Behind-the-scenes: Facts you need to know about your fave movies
Film nerds and bar trivia fans, this article is for you. Sometimes when you love a movie it isn’t enough to just watch the movie over and over again. To truly feel immersed you want to know every little detail about how the movie was made. Sometimes those facts will surprise you by being funnier or more shocking than the movie itself.
From Titanic to The Princess Bride – we’ve found some extremely interesting behind-the-scenes factoids to make your viewing experience all the more rich the next time you watch one of these classic movies.
Titanic
It’s shocking this little factoid isn’t more well known, but on what was supposed to be the last day of filming in Nova Scotia the cast and crew of Titanic were drugged with Phencyclidine – what is colloquially known as PCP or Angel Dust. The drug is a hallucinogen.
Nobody actually knows who spiked the lunch of the cast and crew, but they do know it was the seafood chowder that was spiked. James Cameron reports having vomited, and when he returned to set everyone was missing.
Some people were laughing, others crying, and Cameron says he was incredibly anxious. Many people ended up having to go to the hospital, and a lot of people had very bad trips.
The Mummy
Brendan Fraser, who played the male protagonist in the 1999 movie, has one scene where he’s nearly hanged. However, if you, like many, were surprised with how realistic the choking scene looked, there’s a reason.
Fraser really did end up getting choked out while they filmed the scene. The crew had tightened the tension on his rope just a little too much and Fraser was unable to keep his feet on the ground. Fraser recalled the moment saying, “I remember seeing the camera start to pan around, and then it was like a black iris at the end of a silent film”.
He woke up later, in pain, to an EMT calling his name. Fraser then went home for the rest of the day to recover from nearly suffocating to death.
Clueless
In the 1995 classic coming of age movie Clueless, actress Alicia Silverstone mispronounces the word “Haitians” in a monologue. However, this moment isn’t actually in the script. Silverstone really didn’t know how to say the word, but was unaware her perceived pronunciation was incorrect.
The director, Amy Heckerling, thought the moment was too good to be reshot, and told everyone not to correct Silverstone so they could keep it in the movie.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Jim Carrey is widely praised for his ability to play intensely wacky characters, and his role as the Grinch is one of his most beloved roles. However, he almost didn’t go through with the movie because of how much makeup and prosthetics he had to wear.
The makeup took eight hours to apply every time, and on the first day Carrey was so stressed out from wearing the thick layers he kicked through a trailer wall – he was ready to quit because the application felt like “being buried alive”.
So, the director brought in a CIA specialist to teach Carrey torture endurance in order to get through the movie. Though Carrey says what really got him through was listening to the Bee Gees. Odds are, Carrey’s hatred of wearing the makeup helped him channel the most iconic version of the Grinch.
Django Unchained
One of the most insane and dramatic scenes of the movie Django Unchained is one where Leonardo DiCaprio as Calvin Candie gives a passionate and terrifying monologue while his hand bleeds on a broken glass.
Except only half this scene was scripted. DiCaprio’s hand was accidentally sliced open during one of the takes, and instead of panicking and asking the cameras to stop, DiCaprio acted as if it was entirely planned. He went on with the monologue and continued to use his hand as a prop.
He went as far as to smear his blood on another actor’s face. Which of course, she had no way of anticipating. It’s clear in the scene he’s bleeding rather extensively. After the scene was done DiCaprio required stitches.
The Princess Bride
Remember the scene where Count Rugen knocks Wesley out in the woods? It turns out Christopher Guest really did knock Cary Elwes unconscious, by accident, of course. The poor actor woke up in the hospital to the sound of stitches being sewn into his head, by the same doctor who had attended to a broken toe of Elwes’s only a few weeks before.
