Quotes / Troubled Production

Music

"We all came down to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline
To make records with a mobile; we didn't have much time
Frank Zappa and the Mothers were at the best place around
But some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground

Smoke on the water
A fire in the sky
Smoke on the water

They burned down the gambling house; it died with an awful sound
Funky Claude was running in and out pulling kids out the ground
When it all was over, we had to find another place
But Swiss time was running out; it seemed that we would lose the race"

— Deep Purple, "Smoke on the Water"

Web Animation

Carolina: How’s the shoot going?
Jax: Well, we’ve had fires, sabotage, actors dying in strange circumstances, food shortages, paranormal activity, union strikes, lawsuits—in short, amazing!
Carolina: Are you being sarcastic?
Jax: No! See, the best movies have the most tortured productions. And this has been the most tortured production of all time! Ergo, this is going to be the best movie of all time!

—Red vs. Blue, "Walk and Talk"

Web Original

The sequel to the smash-hit Xbox launch title, Halo 2 is famous for practically defining how online console multiplayer should work, and somewhat less famous for an interesting development period that went through at least two engine rewrites, the project lead vanishing for a number of months, and generally being worked on right up until the gold master was burned. As a result, the ending is kind of abruTO BE CONTINUED

— The Cutting Room Floor's introduction for Halo 2

Chris: It took 12 years after Batman Returns for this movie to be released, and when it was, there was a debate involving 28 writers who had worked on the script. So really, the amazing thing isn’t that it’s bad, but that it’s so consistent in its badness.

David: All credit due to Pitof, apparently, for amalgamating all those scripts into a uniformly bad movie, with a real consistency in the ways in which it’s terrible. Well done, sir.

—Chris Sims and David Uzumeri on Catwoman (2004)

The worst movie of the year so far, the long-awaited biopic about the Gambino crime boss' rise from made man to top dog took four directors, 44 producers and eight years to make. It shows. The finished product belongs in a cement bucket at the bottom of the river.

—Johnny Oleksinski on Gotti

Let's spend $65 million on a musical about Spider-Man, because kids who like Spider-Man and old Jewish tourists who like to go to Broadway shows are totally the same demographic. Now, we're going to need a batch of forgettable U2 B sides and a harness system designed by Lyle Lanley from The Simpsons' monorail episode.

—Drew Magary

In his Inferno, Dante never described a torture with which to punish 80s sitcom stars. But if he did, working on ALF for all eternity would win hands down. Take a glance at your living room floor, and imagine it's riddled with over one dozen Viet Cong tiger traps.

— Cracked

Web Video

"It's basically the movie God said 'Fuck this shit' to, but no one took the hint."

—Brad, Phelous and Lupa Review Foodfight!

"Geez, what a mess. The movie about making this movie will be so much better than this movie!"

— Honest Trailers on Fantastic Four (2015)

"I thought it was the end of my career. It was incredibly painful to watch."

— The Angry Video Game Nerd interviews Seamus Blackley on Jurassic Park: Trespasser

"Right from the start, there was a lot of trouble with the project; many different writers and directors were involved with it. When David Fincher was assigned to the directing task, he had little time to prepare, didn't even have a finished script when they started shooting, and the studio interfered with a lot of his decisions. Lots of film productions are troublesome, but all that matters is what comes up on the screen in the end... and Alien³, unfortunately, isn't that awesome."

— James Rolfe on Alien³

"Clone Wars was at its best while on the verge of cancellation. You know, art through adversity and all that. It's how A New Hope was saved. The production of Star Wars should be fraught with hardship. It shouldn't be easy to tell a good story about space wizards it should be kind of hard to make that work. Clone Wars started off bland but with a big budget. It got better and better as it went on because it was always seen as that weird Star Wars cartoon for kids. It took a while before the guys behind it could actually turn it into something special and that hard work shows. You could see a progression of quality between the seasons. The most moving and exciting episodes are the very last ones because when faced with cancellation they were willing to go all out and try something different."

— The Cosmonaut Variety Hour discussing the success of Star Wars: The Clone Wars

"Troubled production is never not a thing, no matter what you're doing. You will always need more time, more money, less corporate oversight, and you could've always made a better project."

— The Mysterious Mr. Enter

So, just to sum up where we are right now: Street Fighter II, biggest game of this generation, people want a sequel. So Capcom asks the producer of Street Fighter II to return, and he says "no". So, desperate for ideas, Capcom gets somebody who had never made a fighting game before but was currently working on a fighting game that everyone said looked bad, and they said "Let’s just shove Ryu in there and make it Street Fighter III." Then they brought that Street Fighter II producer back, but made him work on this game, while also working on a prequel game that had a far more hellish development schedule, meaning he had to focus all of his attention on that game, basically leaving the Street Fighter III staff to fend for themselves. They then promoted the guy who had never made a fighting game to a producer role, despite the fact he had no idea how to be a producer. They then filled his old position with two guys, neither of whom had ever made a video game. This team, made up mostly of people who didn’t know anything about fighting games, now had to make the brand new Street Fighter, on a brand-new arcade system, while throwing out there every idea they possibly could, including using mocap for some reason, because f*ck it, nothing matters anymore. After working like this for years, brand-new developers, who did know how to make a fighting game, were brought on, and asked them, "Okay, so what have you got so far?" And they said, "Well, we decided we wanted to feel like Street Fighter." I want to make sure… that we all understand right now… this was the sequel to Street Fighter II.This is how Capcom ran development… on the sequel… to their biggest game ever. I can not stress this enough.

— Professor Thorgi, Street Fighter Retrospective - Part 3: A New Generation

Western Animation

"You think this is the first time that group of (guitar riff)-ing clowns has tried to reunite? There was that one time they almost reunited but Rockso drank a whole bunch of acid right before he went on stage and just spent the whole night spraying some lady with huge tits in the front row with a big spraying thing, and they didn't even play one song, cancelled. Then there was that one time they were supposed to reunite but Rockso, the night before, smuggled, like, twenty condoms worth of cocaine into his intestines, then he ate some super spicy Mexican food and the condoms melted and he OD'ed. He couldn't perform, cancelled. There was that one time they were about to reunite and, like, Rockso borrowed 20 million dollars from an Ecuadorian drug cartel, and they're like 'give us our money back' and he's like 'no, I'm not gonna give you your money back' and they're like 'well, we're gonna shoot' and he's like 'well, fine, shoot me' and they shot him, and now he pees out of the side of his dick. And, uh...they cancelled the show."

— Nathan Explosion on failed Zazz Blammymatazz reunions, Metalocalypse

Real Life

"A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army."

— Orson Welles

"Yeah? And Twinkies are fun to eat, but I doubt the people at the Twinkie factory are having any fun!"

— Madeline Kahn, when asked if her funny movies were fun to work in

"Making movies is either a utopia or it's like shoveling shit uphill."

— Sean Connery, 2006 AFI Life Achievement Award acceptance speech

"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane."

— Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

"Everyone wanted to kill one another, put one another in institutions."

—Jack Nicholson on making Easy Rider

"I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum."

— Werner Herzog on the making of Fitzcarraldo

"Working on RoboCop was like being the victim of a violent crime. You just try to blank it out of your mind and memory. I swore I'd never make another picture."

—Jon Davison, executive producer of RoboCop (1987)

"When good weather was needed, it rained. When rain was needed, it was sunny. The cameraman was Belgian, his crew French. The underlings were Hungarian, the extras were Russian. I speak only English — and not really that well. Each shot was chaos. By the time my directions were translated, what should have been a battle scene ended up as a dance marathon. In scenes where Keaton and I were supposed to stroll as lovers, Budapest suffered its worst weather in twenty-five years."

—Woody Allen on Love and Death

"The Abyss was many things. Fun to make was not one of them."

—Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

"She would change her mind about anything and everything: setups, locations, costumes. If you'd ask her, "Black or white?" she'd say, "Yes!" Nothing suited Elaine. Ishtar was a really difficult film. They went crazy in Morocco."

— Nigel Wooll, associate producer on Ishtar

"There have been bad times, but the only time I felt like giving up was during the filming of The Island of Dr. Moreau. I found myself looking up ‘success’ and thinking ‘If this is success, maybe I don’t want any of it.’"

— David Thewlis

This film would have been easier to shoot on the Moon

— Fun T-Shirt worn by the Titanic (1997) crew

"We go through 21 episodes, and we come to the last episode which was 'Dead On Arrival.' And I always thought it was kind of ironic that we went from [the pilot] 'Reborn' to 'Dead On Arrival'; and that show was Dead On Arrival... This all kinda went in the toilet and it was flushed, and away it went. That was the end of it."

— Don Paonessa on the cancellation of Highlander: The Raven

"It was a pain in the arse. A super pain in the arse. But in some ways it feels good because it was a struggle."

— Butch Vig, describing the production of Garbage's Bleed Like Me

"We kept on waiting for that magic moment when everything starts coming together, but it never arrived."

—Andrew Bado, member of QA for Drake of the 99 Dragons

"There's a famous drawing that someone did on a whiteboard in the team's space that shows a plane on fire trying to land on a runway, and people are jettisoning cargo crates out the back of the plane in order to try and get it on the runway. Every crate has the name of a feature we had to cut... In the end, we ran out of room on the whiteboard for all the crates."

— Chris Butcher on Halo 2

"Jerry Rees and I were sent down because we were told the project was drifting and were asked to check it out and give our assessment.

So we went down to a building they'd rented in Hollywood to check out what was going on, and were staggered at the quality of the artwork on the walls. The key staff was half American half Japanese, all great artists. AMAZING stuff.

We were floating around, talking to people casually, asking them about what they were doing, and they said "we're just illustrating what Ray Bradbury is writing".

We walked around some more among the jaw-dropping imagination and talent on display and ran into Bradbury himself. We remarked about the terrific work and asked Bradbury about the story he was writing for the film. "I'm just putting in writing what these wonderful artists are drawing", he said.

Jerry and I looked at each other; 'Uh-ohhh.'."

— Brad Bird on Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland

"In interest of full transparency, I have to be the bearer of bad news: the EP PSP hacker, as some may know, is in Russia^note Russia had recently started a war of aggression against Ukraine, leading to a boycott of the country. This means an indefinite hiatus until things clear up. I hope things progress for the better in the meantime, but until then, stay positive."

— CJ Iwakura

"We struggled with testing the game because you have to sleep to do so. Basically, we could only do one test run per day... while it's technically possible to proceed by using temporary sleep data, there is always a possibility of something unintended happening when actually sleeping, so we tried to have the testers sleep for real as much as possible."

— Keisuke Miyagawa on the development for Pokémon Sleep

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