing it was bill ponderosa one reason for the spiking may have been that cameron was so tyrannical in his approach and would flip into a rage so quickly that crew members felt he had a split personality filming costs soon ballooned to 200 million dollars and shooting took 160 days instead of 138. an executive came down to try and tame cameron only to get trapped in a trailer with him whilst he flew off the handle saying they'd have to kill him before they could fire him industry trades in the newspapers widely reported the film as an oncoming flop and nobody not even cameron had any idea how the film would do financially the film was delayed there were arguments over when it should be released and marketed a confrontation that almost culminated in a fist fight when cameron finally turned in the film the studios were horrified to find it was three hours long fearing that nobody would sit for a three-hour love story blockbuster and they'd lose more money on an already bad investment cameron naturally refused and one can only assume he flew into another rage but privately he felt he'd never be allowed to work in the industry again he even offered to forfeit any money he was set to earn from the film in compensation but then the film was released it rapidly became the most successful movie of all time a title held until recently it stayed at number one for 16 weeks straight a feat never accomplished before or since and it won 11 oscars including best pitcher and director go figure movies aren't easy to make they require an enormous effort to shepherd thousands of moving parts and countless clashing egos despite this there are some movies whose production troubles are so rich with herculean difficulties that they have become the stuff of legend the original dr doolittle for instance built an enormous artificial dam that annoyed the residents of castle combs so much that explorer ranul fines came and blew it up with plastic explosives jaws was such a troubled production and it started without a script a cast or even a shark and led steven spielberg to think his career was over and richard dreyfuss was convinced it was going to be a disaster harrison ford on the set of star wars famously told george lucas george you can type this [ __ ] but you can't say it it's a shame he didn't say the same to jj abrams wesley snipes was so difficult on the set of blade free that he refused to communicate by anything except post-it notes always signed from blade the production of the exorcist was infamously cursed and director william friedkin slapped an actor and shot a gun to startle another just to get the reactions he desired and heaven's gate was such a disaster that one reviewer wrote of the director it failed so completely that you might suspect mr camino sold his soul to obtain the success of the deer hunter and the devil has just come around to collect which may just be the most damning movie review of all time but what are the most shocking mind-boggling movie productions ever what are the movies that were so close to collapsing under their own weight that they should probably have never been made and why does the legendary actor marlon brando appear in two of them george miller's madden max might have spawned just as many rip-offs as star wars it effectively set the tone for post-apocalyptic action in countless mediums be it comics movies video games and even novels however none of these ripoffs were quite like water world which had the genius idea of taking mad max and setting it in the middle of the ocean post-apocalyptic action set on a future earth where everything is in the water sounds pretty awesome right well it's a shame then that the production was the movie equivalent of downing a gallon of coke with a packet of mentos back in the 90s using computer graphics to create a city on water wasn't easy or particularly convincing so the filmmakers behind waterwall decided to take their picture at face value and film it off the coast of hawaii in the middle of the actual ocean logistically this was madness burning through 100 million dollars making sets at sea and with every shooting day depending on hundreds of people being ferry to and from the atoll across the open ocean and then back again every day for lunch and when one of your movie's biggest problems is how the crew arrive at your set you know you're in deep water but the trouble persisted from there in the sense that almost everyone kept nearly dying and everything that could have gone wrong did kevin costner almost died when he got caught in a squall gene triplehorn and tina mourinho were thrown from a boat and almost drowned needing a team of 12 divers to rescue them there were countless jellyfish stings two stuntmen were injured and one went missing in the middle of the ocean found deep in the channel moments away from being swept out to sea to top it off a hurricane struck and sank one of their million dollar sets screenwriter joss whedon was flown out to save the script which had proven to be a mess an experience he described as seven weeks of hell where everyone ignored what made the idea work mutant people at sea and instead turned it into a generic action movie where he was forced to edit in star kevin costner's ideas with little input of his own eventually filming was finished having run up an enormous budget of 175 million dollars and the director walking away from the picture entirely the original score which was completed for nearly 25 of the film was reportedly rejected as to ethnic and after getting savaged as much as possible by critics it took the film until its blu-ray release nearly 15 years later to earn its money back i still think it's a damn cool idea for a movie though now you know your film production has lost its mind when you shot over 1.5 million feet of film but with apocalypse now that's precisely what happened apocalypse now if you haven't seen it is a fantastic vietnam war retelling of joseph conrad's heart of darkness the film tells the story of a special forces soldier set to hunt down a colonel who has lost his mind deep in the vietnamese jungle amidst the heat and bloodshed of the vietnam war it's not surprising then that everyone making the movie seemed to lose their minds as well aside from a typhoon wrecking the sets or the u.s government denying the film any support or the director francis ford coppola blowing his budget and having to fund the film himself apocalypse now took an incredible toll on the people making it with the actors descending seemingly against their will into a world of madness martin sheen suffered a heart attack in the middle of filming and was struggling with alcoholism so badly that there are literally scenes in the finished film where he's completely inebriated dennis hopper whose character was off his face was supplied drugs by the production so that he could maintain his performance and harrison ford was so nervous he could barely perform his only scene but it was the great actor marlon brando who was truly the strangest he showed up enormously overweight maybe 300 pounds to the point where whatever scene he was in he filled the entire frame and had to be shot in darkness he hadn't learned his lines nor even read the source material causing the entire production to be shut down for a week whilst coppola was forced to read brando the script eventually brando showed up with a shaved head and just started improvising coppola himself was so stressed by the production and blaming himself for sheen's heart attack suffered an epileptic seizure a nervous breakdown and is said to have threatened suicide no less than three times the film shoot was us a chaos constantly being rewritten on the fly with the crew either being fired or plagued by tropical diseases and the various military equipment loaned by the local government was constantly being requisitioned to be used in the fight against rebels but perhaps the strangest story were the rumors that real dead bodies were being used on the set although dismissed at first real cadavers were eventually discovered with their use being justified as authentic it turns out they got them from a doctor he was actually a grave robber when the police showed up and saw all the unidentified bodies it was naturally a fairly incriminating scene and everyone's passport was seized yet luckily a few days later the grave robber was caught and sent to prison interestingly if you ever watched the film and wonder how they made the buffalo killing scene look so authentic you might be interested to know that they didn't actually do anything special they just took a real buffalo and filmed a local tribe cussing its head clean off so that just about sums up the entire movie but apocalypse now wasn't the most troubled movie shoot in history nor was it the most troubled model in brando shoes in history no that title goes to a far more bizarre picture i'm of course speaking of the island of dr moreau the island of dr morrow was a 90s retelling of h.g wells novel of the same name a story about a mad scientist who fuses animals and men into strange hybrids but the movie adaptation well it gives crazy a new definition the film was a dream project of director richard stanley who landed the job after coercing marlon brando to play the eponymous dr moreau but his methods for doing this were less than conventional he contacted a warlock that's not a joke stanley had a ritual undertaken that would supernaturally bind stanley and brando to the project and as fate would have it the spell proved to be a success at least as far as getting brando on board who demanded that stanley be the one to direct the picture but it perhaps had further consequences neither stanley nor his warlock intended strange events began to mount up the warlock became hospitalized with bone disease and a flesh-eating parasite stanley's mother's house was struck by lightning three times and there were multiple reports from neighbours that a ghostly supernatural hyena was stalking the nearby hills i guess that's what happens when you use witchcraft to get your movie greenlit but these were just the first of the issues actors were hired and replaced at great speed with both bruce willis and james woods entering and leaving the picture val kilmer who had been hired in a lead role discovered his wife was divorcing him and struggled to cope and marlon brando suffered a family tragedy when his daughter committed suicide and he became a recluse when filming began both actors were incredibly difficult and bizarre to work with kilmer wanted his role to be as small as possible and when brando arrived he brought with him several strange requests his character would wear white face paint he would have an ice bucket for a hat and he would again this is not a joke have an identically dressed [ __ ] he would follow him around and play the piano with him yes this was the inspiration for mini-me astonishingly all of this made its way into the movie sadly his suggestion that moreau be revealed to be a dolphin in disguise was not included in a feat of staggering laziness brando refused to learn his lines and instead asked for them to be delivered through an earpiece however when the earpiece started picking up transmissions from a nearby police scanner brando in full character as monroe began to declare that there had been a robbery at woolworths when tensions or rather egos rose between brando and kilmer both actors will get caught in a standoff where neither was willing to leave their makeup trailer before the other tensions arose between the director and studio so much that stanley was booted off the set and replaced with veteran director john frankenheimer stanley was escorted to the airport by security staff but when his plane landed in lax he wasn't on board a while later he was found and this is true living in the jungle subsisting on fruit and nuts he eventually sneaked back onto the set disguised as one of the animal human hybrids and started to attack the sets with an axe amazingly he managed to sneak into the wrap party where he got to tell val kilmer what a [ __ ] he thought he was john frankenheimer had no easy time himself he was forced to grapple with kilmer and brando so much that some scenes had to be filmed by the animal behavior specialist but the specialist just completely as a baboon was unintelligible behind his costume and left the crew puzzled as he attempted to direct them in what sounded like random screeches and grunts frankenheimer grew to despise kilmer so much that when kilmer finished his last scene the director had security force him off set and shockingly the world's smallest man who played the smaller moreau clone was said to have gone mad with power and sexually propositioned every woman on set and he did this through the use of an interpreter his sister so in short it was complete and utter madness a fundamentally broken film with a fundamentally broken script a fundamentally broken shoot and a fundamentally insane crew who were all so bored with the delayed production that they gorged on drugs alcohol and sex-filled orgies to pass the time thanks for watching you can now pre-order my brand's new book stick a flag in it on amazon link in the description thank you

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 701,104

Rating: 4.9281034 out of 5

Keywords: movies, movie, movie production, film, cinema, failed movies, list, top 10, action movies, hollywood movies, titanic, water world, dr moreau, english movies

Id: T3io8Vugias

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020