The movie that took us around two hours to watch could have taken two years to make.
“While in production, schedules can change at the turn of a dime, and you have to be ready to pivot right then and there," says line producer and unit production manager Xavier Luis Salinas. "From the time you develop a script to a shooting script, you are looking at one to three years of your life trying to produce your project.”
And those one to three years are bound to be filled with a lot of ups and downs, highs and lows, craziness and chaos.
As the Raindance Film Festival site puts it, a film set is truly a place where Murphy’s law applies. Loads can go wrong, and often it does. From equipment malfunctioning to people getting injured, the crew knows to expect the unexpected.
The site explains that props, weather and stunts play a big role in making a film. "Cast and crew can trip over wires or be hurt by an explosive from a stunt that’s defective or isn’t handled properly," it notes.
One of the most common accidents that happens to people on a film set is falling.
"Falling off a ladder, a scissor lift, a scaffold, or a rooftop: unfortunately, these accidents occur more often than they should," reads production blog, The Beat. "People exercise caution in their daily lives, yet on set, if people are waiting or if something’s running behind schedule, people take chances they normally wouldn’t and end up injured."
Film set disasters aren't always about danger. Sometimes they're funny. Ask Renée Zellweger... She would know. Apparently, the actress had an awkward, but rather hilarious, mishap while filming a kissing scene while filming her Oscar-winning biopic Judy.
Just as she and her co-star Finn Wittrock locked lips, Zellweger’s prosthetic nose broke. And it didn't stop there. The nose gone rogue proceeded to ooze glue all over Wittrock’s face.
“I did not know until this kissing scene and I look at him with horror and I realise, ‘Am I more upset that I got that on his face – and we haven’t cut so I can’t be touching his face in a way to try and get it off – or that it’s attached to my head and there’s so much more where that came from?'” a mortified Zellweger later said.
Margot Robbie has also spoken of a rather awkward and painful experience she had while filming The Wolf of Wall Street. Robbie says one particular scene left her scarred. If you've seen the film, you might remember her and Leonardo DiCaprio getting hot and heavy on a bed of money.
“I got a million paper cuts on my back from all that money! It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” she revealed. “If anyone is ever planning on having s*x on top of a pile of cash: don’t. Or maybe real money is a bit softer, but the fake money is like paper, and when I got up off the bed, I turned around to get my robe and everyone gasped. I said, ‘What is it?’ And they said, ‘You look like you’ve been whipped a million times. Your back is covered in a thousand red scratches.”
There seems to be no shortage of mishaps when it comes to filming steamy movie scenes, despite the actors and actresses making it look so easy.
Lizzy Caplan once revealed how one particular incident left her a lot more deflated than she anticipated. The actress says she was already nervous about undressing in front of co-star Charlie Sheen in the TV series Masters of S*x. Things seemed to be going well, until they weren't...
Caplan told how they'd just completed the scene and the director yelled “Cut!”
"[Sheen] immediately walks over to a garbage can and throws up,“ Caplan said. ”My whole self-confidence plummeted to the ground and I realised that I’m a monster and anybody who touches me will immediately start vomiting and that’s just the way it’s going to be.”
What the actress didn't know at the time was that Sheen had eaten something that upset his stomach!
