What Was the Hardest Film to Make?

Pulling a 320 ton boat up a hill

film

ing half a movie underwater and trying to

make

a movie with Wedley Snipes, while making any movie has its challenges, some really stand out as being a total nightmare. We are here to shed light. in

what

we think are 12 of the

hardest

movies to

make

. These

film

productions usually started with big ambitions and ended up with budgets that skyrocketed due to an ever-growing list of problems. These are movies disowned by their actors or that almost bankrupted the studios or even had the cast and crew constantly attacked by animals, there are many contenders competing for the title of the

hardest

movie to make, but as always we want to hear from you which one you think deserves the crown, let's first address the two obvious ones when thinking about Production Nightmares Are Possibilities Water World and Apocalypse Now are the first movies that come to mind.

They are the example of everything that can go wrong on a film set. Water World, often dubbed as Mad Max on water, delves into a future where polar ice. The layers have melted, dramatically raising sea levels and turning Earth into a liquid planet. The people in the film relied on the use of boats, jet skis and makeshift floating settlements, but since the film was made in the early mid-90s to make everything look real, everything had to be done practically, the script went through many rewrites and When Kevin Cner signed on as star and Kevin Reynolds as director, Universal gave him a $100 million budget to make it happen, but Steven Spielberg, who knew a thing or two about the difficulties of filming. in the open waters of Jaws they were warned not to do the same, did you listen? no, they kept going fighting the elements in a giant water enclosure off the coast of hawaii and mother nature wasn't playing nice waves they pushed camera crews out of position cner they were almost swept out to sea during a storm while it was tied to a boat and there was an incident where Jee Triplehorn and child actress Tina Maharo almost drowned and a hurricane hit the place and washed away the sets, inflating the budget by millions and as if that wasn't enough. the script was still a mess.

Jos Weeden was flown in to help rewrite parts of it that described the experience as 7 Weeks of Hell. When production wrapped, the budget skyrocketed to $175 million, making it the most expensive film at the time that also they filmed for 157 days instead of the originally planned 96. Cosner and Reynolds, who used to be friends and had worked together on three other films before, ended up despising each other by the end of this production. Creative differences drove a wedge between them, leading Reynolds to abandon the project. project near the end, leaving Cosner to finish it with all the drama and budget overruns in the headlines, some people were practically rooting for Water World to fail at the box office and even though it did, it didn't exactly do well with critics or at the box office.

Apocalypse Now had it even worse when the lead actor suffering a heart attack was one of the minor setbacks. You know, things got really chaotic. The film follows a soldier on an undercover mission in the Vietnam War. Chasing a renegade colonel who has gone mad with his own army in the jungle, was directed and produced by Francis Ford Copla, who tried to get someone but him to direct, but fate had other plans. The film was primarily shot in the jungles of the Philippines, but before they even started filming they had to swap out Harvey Kitel for Martin Sheen because he simply wasn't playing the character the way Copa had in mind - the first of many delays and then Typhoon Olga came and shut down production and destroyed between 40 and 80% of their sets, including the entire Playboy Playmate set.

After rebuilding and relocating some sets, filming returned to normal and everyone thought the worst was over. left behind, but then an overweight Marlin Brando arrived to play Colonel Curts, a character that was supposed to. being thin and consumed by the jungle br had also not bothered to read Heart of Darkness as Copa had requested, so the character had to be completely reworked and Copa had to conjure up a new ending since Brando's bulky physique did not work with the original script Brando and Copa spent days together exploring the characters putting the brakes on the production even more the final result Brando dressed in black and was filmed mainly in the dark to reduce some visual kilos, but the way Brando played Curts couldn't have been more iconic than Sheen, who was only 36 at the time and suffered a heart attack that forced his brother Joe Estes to step in for some long takes and voiceovers, and let's not forget Dennis Hopper, who apparently he was high the whole time and couldn't.

Remember his lines and these were just the problems. The film was ambitious from day one using real helicopters and military equipment, working with the Philippine government and having hordes of extras. There is a famous documentary that delves into this production and you can find many YouTube videos. Breaking it down too, when filming finally wrapped, its initial budget of 12-4 million skyrocketed to $31 million and

what

was expected to be a 4 month shoot ended up taking 238 days to film, but unlike Waterworld Apocalypse Now It was a success with both critics and the box office. The last office cop movie was also an uphill battle, but for a completely different set of reasons we're talking about megalopolis, a passion project that had been simmering in the cop's brain for 40 years back in the '80s.

Copa began writing the script and even told others about it, he was ready to finance it himself just like he did Apocalypse Now, but then disaster struck in the form of One From the Heart, a film that he also financed and which was a great failure that left the Cup swimming in debt. Megalopolis was pushed into the background while he directed a handful of other films to dig himself out of that financial hole, the films being Bram Stoker's Dracula Jack and The Rainmaker, fast forward to 2001 and Copa finally had enough money to greenlight to his dream project that he began to put together.

A-listers and even filmed some footage of New York City for the movie but guess what the plot of the movie is where a catastrophic disaster hits New York City and an architect sets out to rebuild it as a utopia and stumbles upon a major problem when the 9/11 attacks. in New York City happened that same year Copa would have really needed to change the movie to be something else, so he abandoned it. It's kind of like what happened with Madmax Fury Road, another movie that was difficult to make before hitting a major roadblock in 2001, when the US dollar plummeted against the Australian dollar after 9/11, which really inflated the budget, but fast forward to 2019, the megalopolis has risen from the depths of development hell with Copa dropping $120 million of its own money after selling a portion of its Winery Empire.

At the time of making this video, filming had wrapped , features a stacked ensemble and will be released in 2024, there are no signs of production problems yet, but Adam Driver said it was one of the best filming experiences of his life, fingers crossed it will be that way. It'll be nice, but Copa hasn't directed a movie since 2011 and he hasn't been anywhere near his '70s form. We'll get back to Major Production Issues with our next movie. Fitz Coraldo by Wner Herzog. Now Herzog is no stranger to Crazy Productions, but Este takes the cake, we're talking about transporting a 320 ton ship up a steep 40° slope in the Peruvian Amazon.

The story centers on Fitz Coraldo, played by Claus Kinsky, a man who wanted to build an opera house in the Peruvian Amazon and needed to transport a steamship over a steep hill to reach a richer part of the Amazon basin. . The studio suggested using miniatures in a Backlot studio for the scene, but Herzog didn't agree, he wanted something real, so they went to Peru with the help of hundreds of indigenous extras and a Brazilian engineer who designed an elegant pulley system. , they hoisted the boat uphill. Herzog even called himself the conqueror of the useless, believing that no one else would do something like this, not even the real Fitz Galdo.

On which the story is based he performed a stunt like this, he simply dismantled a ship before moving it and his ship weighed only 32 tons, although he was extremely ambitious and dangerous, which caused many extras to be injured. There were much worse problems with this production, two small ones. The plane crashes, a lumberjack cuts his foot after a snake bite and a surprise attack by scavenger tribes with two people taking arrows to the throat and stomach and let's not forget the scene where the ship crashes in Rapids leaving crew members injured, including cinematographer Thomas. Mom who had her hand broken and now throw Kinsky and his tantrums on top of all this and you've got a major production on your hands.

The guy was a force of nature doing attacks left and right. They actually filmed 40% of the movie with Jason Robards before he got sick and was swapped for Kinsky, the tantrums got so bad that an indigenous chief offered to kill Kinsky for Herzog, but the director said no, I still need him to film. , leave it to me and, as with Apocalypse, there is now a must-see documentary called Load of Dreams that analyzes this crazy production. Definitely worth seeing. We've made entire videos on Kinsky and Herzog. If you want to hear more crazy stories there, we definitely recommend watching them before continuing. next movie, if you're enjoying this video so far, we'd really appreciate it if you liked it and subscribed, it really helps the channel a lot anyway, let's get back to it for the next one, let's take a break from the ridiculously complicated productions and dive in.

In the realm of working with difficult actors, enter Blade Trinity, a film that was much more difficult than it had any right to. Being difficult to work with actors is nothing new, you have your classics like Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer causing chaos on Dr. Maro's island, but there are many other factors that complicate that production, while the Blade trilogy only had one Wesley Snipes and I guess there was a bit of interference from the studio as well. David Goyer, the writer of the three Blade films, took over directing Blade Trinity after Gaml Del Toro passed away.

In it, Snipes, who had a blast working with Del Toro on Blade 2, didn't feel like the new director or the script Goyer wrote, and to add fuel to the fire, Snipes was dealing with a legal drama while filming something. about tax issues that loomed on the horizon. that would result in him going to prison years later, this combo turned Snipes into something of a nightmare on set, he would outright refuse to film scenes, getting to the point where if it wasn't a close-up of him, they would do it. use a spare notebook and Oswald gave us some fun details about this production, revealing that Snipes stayed in his trailer smoking marijuana and at one point only communicated via Post-it notes signed by Blade.

This all culminated in the legendary scene where Snipes was supposed to open his eyes, but he refused to do so, so they had to CGI him opening his eyes, which didn't look good at all. The movie didn't do as well as the others at the box office and Snipes' early antics really slowed down. Moving forward in his career, now let's talk about a film that took ambition to a whole new level. James Cameron is the abyss. Cameron is no stranger to pushing the boundaries of cinema. He has a history of taking on incredibly difficult projects and developing the technology to create both avatars.

It was difficult and really delayed when the movies could have been made and Titanic was a monster in itself with the actual dives on the Titanic, the ship for filming was built to full scale and had to control up to 1,000 extras and 800 crew members. crew at any time. given time, but the abyss is another Beast, the film follows a US recovery team in the search for a sunken US submarine in the Caribbean about this production Cameron said he knew it was going to be a difficult shoot, But even I had no idea. How difficult, I don't want to go through this again. 40% of the film took place underwater and the cast and crew often worked for 6 days. 70-hour work weeks in 6-month production.

Filming took place in two giant water tanks indoors. In an unfinished nuclear power plant, the actors were usually ata depth of 11 M for no more than an hour, while Cameron and the team were at 17 M depth for 5 hours straight, there were many cases of drowning and even movie star Ed Harris came close. call was also towed 10 m deep with its hull full of liquid, which he described as the most painful moment of filming, without surprise, he has publicly repudiated the film and does not want to talk about it, the conditions of the tank made it brutal.

Additionally, algae blooms reduced water visibility to just 6M and chlorine levels were so high that they burned many divers' skin and bleached her hair. Oh, and one time the lights went out mid-session, it was so dark they couldn't even see theirs. hands in front of them and then there's Cameron with a characteristically dictatorial style of barking orders through a public address system whenever someone dared to complain that he'd hit them with I let you breathe, what more do you want? Many people claim that filming Abyss was the hardest thing they've ever done, but despite all of Blood Sweat and Tears, Abyss didn't make a splash at the box office, sure it got some love from critics, but it wasn't as lucrative as Cameron's other projects now.

Let's talk about two films that went down in history for all the wrong reasons: Cleopatra and Heaven's Gate, these films are excellent examples of budgets that get out of control. First, we have Cleopatra, which hit theaters in 1963 and was the highest-grossing film in history. the year and still lost money, but how well they built a whopping 79 sets and made 26,000 costumes; Leading lady Elizabeth Taylor's wardrobe alone cost a whopping $194,800 and Taylor received what was at the time a record salary of $1 million. The movie was very great but it was the production problems that helped make it the most expensive movie at the time.

The first setback was when Taylor was sidelined due to health issues near the start of filming. She was diagnosed with menitis, which caused production to remain delayed for weeks until she was postponed indefinitely during this time. Joseph Manowitz replaced original director Ruben Miman, who in the first 16 weeks was already over budget, spending $7 million on just 10 minutes of unusable film. Filming took even longer to resume because Taylor was hospitalized again, this time with pneumonia that required a tracheotomy. to cure her when filming finally resumed it was hectic manowitz wasn't thrilled with the script so he threw it away and started from scratch manowitz was filming during the day and writing the script at night and even a director of photography collapsed from exhaustion there were many re- Script rewrites and sets being torn down and rebuilt due to changing locations, all of this really made the budget skyrocket and just when they thought they were in the clear 20th Century Fox, the studio that was financing the film decided to cancel some battle scenes and terminated Taylor's contract shortly after Manowitz completed and showed his first cut to executives, he was fired and blamed for over-budget, but since he was writing while filming the script, Manowitz was the only one who really knew how everything had to fit. together, so they hired him again to see the film through to completion, the film's final budget was 31.1 million and although it lost money in its first year, it ended up making a profit the following years with its rental and distribution rights , the same cannot be said.

For our next movie, Heaven's Gate, which flopped so hard at the box office that people dubbed the world's box office problems Kevin's Gate, it only made $3.5 million on a $44 million budget and many point to it as one of the reasons for director-driven films. Director Michael Chimino, coming off the top of two Oscars for The Deer Hunter, was ready to tackle his next project Heaven Gate with an approved budget of $1.6 million, but there was something about the way he created this epic western. Chimino had perfectionist tendencies. and they were persistent on set, they were already 5 days late, only the sixth day of filming required a lot of retakes, sometimes even 50 retakes of a single scene, he even waited for certain clouds that he liked to enter the workshop before filming many.

The scenes were filmed during golden hour, a time just before sunset that would only last 5 minutes, so they would only have a maximum of a few takes each day to get those shots. There was a lot of waiting on set up to the point where Sir John Hurt went to film The Elephant Man before returning and continuing with this film. Chino's perfectionism peaked when he asked for a street built for the film to be torn down because it didn't look right, he wanted it 6 feet wider and instead of breaking up. going down only one side of the street and moving at 6 feet, he wanted both sides to be knocked down and moved 3 feet each, so, no surprise, the film's budget skyrocketed to $44 million in the end, but the surprising thing was that when the studio United Artists began to investigate why they were paying so much to rent land and discovered that the owner of the land was none other than Michael Chimino.

It's no surprise that he took his time filming the film and it received a lot of criticism, especially for its notorious amount of animals. abuse and was withdrawn from theaters until a new reissue. The owner of United Artist did not like the effect the film had on their public image, in addition to the financial damage, so they sold the studio to the owner of Metro Mayor Goldwin. a year after the film's release where it became a subsidiary of MGM, now let's talk about our most recent film on the list with 2015's The Revenant, the production of which was dubbed hell and for good reason the film follows Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass af Bring Out. for Revenge after being presumed dead by his own team, Alejandro Inaru directed and co-wrote the film and the original budget was set at 60 million.

There were a few factors that made this an incredibly difficult film to make. The film takes place in the cold. Wilderness is determined to film only in natural light and put Leo through hell so he can win an Oscar. Most of the film was made in the frigid wilderness of Canada's Alberta region during the winter before jumping to Argentina once the snow began to melt. filmed the film chronologically delaying what was supposed to be an 80 day shoot by a few more months, this was because filming in natural light meant that they didn't have much time during the day to film and work in such remote locations at the time. which takes time to arrive and return wasted 40% of the filming days were very difficult for everyone, the temperature reached -25 °C, causing the equipment to break, although no serious injuries occurred, one by one, team members quit or were fired with explanation.

As a conductor, if I identify an out-of-tune violin, I have to take it from the orchestra and Leo endured a lot during this production, he went to frozen rivers, he slept on animal carcasses, he ate raw bisen liver, he learned a lot beforehand to prepare. Leo said I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the hardest things he's ever had to do, the original $60 million budget ballooned to $135 million by the end of production, but it was a huge box office success and Leo finally got that Oscar, even if he had to get attacked by a bear to get it.

Speaking of being attacked by animals, our next film, 1981's Roar, had the most. Animal-related injuries from any movie are often labeled as the most dangerous movie ever made. The film follows a naturalist who lives in an African nature reserve full of big cats. It stars married couple NL Marshall and Tippy Hedrin, who created and financed the film together. It was made to raise awareness about poaching and had an initial budget of 3 million during its long production run, they amassed around 150 big cats along with some elephants and several large birds. The problem was that most of these animals were untrained, which resulted in tons of injuries.

There are estimates. that at least 70 of the 140 people on the crew were injured during production and most recent estimates believe it was more than 100 of them. Marshall had his hand bitten by a lion during a fight scene, then he was bitten on the leg and then 10 other wounds at that time. Production concluded even as Gang Green was diagnosed with blood poisoning and his wife, Hedrin, was bitten on the head by a lion during a promotional shoot and her teeth scraped his skull. She also broke her ankle when an elephant picked her up with its trunk. that same elephant kicked its trainer breaking his shoulder, oh and a lion scalped the cinematographer and a lion bit the assistant director in the throat and jaw, so I hope you understand that this production was brutal to perform and to add insult.

To make matters worse, production went on for years longer than expected, with many weather problems and flooding, which raised the budget from 3 million dollars to a whopping 177 million and did terrible at the box office; some say they were struck by the Exorcist's curse. Due to NL Marshall's ties to the film as an executive producer who stuck to the theme of filming animals, we now got 1967's Dr. Dittle, although this might not have been as intense as Roar, it still had its fair share of trouble making this movie they worked on. Featuring more than 1,200 live animals, from dogs to pigs and even giraffes, the film follows a veterinarian who can communicate with the animals played by Rex Harrison, whose bad behavior on set made the production even worse.

Some of the animals' antics on set were straight out of a comedy. sketch a goat ate the script a fawn ate paint and needed its stomach pumped the squirrels ate important parts of the set and the sheep kept urinating on Harrison which required many repetitions the best story I read was when I filmed a difficult scene where all the animals had to sit Still, Harrison stopped singing randomly, he said he heard director Richard Fleer yell, cut, but Fleer denied it while arguing about it. They both heard it this time and it turned out to be a parrot screaming.

Cut even something as simple as putting ducks in a pond. They did not continue on their way where the ducks began to sink and could not swim because it was not the time of year in which their feathers were water repellent, in addition to all the problems with the animals, they had problems with the weather, the members of the crew got sick and a disgruntled local resident tried to blow up the set with a homemade bomb—you know, the usual stuff that happens during movie filming. The film's budget increased from its initial $6 million to $17 million and flopped at the box office and with critics and our toughest last film. make is Russian Arc from 2002 is a somewhat experimental film that follows a ghost wandering around the Winter Palace of St.

Peter BG for various periods of time the difficulty came in the way they filmed everything in one take with no secrets Cuts as in Birdman, the film tells through 33 rooms of the Russian Hermitage museum with more than 2,000 actors and three live orchestras, all in a single 96-minute take, the museum offered to close for 2 days for filming, but director Alexander Sakarov rejected the offer and said he only needed one that they recorded. using a Sony hdw f900 camera and had someone carry an external hard drive attached while following the cameraman with only 4 hours of daylight available sakarov only had enough time for a few attempts his first attempt failed at the 5 minute mark and the other two much This later left him without much battery and daylight left him with enough for a good shot and his next shot gave him what he needed, except there is a shot of a violinist looking directly into the camera at one point.

I can't even imagine how. It must have been stressful to achieve this, especially considering that Sakarov only spoke Russian while the cinematographer only spoke German, so they had to have a translator with them during the filming of Frantic Russian Arc to this day it remains the longest shot in a movie and I don't see it being dethroned anytime soon and those were 12 of the hardest movies to make, but before we finish we wanted to add an extra one, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, yes, we know it's not just one movie, but I had to do it.

It's worth mentioning how difficult it was to make and it wasn't even a production nightmare, sure you broke a toe here and there, but the difficulty arose purely from how overly ambitious and grandiose the amount of work needed for each part of was. The process was just crazy, from adapting one ofthe literary works that were considered unfilmable until all three films were filmed at once, something we would never see happen today and you cannot forget its perfect combination of practical and digital effects and how much it boosted the industry every time you watch the film, It is simply shocking that something like this was made, it showed Hollywood that nothing was impossible to film, there are many documentaries and videos that delve into the making of these films that we do not want.

Stay longer, we welcome you because this was already a pretty long video, so there you go. 12 movies we think were the hardest to make. Are there some that were even more difficult? Share your thoughts below if you liked the video be sure to leave a like. Subscribe and check out our patreon for some cool perks, but until next time, have a good one