Development Heaven / Live-Action Films

Creators

• In The Wicker Man (1973), Screenwriter Anthony Schaffer and director Robin Hardy put in a lot of research into Celtic myth and legend while devising the plot—they knew next to nothing about it at the start.

• Charlize Theron in Monster. She gained 30 pounds, wore prosthetic teeth, and generally made herself a lot more plain/uglier for the sake of the movie.

• For Interstellar, Christopher Nolan was so dedicated to the exclusive prominence of cornfields to illustrate the crappy state of Earth's future that the production crew planted and grew 500 whole acres of corn on location rather than do it all with CG. With their location being Calgary, Canada, this was actually a pretty massive risk (the high altitude and northern latitude do not lend themselves to ideal temperature and wind conditions for corn), but by the time of filming, it paid off. Not only did they get humongous cornfields to shoot practically on, they ended up selling the corn as a side gig and actually turned a profit.

• In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola decided that he wanted all the effects shots in the film to be done in-camera with nothing added in post-production. He and his son Roman worked hard to come up with concepts that used old-fashioned camera trickery that dates back to the early days of film (matte boxes, double exposures, reversed shots, tilted cameras, etc.). They even shot some scenes with an old hand-cranked Pathe camera in order to achieve an uneven stuttering look that was difficult to recreate with then-modern film cameras.

• Jackie Chan: After all the broken bones, the organ injuries, and life-threatening misses...and even (by his own honest admission) the occasional Money, Dear Boy offer, almost all of the work he does, he does for the love of bringing his brand of physical entertainment to the world. Continuing a shoot with a broken leg using a rubber shoe-sock over his cast? Done. Rolling over a circular saw? Check. Jumping from building to building with little to no safety mechanisms? All the time. For The Young Master, a movie he directed, co-wrote, and starred in, Jackie doubled for a stuntman that couldn't do a particular stunt. His character wasn't even in the scene involving that stunt. He could have just stood behind the camera and ask another stuntman that could do it, but he decided to stand-in himself.

• James Cameron:
  • For Avatar, his team also spent three weeks rendering the opening shot of Pandora, down to the leaves on the trees.
  • When making The Terminator, he actually called weapons manufacturers to ask about how to make a "Phased Plasma Rifle, in the 40 watt range". Understandably, they were confused.
  • During the production of Aliens, Cameron wanted to show a military unit that worked cohesively and acted like a group of friends. To that end, he brought the main cast up to England for a multi-week military training course, which allowed the actors and actresses time to get to know each other—which forged believable friendships.
  • That shot in Terminator 2: Judgment Day of the helicopter flying under an underpass was done for real with no special effects.
  • For Titanic (1997), Cameron even got the same companies (that still existed) to provide authentic recreations of the interior pieces, right down to the china that got smashed when the ship was tipping over. After its release, he was scathingly sarcastic about being called out on the night sky being wrong in one scene, and he still had it corrected for the subsequent DVD release.
    • The person who actually called him out on it was Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, teacher, Director of the Hayden Planetarium, and research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He is as perfectionist as Cameron is about his profession. To his credit, he tells the story of badgering Cameron about "the wrong sky" in Titanic (1997) and Cameron's scathing reply with humor and relish, especially the part where one of Cameron's special effects people called Dr. Tyson to get the right sky for the Director's Cut of the film.

• Crimson Peak:
  • Jessica Chastain learned to play piano, and performed all the pieces in the film herself.
  • Guillermo del Toro had the whole set constructed from nothing, not re-using any existing props or costumes. He was also determined for the film to look like a Mario Bava Technicolor piece.
  • Tom Hiddleston sat through three hours of make-up for the prosthetics of Thomas's ghost, just so he could be on set to help Mia Wasikowska's reactions.

• For a scene in Yes-Man in which he plays DanceDanceRevolution, Jim Carrey was actually taught how to play it. Instead of the scene consisting of him randomly stepping on panels during the attract demo with random generic dance music, he plays for real... on an actual in-game song... on Heavy difficulty... with a x3 speed modifier... and is shown with at least a 100 combo. He also learned how to do everything else he did in the film, including playing the guitar, flying a plane, and speaking fluent Korean! The only exception was the elbow skating.
  • Carrey's commitment to playing Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon was the stuff of legends for nearly 20 years before the documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond confirmed they were true. He identified strongly with Kaufman's desire to perform on his own terms, untethered to the traditional image maintaining of an A-list celebrity. So, since Kaufman delighted in playing a variety of strange personas at length (think Kayfabe) in public, Carrey stayed in character(s) throughout the entire shoot to the alternating fascination, consternation, annoyance, and delight of the cast and crew — many of whom actually knew/worked with Kaufman and were stunned by how well Carrey captured his temperament and mannerisms. (To say nothing of talent: Carrey does all of his own singing, dancing, and conga drum playing.) It took by his estimation three weeks for him to fully reconstruct his own personality after spending several months as Kaufman, but to him it was worth it to honor the memory of one of his inspirations and open to the door to younger generations unfamiliar with him.

• Laurel and Hardy were very dedicated to the art of comedy, but one example stands out during the filming of their most famous and beloved short, The Music Box. Although the piano that was smashed in the finale was fake, the (empty) packing case was real, and it actually was quite heavy. But Stan and Ollie decided to carry it up the legendary flight of stairs anyway, suffering falls, the summer heat and exhausted arms all the while, for the sake of laughs and joy everywhere.

• One of the great early examples is Lillian Gish — in the climax of Way Down East, D. W. Griffith required her to lie still on a very real ice floe for hours on end while her hair and right hand were submerged in below-freezing water. Thanks to the stunt, Gish's hand would be partially impaired for the rest of her life, but she contributed to what is considered one of the most exciting climaxes in cinema history.

• Meryl Streep learned German and Polish for her role in Sophie's Choice. Maybe not completely fluently, but certainly to an astonishingly adept level. And she begged the director for the role on her hands and knees. It has been cited as the greatest acting performance ever put to film.
  • Meryl likes doing this. For Music of the Heart, she learned the violin. Not to professional standard, perhaps, but far beyond what anyone would have expected of her.

• Michael Chiklis insisted on uncomfortable makeup rather than CG for the Thing in Fantastic Four. CG and voice over would have let him do the role in days. The makeup meant he spent hours a day in it, and could not even sit. He did this because he was One of Us and knew a CGI Thing wouldn't have the same effect on the audience. His efforts were arguably successful; although the films themselves failed to make much impression, Chiklis' version of The Thing is generally considered the best and most comics-accurate part of the venture.

• Michael Fassbender lost over thirty pounds to play the role of a hunger striker in Hunger; one interviewer pointed out that the weight he stopped (58 kg, about 128 pounds) was the same weight that his character, Bobby Sands, reached in his last diary entry before he died. (Incidentally, Fassbender has been compared to Daniel Day Lewis by some critics.)

• Mickey Rourke:
  • In order to film The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke actually worked several wrestling matches, including blading and allowing the infamous Necro Butcher to put him through the ringer in a hardcore match.
  • For Iron Man 2 Mickey Rourke improvised a lot of Ivan Vanko's characteristics, such as his toothpick habit, his fondness for cockatoos, and his tattoos. He paid for the cockatoo with his own money, learned to speak Russian, and visited the infamous Butyrka prison to interview the prisoners there, who he described as very polite.

• Penélope Cruz learned Italian for her role in Non ti muovere. Even more shockingly, she actually managed to make herself unattractive with a false nose and teeth.

• Megan Fox insisted on doing her own stunts in Jonah Hex (2010), only using a stunt double for one scene which would've been too dangerous for her to do by herself.

• For Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks went through the effort to reuse the elaborate electrical machinery from the original Universal Frankenstein films.

• When Taylor Lautner heard that he was being replaced for New Moon on account of not having a good enough physique, he immediately started doing a rigorous exercise routine on a daily basis in order to bulk up for the role, the execs were so impressed that they decided to keep Lautner after all.
  • Lautner also did all of his own stunts in Abduction he learned how to fight, ride motorcycles and everything.

• Tim Burton was so dead set on avoiding using CGI for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that he paid a team of animal trainers to train 40 real squirrels for the sequence where Veruca Salt meets her demise. It took 19 weeks of painstaking work, training each squirrel individually, but they pulled it off. And all for a scene that takes up less than 10 minutes of screen time.

• Fitzcarraldo is about a man trying to haul a ship over a mountain. To make it, Werner Herzog actually hauled a ship over a mountain (with help, but still). And that's not the half of it. In the real event that Fitzcarraldo is based on, that ship was originally disassembled before it was hoisted up the mountain. Herzog had his ship hauled up in one piece. Herzog is a crazy man — he also deliberately filmed in the middle of the jungle instead of just a mile or two from civilization, because the movie wouldn't "feel right" otherwise. (All this and more warranted its own on-set documentary, Burden of Dreams.)

• Actors gaining or losing weight for film roles certainly qualifies (when prosthetics could just as easily be used, especially nowadays), with Robert De Niro's work on Raging Bull the most famous example... but Peter Sellers arguably went the extra mile by gaining weight for Being There because he felt it looked right for the character—despite chronic and worsening heart problems and a subsequent hatred of how he looked on screen. It's hard not to think that his admitted difficult time losing the weight as fast as he could afterwards may have hastened his death.
  • Christian Bale deserves mentioning. He had lost weight for his part in The Machinist (IMDb says 120 pounds on his 6 foot+ frame). Then Christopher Nolan told him he'd have to become bigger to be Batman. Bale did so and went up to about 220 pounds.
    • Whereupon he was told they didn't mean that much bigger and he had to shave some off again. And then he lost it all again to play a crack addict in The Fighter (and jumped out of windows for real).
    • Which had to be somewhat reversed once more to prepare for The Dark Knight Rises. And then he had to gain more weight in fat for American Hustle.
• Christian Bale certainly went to extremes for The Fighter, but so did Mark Wahlberg: the film was stuck in Development Hell for a long time, so he ended up training for the film for five years, working with trainers during his off time on his last six films. He also refused a stunt double and did every fight scene for real.
  • Similarly, on Three Kings, he said he wanted to get into his role properly, so when his character is tortured with electric shocks, they hooked him up and did it for real.
• There must be something in Wahlberg DNA that makes them take the Method approach: Mark's brother Donnie Wahlberg dropped 43 pounds for his incredibly brief (but pivotal) role of a ravaged, haunted psych patient in The Sixth Sense. Most people are shocked to realize it was him.

• The Three Stooges: Can we get a shout out to the actors who played Moe, Larry, and Curly if for nothing else than their sheer tenacity when it came to on set injuries? Some of their highlights include Curly smashing his head on a windowsill and needing nine stitches to seal up the gash only to return to work almost immediately, Larry accidentally getting a pen deeply stabbed into his forehead because of a botched stunt, Moe getting blasted in the face with an oil like substance that needed medical attention to his eyes, Moe twisting his ankle by accident during a scene and diving out of the frame to save the shot which resulted in him hitting his head on a bed frame and knocking himself out cold, and Moe breaking several ribs after a pratfall only to stand back up JUST long enough to finish the shot before passing out from the pain. Say what you will about those three but they sure could take a lot of punishment for the sake of their act.

Works

• 2001: A Space Odyssey had Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke spending enormous efforts into making everything as realistic as possible. The earth moving equipment seen on the Moon would actually work on the real Moon. Quite a few experts from NASA and IBM were asked to help design the sets.
  • That's just the kind of guy Kubrick was. The interior of the B-52 Stratofortress (top-secret at the time, believe it or not) in Dr. Strangelove was so realistic that the military launched a brief inquiry into how the movie makers had gotten the inside information. ^note What they did was look over diagrams of the insides of the B-29 Superfortress, which was not classified, and then extrapolated on those designs based on the size and shape of the B-52.
    • Kubrick also insisted that the table in the war room be covered in green baize like that on pool or poker tables to symbolize that the leaders were playing a giant game of poker for the fate of the world. The only thing is, the movie is in black-and-white.
  • Clarke published a few lines from his diary from pre-production in the introduction of a re-issue of the novel. They include "rang Isaac Asimov to ask him about the biochemistry of turning herbivores into carnivores." (Asimov, besides writing science fiction, was a professor of biochemistry.) And they never even did anything with that...
  • Kubrick required the compositing work to be done by a team of British animators painting traveling mattes by hand, frame-by-frame, to mask out each element, rather than using bluescreen. When production ended, most of them signed onto Yellow Submarine in order to work on something colorful after spending two years painting little black blobs.
  • Instead of storyboarding the docking sequence, multiple model sequences were shot so Kubrick could edit them.
  • In the original script, Bowman and the other astronauts go to Saturn (this is also where they go in the book). Kubrick ended up changing it to Jupiter because the crew wasn't able to make a model of Saturn he was satisfied with.
  • Also, when Kubrick did The Shining, the scene wherein we see Jack's manuscript, and all we see is "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." typed over and over again?" Each page was individually typed. And he also shot the pages for four other languages, too.
  • Kubrick's reputation is the source of a common joke about Moon-Landing Hoax conspiracy theories, particularly those that claim Kubrick directed the staged Apollo landings. The joke is that NASA originally signed Kubrick on to film it on a soundstage or in the southwestern desert, but that Kubrick, unsatisfied, decided that it would work better if he filmed it on the actual moon.

• The 2012 war film Act of Valor takes this to a whole new level. The main characters are all played by REAL U.S. Navy SEALS (who were between deployments at the time of filming) all the tactics used in the film are REAL, REAL live bullets were used for most scenes, and in one scene a REAL truck gets blown up with a REAL RPG.

• In Amélie, to keep that 'fantastic' Paris, every single place used in the movie was painted and cleaned before any shot.

• For The Apartment, Billy Wilder created memo pads and stationery with Sheldrake's name on them, even though no one but Fred MacMurray ever saw them.

• Apollo 13. The research they put into it was downright impressive. There's a "Making Of" feature in the collector's edition which has Ron Howard recounting when someone told him that man wouldn't go so far from Earth again for a hundred, hundred fifty years. By that time everyone involved would be dead; they would just have the old stuff, the stock footage, and documentaries. And this film. It had to be right. The director said he laughed it off, but it really does look like he took it seriously.
  • Upon watching the launch in the movie, second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin (then working for NASA Public Relations), apparently turned and asked the movie crew where they get some of the footage as he was unaware that there had been a camera in that particular location. There wasn't—it was just so authentic that he'd been fooled.
  • Most movies use CGI trickery or wire work for zero gravity. This movie actually used the real thing, filming onboard NASA's Vomit Comet.

• For The Babadook, Jennifer Kent was keen on a Victorian terrace-style house being constructed for the film to help make it feel universal. As those are uncommon in Adelaide, where they were filming, one was built specifically for the production. What's more is that she wanted In-Camera Effects to create the Babadook, and none of the film's colour scheme was altered in post-production.

• Bad Grandpa: while not a particularly good film by any metric, Bad Grandpa does shine in one area: The makeup. The main character, a balding old man with wrinkled skin, was actually Johnny Knoxville who pulled off the look though a mixture of silicone prosthetics, hairpieces, and other makeup tricks that turned him into an older version of himself. The makeup was so good that not only did it completely fool everyone Knoxville interacted with over the course of the film (who had no idea they were being filmed by the way) to the point that they legitimately thought he was an old man with his grandson, but it even got makeup artist Stephen Prouty nominated for an academy award.

• Before they filmed Battle: Los Angeles, the cast were put through several weeks of real military boot camp to get them to operate like Marines. Not only that, but each actor was given the same kind of training that a Marine of the rank they were portraying in the film would have received. Aaron Eckhart even said that he and the cast tried very hard to use correct military jargon and terminology, such as calling a helicopter a "helo" instead of a "chopper", and would redo a take if they made such a mistake.

• Plenty of examples exist from Blood Diamond:
  • Leonardo Dicaprio spent months living in South Africa and hanging out with the natives, including many mercenaries, for the role. He also took gun training courses so he could have a reasonable level of confidence with the weapons he'd handle. And he worked tirelessly to get the accent right.
  • As a whole, the production team spent months living in various parts of Africa (Mozambique, South Africa, Sierra Leone) and did exhaustive research to make the film as real-seeming as possible while still staying on track.
  • A number of things were added in production and post to make the setting look more like Sierra Leone, including adding authentic trees and digitally painting in mountains in the background, including in many shots where people wouldn't think to look.

• In The Bourne Legacy, Jeremy Renner actually entered glacier water with little protection.

• Brazil:
  • When Universal wouldn't release the film, Terry Gilliam hosted a series of lectures that turned out to be secret screenings of the film. He also took out an advert in Variety:
  Dear Sid Sheinberg of Universal Pictures,
  Why won't you release my film Brazil?
  Love,
  Terry Gilliam.
  • All of the tools seen on Harry Tuttle's utility belt were designed by Robert De Niro himself.
• With It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Stanley Kramer set out to make the ultimate comedy.
  • At the time, there were only a hundred stunt performers working in Hollywood. Eighty of them were working on this movie.
  • The film's scale was so big that the actors were given two scripts - one for the dialogue and one for the slapstick.

• The Psychological Thriller CAM has a heavy focus on internet live streams with chatrooms. To fill the scenes with realistic "background chatter," Isa Mazzei wrote about one hundred pages worth of chat logs, including several "characters" with distinct personalities and inside jokes.

• While making City of Ember, a set nearly as big as a small town was constructed to stand in for Ember. It was so big, most of the cast needed a map to get around.

• Conan the Barbarian (1982) was very, very, very good for a character most people treated as a joke and expected to get something lighthearted and campy. Instead, they got something dark, edgy, philosophical and yet still a good adventure movie. It had plenty of changes from the original stories, but it still stands up as an individual story and has actors that are either excellent, hammy or both. Sadly, John Milius was not brought back to work on the sequel.
  • He researched ancient civilizations and designed art histories for all the obscure R.E. Howard civilizations that Conan passes through, shrugs at, and burns down...he designed a workable house on wheels for the family of drifters Conan gets directions from...he built a life size Wheel of Pain...he had Arnold bite the head off a real vulture carcass!

• Crimson Peak:
  • Two sets of each piece of furniture were made - one bigger and one smaller - to make the character look more vulnerable or stronger depending on the scene.
• The Forbidden City courtyard in Curse of the Golden Flower was the largest set ever built in China. The entire square was covered in chrysanthemums. The filmmakers also did extensive research on the Tang Dynasty to get the interiors of the palace and the small details accurate.
• For tick, tick... BOOM!, the production went to great efforts to recreate both the Moondance Diner and Jonathan's apartment at 508 Greenwich Street; in the case of the latter, even getting their hands on several of his real possessions. Adam Pascal, Daphne Ruben-Vega and Wilson Jermaine Heredia described the recreation of the apartment as particularly surreal, since they had visited it many times in preparation for RENT.

• The Dark Knight has the moment in the car chase where the Joker's semi truck is turned upside-down on LaSalle Street by the Batpod's cable, flipping trailer-over-cab to land upside down with a loud noise. Do you think they used CG to do that scene? Noooo! It was a real truck that was really flipped over on the streets of downtown Chicago. They could do that stunt only once, ignoring if the final shot would be cool or not. And it was awesome.
  • The Bat-pod?... fully functional.
  • Heath Ledger locked himself in a room for a month with copies of such comics as The Killing Joke, writing the Joker's journal, in order to fully understand the character.
  • The scene of Joker walking away from the exploding/collapsing hospital was 99% real; the only CG used was the windows shattering. Needless to say, there was only one opportunity to get the shot. The building in question was actually an old Brach's Candy Factory on the west side of Chicago.
    • And they only CGI'd the windows because some hoodlums stole half the glass out of the building. They didn't have the time or the money to re-outfit a building with new windows.

• The production crew of Deepwater Horizon constructed a whopping 85-percent scale recreation of the actual rig just for the movie, which took 85 welders over eight months to build.

• Doomsday. On a budget of $30 million, Neil Marshall made a completely insane, Rule of Cool-driven action movie that uses as many practical effects as it can. Yeah, the Bentley driving straight through a fucking bus at ninety miles an hour? They really did that. And since Bentley doesn't do Product Placement, that meant that they actually had to buy three high-end luxury cars, at $150,000 each, to smash up in order to film that scene. Then there's the props. The crew designed and made about a hundred different hand-to-hand weapons, a couple of guns, several punkish "mutant" cars, and a special suit of armor so it would look like it was makeshift. Finally, the two APCs in the film were designed and then built completely from scratch.

• For Elf, despite the production not having much in the way of a budget or schedule for any ambitious special effects, Jon Favreau was dead set on using as many In-Camera Effects and live props as possible, as he felt too much CGI would date the film and clash with the Rankin/Bass Productions-inspired visual style. The Forced Perspective shots used to put normal-sized Buddy in an elf-sized world took so long and were so complicated to set up that Joe Bauer's effects team had to set up a second unit so they could to come in at night and set up shots for the next day just to keep the film on schedule and under budget. The North Pole set itself was so deep and wide that it had to be built inside a hockey rink, as no sound stage could accommodate it.

• For Gangs of New York they actually built what was essentially a full scale complete replica of the Five Points in 1800's New York in Italy just to film the movie. All of the costumes and props were painstakingly created to be historically accurate too. According to one of the extras on the DVD, George Lucas visited the set and complained to Scorsese that it could all be easily done on computers for much cheaper. But Scorcese wanted to put that effort in, and Lucas was ignored.
  • And Daniel Day-Lewis is sort of the king of this trope—for one thing, he practiced tapping his eye with the knife until he could do it without flinching (because his character has a glass eye). He also stayed in character on set all the time, as usual.
    • That glass eye bit? Not in the script. Lewis just thought it fit the character.

• Alfonso Cuarón spent four and a half years developing the technology needed to shoot Gravity, with a 100 million dollar budget. And all that effort shows.

• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2:
  • The props department had trouble sourcing Walkmans and headphones for this film (Sony had none of the specific model to lend to the production), so six sets had to be made from scratch.
  • James Gunn insisted that the "Guardians Inferno" music video be shot on genuine 1970s television cameras, which was extremely expensive and technically difficult to do, because they provide a visual quality that is impossible to replicate in post-production. Also, the initial plan was just to use David Hasselhoff and dancers but the cast, despite their busy schedules, all enthusiastically agreed to participate when asked, with Chris Pratt even shooting his part during a spare moment on the set of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and the crew of that movie pitching in to help.

• For the 1996 version of Hamlet, the cast had to rehearse and go through the entire play at one point beforehand so they would have a rough idea of where they were in the chronology of the story when scenes were shot out of order. Additionally they had to rehearse for up to three hours a day for simple set-ups (to co-ordinate with the elaborate camera set-ups). They had marks on the floor they had to memorise, as they would be visible on camera.

• For The Haunting (1963), infrared film stocks were imported from Belgium to help make the exteriors of Hill House look more sinister. They also took a chance on a 30mm lens that wasn't fully finished from Panavision because Robert Wise wanted an anamorphic wide angle.

• Hero (2002):
  • The "red fight" between Moon and Flying-Snow was filmed in a forest in Mongolia. Director Yimou Zhang had to wait until the leaves turn yellow, and hired local nomads to gather even more yellow leaves in order to cover the ground completely. In fact, he was so fanatic about the leaves, that he had his crew separate the leaves into four different "classes" which were each put at increasingly farther lengths from the camera.
  • The lake scenes took almost three weeks to film because Yimou insisted that the lake's surface had to be perfectly still and mirror-like during filming. Due to the natural currents, this occurred every day for only three hours. And even less than that in case of windy weather. With the set-ups required for Wire Fu, the filmmakers could get maybe two shots done during those three hours.
  • The Qin Empire preferred the color black, even for the horses. In order to be historically accurate, Yimou ordered all 300+ horses to be colored black (temporarily, of course) for the cavalry sequences.

• I Know What You Did Last Summer:
  • For the daytime sequences on the marina, the boats were directed by a marine traffic coordinator to make the waterway look more lively.
  • Muse Watson worked carefully on every aspect of his character - down to how he walked and held the hook - because he could sense the potential of the story.

• Inception:
  • Nolan tried as far as possible to film the spectacular effects in-camera, opting to use CGI to edit and enhance as opposed to entirely create. Massive props have to go to Chris Corbould, the special effects supervisor on the film who had to figure out how to achieve all the things (that had such a high JustForFun.Holy Shit Quotient) with practical effects. For example, the scene in the hotel bar with the slanting water levels was achieved with a hydraulically-controlled set that could tilt at a 25-degree angle, while the camera was anchored to the ground. Similarly, the zero-gravity fight in the hotel corridor was achieved with a rotating set, while the camera was kept level relative to the set. The effect was so amazing that the film's editor, Lee Smith, admits to being stunned and disoriented the first time he saw the footage. Also, the snow-fortress-hospital was built full-scale in the Canadian Rockies and blown up for real - along with a smaller scale model built in the studio parking lot. The atomizing streets of Paris were done with air cannons and rigs on an actual Paris street and the water flooding Saito's castle at the start of the film was accomplished with air cannons creating high-pressure jets of water.
  • The Penrose steps Arthur shows Ariadne? No CG trickery, they built the staircase then used the precise scaling angle for the camera to show off the optical illusion.
  • Also, he refused the studio's wish to have the movie converted to 3D as he isn't satisfied with the image quality of 3D.

• John Wick:
  • Keanu Reeves was so enthusiastic about this project that he dedicated four full months to training in martial arts, firearms, and stunt driving in order to do as much of the action himself. He was also the one who pushed the directors to take this project because he felt that this was the movie that would give them their big break.
    • The scenes in the Red Circle were filmed while he was sick with the flu. According to the commentary, the directors couldn't even get him to sit down between takes.
  • The directors and stunt team responsible for this film initially made a name for themselves because they didn't merely show up to do whatever stunt they were told to do, but would study scripts and prepare and stage action sequences that would add to the story before pitching them to directors. This dedication led them to become one of the premiere 2nd unit teams in Hollywood and got them their shot at running a 1st unit with this film.
  • The decision to set the film in New York City and also to shoot there was this. Filming in the city was very expensive for a cash-strapped project, but the filmmakers insisted that New York was the only place the film's Masquerade setting would make sense.

• The Lighthouse:
  • To give the movie its old-fashioned look, Robert Eggers shot it not only in black-and-white film but also in 1.19:1 aspect ratio, which old movies such as M were filmed in back in the '20s and '30s. He also used vintage Bausch & Lomb Baltar lenses from the '30s^note Baltar lenses are incredibly rare these days, even moreso for those in working condition. and had custom short pass filters installed in the film cameras to emulate vintage orthochromatic photography. This limited the amount of light that the film in the cameras received and required more elaborate lighting setups.
  • The lighthouse as shown in the movie is an actual functional 70-foot lighthouse that was specifically constructed for the movie.

• The Lord of the Rings, the live-action movie version. For those of you who don't already know about the insane efforts went to to make this adaptation, just remember this: part of the budget was dedicated to a couple of guys making chain mail. That's right. A couple. By themselves. By hand. They actually rubbed off their fingerprints in the process because normal costumes just weren't going to cut it. As you can see below, they were taking the motto of Tolkien straight to heart.
  • And most of the Ominous Latin Chanting you hear in the soundtrack? It's not Latin. It's Elvish.
    • Or Dwarvish. Or the Black Speech. And every word is context appropriate. Howard Shore should get a CMOA for this one.
  • And the various inscriptions and other writings seen in the movies (the inscriptions on swords and other weapons are authentic Elvish; longer texts, such as books, are just English transcribed into an appropriate alphabet, but still a lot of work). There are even decorations inside some armour, which would never be seen by the audience.
  • When the hobbit scale doubles are used instead of the actors, you figure they're just wearing the same outfit as the actor but in a smaller size, right? Not quite. They're wearing the same fabric—but woven at a tighter weave. So if you measured how many strands of the material were in, for example, a collar, it would be the exact same number as in the full size costume. The weave on a square inch of fabric from the double's costume would be smaller in the same proportions as the double was to their actor. The mind boggles. Especially when you consider that this, like most of the scale trickery in the movie, was never supposed to be noticed by the audience (that is to say, you'd only notice it if it was wrong).
  • The very fact that all three films were made simultaneously over the course of 18 months before the first film was released, with additional reshoots for the films after each film was released year-by-year, is a great surprise in this age of next week sequels.
    • Apparently Peter Jackson approached New Line with trepidation, trying to convince them that he'd need two films instead of one (the previous production company having asked for one film only) to cover the whole "trilogy". New Line responded that if there were three books, there should be three movies.
    • And when you hear that there were pick ups, entire CG sequences and full orchestra re-composing and re-recording for the DVD releases of extended editions (they were still shooting after the third film won the Best Picture Oscar), you realize how much effort went in to making this one of the best film trilogies of all time.
  • Jackson's attitude towards the effort and detail that he insisted on putting into the films is summed up by this anecdote he tells:
    I gave a little speech to the design crew very early on. This is a little bit weird, but it was the only way I could really express myself. I said, "Look, we've been given the job of making The Lord of the Rings. From this point on, I want to think that Lord of the Rings is real, that it was actually history, that these events happened. And more than that, I want us to imagine that we've been lucky enough to be able to go on location and shoot our movie where the real events happened. Those characters did exist and they wore costumes, and I want the costumes to be totally accurate to what the real people wore. Hobbiton still exists. It's overgrown with weeds and it's been rundown and neglected for the last three or four hundred years, but we're gonna go back in there and clean it up. We're the luckiest film crew in the world; we're able to shoot in the real locations that these real events actually took place in."

• For Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Branagh and De Niro thought that the Creature should have mismatched legs and spent hours trying out different types of footwear to get the proper limp. Also, the Creature's birth scene required a full body prothesis and De Niro had to come in at two in the morning and stay absolutely still as a team of makeup artists meticulously stitched him into the suit.

• Master and Commander: Peter Weir insisted that the production use real cannons firing actual gunpowder charges in order to show realistic recoil and to capture live audio rather than using recorded cannon noises in post production. Weir experienced permanent hearing loss that he attributes to his decision.

• While watching the "Lady in the Red" scene in The Matrix some may notice the same people passing besides Neo and Morpheus more than once. Production goof? Nope, all extras in the scene are actual twins. They searched all over Sydney for twins and brought them in to demonstrate how Mouse, writing the Agent training program, got lazy and just copy-pasted same models over instead of making unique ones. And hardly anyone would ever notice...

• Mission: Impossible Film Series:
  • The film series historically has rotating directors, done so each film would be stylistically unique from the other entries. Even when Christopher McQuarrie ended up being the first director to return for a sequel, he was instructed by Tom Cruise to change his direction style.
  • Cruise taking the initiative and doing his own stunts isn’t necessary for filming but he does so anyway for the authenticity. One of the best examples is training himself to hold his breath for over six minutes to film an underwater scene in Rogue Nation. The scene wasn’t filmed as a single take or anything that would actually necessitate Cruise have to do this but having the ability to do so meant the plausibility of the scene holds up because Tom can do it in real life.
  • In Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Tom Cruise wanted the HALO (High Altitude, Low Opening) jump sequence to be as real as possible. So, he performed over 100 jumps to get three usable takes that were stitched together. Adding to the complication was the fact that it was shot on a film camera rather than a digital camera^note Because the camera was mounted on a helmet, this added to the weight and strain the cameraman's body. Also, this meant that the cameraman didn't have video assist to help him keep the shot framed and in focus, instead relying on his eye and instinct.

• According to Brian Henson the initial impetus for Muppet Treasure Island was that they realised filming a Muppet movie on a realistic ship would be almost impossible, and therefore wanted to try it.

• Despite Tom Savini's reputation for Gorn, he wanted to keep Night of the Living Dead (1990) free of it out of respect for the original. The special effects team kept the effects restrained - and actually studied autopsies, forensic textbooks and even Nazi death camp footage - all to make them as realistic as possible.

• Pan's Labyrinth used extensive puppetry for its special effects as opposed to CG animation, which is far more the norm in modern circumstances. Suffice to say, puppets are a lot harder to do than CG.
  • Used to a lesser (but still greater than normal) degree for the Hellboy films, which made extensive use of puppetry, optical illusions (Krauss' head) and contortionist/actor Doug Jones (Abe, Angel of Death, Chancellor...etc.).
  • Team America: World Police also used puppets, although these two movies are about as far apart from each other thematically as can be possibly imagined.
  • The Silent Hill movie only used a few CG effects (noticeably the bugs and the fog). All the monsters were done with live actors, which arguably makes the effect that much creepier.

• The Passion of the Christ had a complete lack of spoken English, the spoken lines done in Latin and Aramaic (both languages now considered "dead").

• The underwater scene on Naboo in The Phantom Menace? Trisha Biggar used vintage fabric for Obi-Wan's robe, and it shrank in water. They had to make and destroy a robe for every single cut.

• Primer features the most complex (read: impenetrable) time travel plot in film. It was written by two engineers and literally requires a large chart to understand completely.

• In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, you know that scene where the Kraken chops a ship in freaking half? Yeah? They really did that. They got a huge slab of concrete, and painted it green, and then CHOPPED THE FREAKING SHIP IN HALF.

• In Safe House the scene where Denzel Washington is being tortured by waterboarding? That wasn't faked — Denzel insisted on doing it for real so it would be more convincing.

• For Seconds (1966), Frankenheimer actually shot the plane sequence inside a real airplane that flew from Los Angeles to Washington and back.

• In Se7en, all the books in John Doe's apartment? They're all real. One of the special effects companies hired for the film spent two months hand-writing every single one of them; this was mostly handled by one guy who showed exceptional talent at writing journals like a crazy insane sociopath. He even included an authentic suicide note...

• For The Shallows, the special effects crew went to great effort to create an accurate female shark. Word of God said the shark had to be female, because they are naturally more protective and "carry great scars from mating". They even joked they knew how much the shark weighed, and every story behind the scars on her body.

• In Shanghai Express, Joseph von Sternberg painted many of the Chinese characters on the railways himself. Additionally Marlene Dietrich's daughter claims that the famous Fluffy Fashion Feathers outfit came about after the entire Paramount costume department was searched - trying to find the most dramatic thing. Clive Brook also claims the cast were told to talk in rhythm with the wheels.

• Silent Hill: Every monster in the movie is a person inside a suit, with some CGI effects added afterwards. Unfortunately many people ended up thinking them as shoddy CGI, due to their unnatural movements, which in fact are the result of the skill of their actors, and unusual camera techniques in shooting them; for example, the bubble-head nurses were choreographed doing their movements backwards, and the film was then reversed for the effect.

• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was the culmination of a life's work, and was filmed twice—the first time, so that the actors could see how it would look like with the CG in place before they filmed the "real" version.
  • Jude Law had said that it was his dream as an actor to work alongside Sir Laurence Olivier. A pity he had been dead for 15 years. Instead, the director dug up decades-old test footage of Olivier, and spent God only knows how long piecing together sound clips in order to give Olivier a posthumous "cameo" as Big Bad Dr. Totenkopf.

• The opening scene of The Social Network took ninety nine takes to get it the exact way the director wanted it. ...Yeah. To say nothing of all the extra work that went into using CGI to make it possible for Armie Hammer to play both of the Winklevoss twins. Did a dialogue-driven biopic about the founding of Facebook really need hours of CGI work to make the twins more believable? Would anyone in the audience have noticed (or cared) if the brothers had been made non-identical twins, or if Fincher had just cast a pair of real twins that didn't look exactly like the Winklevosses? Nobody knows. But the extra work added an unexpected extra layer of realism to a film that probably still would have been a critical darling without it.

• Possibly the biggest Unexpected Character among the Warner Bros..-owned ones that appear in Space Jam: A New Legacy is Sister Jeanne from The Devils, a controversial movie the studio keeps unavailable whenever possible. And to depict the nun, the original habits, still intact since 1970, were flown in, handled with much care.

• In Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky, some beautiful scenery shots were created by dyeing the real landscape in desired color scheme. Yes, the film crewmembers actually had painted the grass and trees.

• The file cabinets in Stray Dog were all filled by cards with information on them despite none of these card ever showing up on camera. The crew invented an entire city's criminal background just for the sake of "realism."

• Tenet:
  • The inverted fight scenes were achieved with minimal special effects. John David Washington trained extensively alongside the stunt team to prepare and figure out how to fight in reverse so that the inverted party in each sequence would be seen pulling back their hits.
  • Nolan insisted on shooting on film with IMAX cameras. In shots with inverted causality, turning the footage backwards would have been trivial if it had been shot on digital, but shooting on film forwards and then reprinting the footage to run backwards would have lowered the image quality, so Nolan re-engineered the IMAX cameras so that they could feed film backwards.

• Similar to Act of Valor there's The Three Musketeers (2011), in which all the swords and other weapons were real, and none of the actors had stunt doubles.

• Tom Cruise describes Top Gun: Maverick as a "love letter" to aviation. So despite the difficulty and expense, many of the aerial shots and stunts were performed with real planes rather than done through CGI. A particularly neat trick is that they are using a two-seat aircraft with the actor in the rear seat so that they can be pretending to fly while the aircraft is truly in flight.

• Transformers Film Series:
  • The movies exist to sell toys, GM vehicles, and many other products, but Michael Bay didn't want to do it at first. Yes, Mr. Flash Cuts & Explosions had to be talked into doing this. Bay explained that the only thing that made him even bother to consider the job is that you don't just ignore an offer from Steven Spielberg. Once he went through "Transformers School" at Hasbro, he had a wave of inspiration that was about showing something no one has ever attempted to do before. Once convinced, he made sure the CGI was some of the most detailed ever made. Industrial Light & Magic actually said they hadn't done work this groundbreaking since Jurassic Park.
  • Devastator is likely ILM's greatest accomplishment to date. The scenes with him had such a massive level of detail that rendering him took the ILM equipment to its limits. "Took the ILM equipment to its limits" as in smoking and melting one of the motherboards. Also prior series just made a blur of motion between the transformations, sort of "cheating" the process. Here no two transformations are identical (same basic components go to the right place but how it does that changes) and each one is appropriate to the scene, sometimes done in slow motion for dramatic effect.
  • Bay insists on doing as many shots for real as possible, instead of doing everything in CGI. He rarely uses a blue screen. That really was the Hoover Dam, that was a real bus splitting in half, those are the real pyramids, that was a real sand explosion, there is a real life-size Bumblebee prop, the entire city of Chicago represents itself, etc.
  • Bay had to be coaxed into making the third one in 3D, because he said it was "gimmicky". Seriously. And when the decision was made, Bay refused to work with anyone but the best. The best being the crew behind the 3D in Avatar.

• Vertigo:
  • It took a week to film the brief scene of Madeleine staring at the painting of Carlotta, just because Hitchcock wanted to get the lighting right. The famous shot of Madeleine's silhouette at Ernie's Restaurant (when Scottie first sees her) was actually a composite of inserts from the original production and reshoots taken long after production had finished because Hitchcock was not entirely satisfied with it.
  • Hitchcock wanted a certain realism for the film but he hated shooting on location unless absolutely unavoidable. For the scenes set in Ernie's, the famous real-life restaurant (which shut down in 1995), Hitchcock recreated the entire restaurant in detail in Paramount's studio lot, and then he brought the entire staff and regular patrons to act as extras in the studio version of Ernie's.

• Who Framed Roger Rabbit embodies this trope. In an age when computer animation and fully green-screened film making technology were about a decade away, this film blended cel animation with live-action choreography, prop work, and humans, especially lead actor Bob Hoskins, so seamlessly that it was completely believable that humans and cartoons coexisted and interacted with each other.
  • The lengths the producers went through to get the rights holders of the numerous cartoons characters to allow their characters to appear in the movie, and then weave those characters' involvement in a believable yet hilarious way, goes to show just how far these creators were willing go to create the ultimate love letter to these cartoon legends.
  • On the special effects side, one small item paradoxically stands out yet is nearly invisible. In the scene where Eddie and Roger are handcuffed together, and Eddie is trying to find a saw to cut his way through the cuffs, the Running Gag of that scene is that Eddie keeps banging his head against an overhead lamp as he and Roger struggle against each other. The swing lamp causes the light to keep shifting and casting light all over the room throughout the entire scene, meaning the animators had to match up the light and shadows on and around Roger when they added him in later. Most people in the audience wouldn't notice, and no other collection of artists would have likely cared to put in such a minor, inconsequential, agony-inducing detail, but this team did it anyway. Such dedication and attention and care to detail has an unofficial name: Bumping the Lamp.
    • In one shot during the scene where Roger and Eddie sneak back into R.K.'s office looking for the will, Bob Hoskins inadvertently focused his gaze at human eye-level, not a 3-foot tall cartoon rabbit's (which in itself was notable, in that Bob could track an invisible character's movements without needing a stand-in to look at). This mistake was noticed during the animation stage. The animators' solution? Rationalizing that as they were on a clandestine mission, Roger would be the type of character who'd imagine himself to be a spy and draw him standing on his tip-toes whilst flattening himself against the wall behind him, bringing his eye-line level with Bob's.
• The story behind the making of "Uganda's first action movie" Who Killed Captain Alex? is considered the stuff of legend: it was made by creators from the slums of Nateete on a practically nonexistent budget (from anywhere as low as $200 to $85 USD), with props, film equipment, and even the computer it was being made on being assembled from leftover parts and scrap metal, and the filmmaking process involved working through the Ugandan heat, martial law, and general chaos of scrambling together an action movie from what available resources they had. No one was expecting the film to make it very far past their neighborhood, let alone to become a viral hit on YouTube — everyone went through all the hardships to make the film simply because they loved Hollywood action movies and really wanted to make one of their own.
• For The VVitch, since colonial Puritan-style homes naturally didn't exist in their filming location in Ontario, they had to build them themselves, hiring historians and experts in colonial construction, furniture, and clothing in order to construct an authentic homestead using period-accurate materials. The portrayal of the titular witch was also rooted in actual folklore and mythology about witchcraft from that time period, with Eggers describing it as "a Puritan's nightmare". Outside of nighttime outdoor scenes, all lighting was done with candles and natural light. Even the score was recorded using instruments dating back to the 17th century.

---