Are you sitting comfortably? Enjoying that popcorn, are you? Good, because a lot of people probably starved, drowned, burned and wept to entertain you in the cinema for 90-odd minutes.
Turns out some movies are a lot more fun to watch than they were to make...
1. Apocalypse Now
"I felt like I had fought in the war," said Dennis Hopper – a man who looked like he could handle a moderate dose of war. A perfect storm of drink, drugs, tropical diseases, Marlon Brando and an actual perfect storm dominated Francis Ford Coppola's chaotic 68-week shoot in the Philippines (most movies take about 12 weeks to shoot).
Martin Sheen had a heart attack, rogue tigers broke on to the set, Typhoon Olga destroyed the production facilities, the entire payroll got stolen, dictator Ferdinand Marcos wanted his helicopters back to put down a coup and a severely overweight Marlon Brando refused to read his lines unless he was entirely shot in shadow. And after all that, the local sound crew hadn't had the equipment to record the authentic background noise of the jungle, so sound editor Walter Murch made it all up afterwards from stock recordings.
Oh, and at one point they had literal, actual dead bodies hanging trees (bought from a medical supplier) to create atmosphere. The army came and took them away before shooting, though, so they had to recreate the scene with (live) extras.
Understandably, Coppola ultimately hurled his Oscars out the window.
2. Jaws
The definitive blockbuster still stands as the definitive example of how not to make a movie. The screenplay was rewritten every day on the fly, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus hated each other, the production spiralled over budget, and the robotic shark broke almost as soon as it was turned on.
On top of all that, the boat sank, a propeller almost decapitated the screenwriter and George Lucas got his head stuck in the shark's mouth. "I thought my career as a filmmaker was over," remembers Steven Spielberg.
3. The Revenant
"If everybody is having a good time, most likely the film will be a piece of shit," said Alejandro González Iñárritu on the set of his revenge epic – possibly the same day that half his crew quit, a naked guy got dragged along the ground by a horse and one crew member labelled the shoot "a living hell".
Shooting in -40 degrees in a remote Canadian forest, Iñárritu insisted on only using natural light, so the crew were required to lug the frozen, frequently-breaking camera equipment for miles every day just for a few precious hours of shooting time.
Also, the bit where Leonardo DiCaprio eats raw liver was real. "Alejandro threw me a real one," he recalled some months later in a presumably very comfortable hotel suite. "The bad part is the membrane around it. It's like a balloon. When you bite into it, it bursts in your mouth."
Leo is a vegetarian, by the way.
4. The Shining
Stanley Kubrick was one of the greatest directors of all time, but he wasn't one of the nicest. Deciding that the best way to make Shelley Duvall act stressed and scared was to put her through the emotional wringer for real, Kubrick bullied her into filming some of her takes over 100 times – enough to give her such severe panic attacks that her hair started falling out.
Taking up all the sound stages at Elstree simultaneously for a full 11 months, Kubrick only stopped when one of the sets burnt down, forcing him to call it quits.
5. Roar
With the tagline reading, "No animals were harmed in the making of this picture, but 70 cast and crew members were", Roar was sold on its infamous reputation as one of the most dangerous films ever made.
Somehow, someone thought it would be a good idea to use real lions on set, and the horror started as soon as the cage doors were opened. The cinematographer (Jan De Bont, who went on to direct Speed) was scalped and required 120 stitches to sew the back of his head on, producer Noel Marshall and star Tippi Hedren got gangrene, assistant director Doron Kauper had his throat torn, and star Melanie Griffith was mauled so badly that she needed plastic surgery. Amazingly, no-one was killed.
6. Fitzcarraldo
Fitzcarraldo is about a madman who forces a load of people to haul a giant steamship over a mountain deep in the Amazonian jungle – a good metaphor for director Werner Herzog's own insanity in making the film.
Original star Jason Robards got amoebic dysentery and dropped out, forcing a reshoot which meant Mick Jagger's role had to be written out entirely to allow him to tour with the Rolling Stones.
With Herzog insisting on using a real 320-ton steamship instead of a prop, the lines between fiction and reality blurred everyday on set as the cast and crew slowly lost the will to carry on.
A crew member was bitten by a snake and cut his own foot off with a chainsaw to prevent the poison killing him. Fiery lead actor Klaus Kinski got so difficult to work with that one of the local extras offered to kill him for Herzog. No need – Herzog later admitted that he tried to murder Kinski himself by setting fire to his bed, but his dog woke him up.
(It was a step up from their time together on Aguirre: Wrath of God, when Herzog merely threatened to shoot Kinski.)
7. The Island of Doctor Moreau
The story behind the 1996 version of The Island of Doctor Moreau is probably better than the film itself – starting with director Richard Stanley making a voodoo pact with a witch doctor to make sure he wasn't fired.
Marlon Brando's daughter died by suicide shortly before production, leaving the director unsure if he would even return. When he did turn up, he refused to learn a single line (he only spoke the words that were fed to him through a radio earpiece – even when a local police band interfered with the reception and led him to report police activity). He also obsessed over his dwarf co-stars and demanded extra peacock feathers for his hat every day.
Co-star Val Kilmer, brought in to replace a suddenly divorced Bruce Willis, learned that he too was getting divorced and demanded 40% fewer shooting days and a different role in the film, meaning other co-star James Woods was forced out and Rob Morrow was hired.
According to reports from the set, Kilmer was "hostile", "bullying" and "obnoxious" to director Stanley, and Rob Morrow, unable to handle any more tension, left the production, to be replaced by David Thewlis.
This was Day Two.
On Day Three, Stanley was fired by fax, and replaced by veteran John Frankenheimer. If you think things got any better, you'd be wrong. He got on so badly with Kilmer that he reportedly said, "If I was making The Val Kilmer Story I wouldn't hire that prick!"
