According to Francis Ford Coppola’s commentary track on The Godfather DVD, they went to a slaughterhouse holding pen, picked out a horse awaiting slaughter for pet food, and asked for the head to be sent to them when the deed was done. That’s why it looked so real.
I didn’t really need to know that, but it seems worth sharing with you. [I wonder whether he has a strange sense of humor and is making this claim as some kind of joke.]
But it made me think that many of you have picked up odd tidbits by listening to DVD commentaries, or the “Making of…” ‘documentaries’ that so often come along on the disc, worth sharing with us.
The number one question Peter Jackson and the other screenwriters of LOTR: FOTR is asked is, “Why doesn’t Glamdring glow during the battle in the mines of Moria?”
Speaking of horses and FOTR, doesn’t PJ mention in the director’s commentary that the scenes where the Fellowship are attempting to climb over the Misty Mountains before going into Moria used two people in a horse costume, rather than an actual horse for Bill the Pony? I assumed he was joking, I couldn’t see the horse even in long shot in any of those scenes, but then I didn’t actually search frame-by-frame.
The only place I noticed it was in the ULTRA SPECIAL SUPER DELUXXE 4-disc set, in one of the added scenes. When Strider and the hobbits are walking through a marsh, the horse, while an excellent costume, doesn’t quite move correctly. Plus, if you look closely in the same scene, you can see one of Merry’s hobbit-feet starting to come off.
In Fight Club, one of the lines that was changed from the book to the movie was in the scene where Marla, in post-coital bliss, tells Tyler that she hasn’t “been fucked like that since grade school.” Helena Bonham-Carter, being British, didn’t really know what “grade school” was when she shot the scene, so was unaware of just how inappropriate the line was.
I seem to remember in the Run Lola Run commentary that the scene where the ambulance (or some other vehicle shrugs) crashes through the glass that they could only afford one sheet of glass and therefore if they screwed up that scene, they wouldn’t be able to reshoot it. To ensure that the glass shattered properly on impact, they actually had a series of small charges that ran along the glass that were set off slightly before the vehicle hit it. If you view that scene frame by frame, you can actually see small sparks running along the bottom edge of the glass as the charges are being set off.
According to John Howard Davies, nothing of interest ever happened during the making of the “Fawlty Towers” television show. I know this because most of his DVD commentary is either:
1.) Non-existent. During a couple of episodes the viewer merely hears him breathing into the recording booth microphone.
2.) His comments mostly consist of complaining about Basil’s station wagon ("…that BLOODY CAR!") or pointing out shadows from the boom mic.
In Die Hard, director John McTiernan says Hans Gruber and his gang are meant to be the ideological descendants of Alex and the Droogs from Clockwork Orange. This is why Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is used throughout the film, and why Hans Gruber isn’t just some indoctrinated terrorist (as the bad guys in the book are).
Another great one from Fight Club is that during one scene, Meatloaf’s pants fell down as he was running out a door. They tried reshooting the scene, but they never got a take as good as the one where Meatloaf’s pants fell down, so they just used that one and hoped that folks didn’t notice.
In the commentary for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Nicolas Meyer states that the only way they could get a good scene with Shatner was just to do take after take until Shatner got bored.
Apparently, the “choking the bishop” scene in American Beauty had to be done repeatedly because Annette Benning kept laughing at the things Kevin Spacey was saying. Also, the sex scene with her and the “Reality King” was difficult because both her and the other actor kept laughing hysterically at what they had to do. (The director also says that he doesn’t think Annette Benning was acting in the scene where her character was freaking out at the dinner table.)
Finally, the best comments come from Ridley Scott. In talking about Alien, he states that the only people who knew what was going to happen in the scene where the alien explodes out of John Hurt’s chest were him, Hurt, and the FX people. The rest of the cast had no idea of what was going to happen. They were not amused. In his commentary for Gladiator he makes the statement when Connie Nielson walks on screen, “She can be my Emporess anytime.” (I totally agree.)
The scenes in the house were shot under grueling conditions. At one point, they were shooting for something like 29 hours straight. The house was hot, and everyone was tired and cranky, no one more so than Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface (if I had to sit in a hot house for 29 hours in a stinky leather mask, I wouldn’t be too happy either).
Anyway, at one point Leatherface slices their female prisoner’s finger with a knife, and their dessicated Grandpa suckles on the finger. The prop knife had tape on the blade and a little squeeze-bulb full of fake blood, with some tubing to get the blood to the right place. Well, because of the heat or something, the tubing kept getting clogged, and they had to keep redoing the scene. Finally, Hansen had had enough. He secretly ditched the bulb and tubing and removed the protective tape from the blade of the knife. On the next take, the one that’s in the movie, he actually sliced the girl’s finger. Since her character was supposed to be screaming insanely anyway, no one noticed.
In fact, Tobe Hooper, who is on the commentary with Hansen, apparently heard about this for the first time during the recording of the commentary. Hooper seems pretty shocked about it.
Back in the early draft phase, when the Shallow Hal script was still called Eye of the Beholder, Rosemary’s original name was Kimberly. It was changed to Rosemary so that they could use Edison Lighthouse’s “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” song at the end.
(To this day I wonder if that song’s references to “Rosemary” were secretly about marijuana.)
I loved the commentary for 1776. Among other things you learn that the song “Cool Cool Considerate Men” was removed at the direct request of Richard Nixon, and that Howard da Silva (the actor who played Franklin) was a complete prima donna.
I agree that most commentaries are just noise, though.
(I totally agree.)