A few weeks ago while at work I stepped out for a coffee. Luckily we have a like cafe/kitchen in our building and while the coffee is not what I would refer to as good, or even desireable, it is perfectly cromulent and at the very least filled a necessary void for someone who would be spending the next 4 hours listening to “lockout/tagout”. Now while waiting in line I was talking to a co-worker of some kind (first time meeting this individual, we have a few thousand at my location) and as conversations with me often go we turned the topic to movies. He dropped a bit of knowledge about some behind the scenes stuff on X-Files regarding David Ducovney and told me he loves hearing about those stories. I politely replied with the story of Superman taking on the KKK (and winning) and how the comic effected the real world, and even more politely resisted the urge to tell all of the behind the scenes stuff I know.
And that was when I realized I liked the Behind The Scenes stuff too! There are so many stories of things that happened between shooting, how lines were adlibbed or just flat out dropped. The Lord of the Rings movies have enough stories to fill out this entire post ranging from Christopher Lee’s past to matching tattoos. This is one of the things I really liked about DVD commentaries. I actually used to make time to listen to a lot of them during other activities and learned a lot about movies I loved in the process. And that is what it is all about for me. Learning about shooting angles, scoring scenes (adding the score to the scene that is) and BTS stories just make me appreciate movies even more. In the past year I have actively chased down more than one rumour about Behind the Scenes stories of some movies because they were so cool it would elevate the movie to a great one (or in the case of Jack and Jill, still not a good movie but kind of cool story that I really hope is true, never would have thought I’d say that).
In the end behind the scenes stuff can either bring us closer to movies we love, or elevate them in our eyes so something good becomes great. We have a window into something to feel a deeper connection and learn more about people/things we love. The stories about Christopher Lee made me look more into him and his past and realize he was pretty much one of the coolest humans ever aside from his acting and many iconic roles. So this weeks prompt is simply: What Behind the Scenes/production stories from movie(s) are your favourites? Rumours count, or even something cool you learned because of a movie. As I alluded to a couple of times in the write up I really love the story about Christopher Lee while filming Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Peter Jackson instructed Lee to scream as he was stabbed in the back and he refused citing “Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody’s stabbed in the back? Because I do.” that men who are stabbed in the back do not scream but sigh and weakly gasp for air. Apparently there was a ripple on set as crew realized he had seen possibly multiple stabbing deaths (during his WWII days).