Updated March 16, 2022 3.2k votes 634 voters 30.1k views
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Vote up the most interesting and amusing behind-the-scenes movie facts.
If you love movies enough, you might eventually develop an interest in how they get made. It's bracing to realize that the shimmering images we see on movie screens and on our TVs – that, if distributed widely enough, can become like collective dreams for a whole civilization – began as a bunch of highly paid actors doing silly things in front of a camera. Questions emerge: how did this or that actor get chosen for a key role? How was a seemingly "impossible" shot or special effect achieved? How did the actors feel about doing the movie, and how were their lives changed afterward?
Sometimes the behind-the-scenes stories from movies can be more affecting than the movies themselves, because they involve actual people and have the spontaneity and randomness that we associate with real life. In that spirit, here's a grab bag of the best behind-the-scenes movie facts we learned in 2021. Make sure to vote up your favorites!
In a 2016 interview on The Graham Norton Show, Jodie Foster confirmed that she rarely spoke to co-star Anthony Hopkins for the duration of filming The Silence of the Lambs.
The actors first met at a reading for the script and she found his performance terrifying. After that, Hopkins and Foster were usually separated on-set by glass partitions or cell bars, making conversation difficult between camera setups - and their characters rarely shared the same frame onscreen.
"I avoided him," recalled Foster. "I really avoided him. And then, I was eating a tuna fish sandwich, it was the last day, and he... sidled up to me, and I said - I don't know, I sort of had a tear in my eye - 'I was really scared of you,' and he said, 'I was scared of you!'"
Both Foster and Hopkins won Academy Awards for their performances.
Samuel L. Jackson won the role of Jules Winnfield because of his massive talent, but also because of a hamburger. The actor was one of two people in contention for the part. On the day of his second audition for Tarantino, he was stunned to realize the other man, Paul Calderon, had been called back as well. That irritated Jackson, as did Tarantino's lateness. Aside from being angry, he was hungry, so he went out to grab a hamburger and brought it back to the audition site.
In comes Sam with a burger in his hand and a drink in the other hand and stinking like fast food. Me and Quentin and [producer] Lawrence [Bender] were sitting on the couch, and he walked in and just started sipping that shake and biting that burger and looking at all of us. I was scared sh*tless. I thought that this guy was going to shoot a gun right through my head. His eyes were popping out of his head. And he just stole the part.
The effect was so menacing that they made sure Jackson ate a hamburger onscreen the same way.
Billy Crystal's City Slickers character rides a horse named Beechnut, and the two hit it off from the start. "This is such a great horse," Crystal noted in the DVD commentary. "He really was like a great athlete."
The rapport between Crystal and Beechnut was so strong that the production's horse wrangler gave Beechnut to Crystal after filming was over. They reunited for City Slickers II a few years later, and Crystal even rode Beechnut off the stage at the 1991 Academy Awards.
Crystal recalled their time together in later years:
I would go and sit and read and he would graze in the background. He'd always put his head on my shoulder. It was an affectionate, unusual relationship I had with this incredible horse.
Beechnut stayed with Crystal for the rest of his life, until the horse became ill in 2008 and had to be euthanized.
Given that the script was in a constant state of flux, the cast of Gladiator sometimes had to memorize new scenes at the last minute. Other times, they just flat-out improvised. For example, in the scene between Maximus and Marcus Aurelius in which the former describes the farm he came from, Russell Crowe drew from personal experience.
The actor simply described his own home back in Australia. Perhaps because he was utilizing something so personal, it gave the sequence a touching sense of authenticity:
Very simple place. Pink stones that warm in the sun. A kitchen garden that smells of herbs in the day, jasmine in the evening. Through the gate is a giant poplar. Figs, apples, pears. The soil, Marcus, black, black like my wife’s hair. Grapes on the south slopes, olives on the north, wild ponies play near the house.
To Gibson's pleasure, they turned out to be everything he could have expected. "You know they wear kilts; they’re into the full tradition,” Gibson recalled. “So I asked the old question, ‘What do you wear under the kilt?’ And this one guy, Seorus, just looked at me and said, ‘Your wife’s lipstick!’ That’s pretty heavy, right? But that’s the wit; it’s biting!”
The "code" used in The Matrix continues to fascinate audiences. It's a long string of symbols, green in color, that look somehow both inviting and menacing. If you've ever wondered whether it's some sort of actual computer code, rest assured that the truth is far more banal.
The Matrix code is actually just a bunch of sushi recipes. It was created by Simon Whiteley, a production designer at Animal Logic, an FX company in Australia. The Wachowskis asked him to come up with something new after the code designed by another company failed to meet their expectations.
Whiteley went home and began looking through his wife's Japanese sushi cookbooks for inspiration. He used the recipes he found in them as the basis for his code, hand-lettering and painting the Japanese characters, then sending them to be digitized and animated. The rest is history.
