5 Movie Moments That Were Adorable Behind The Scenes
All of Hollywood's most violent, scary, and shocking moments were still created by people. People who make little inside jokes, who goof off at work, and who occasionally screw around with puppets (depending on the accessibility of puppets in the workplace). That's why some of the most serious moments in film and television history have shockingly cute behind-the-scenes stories. For instance ...
Sansa Stark's Actress Adopted Her Direwolf
Sansa Stark's role in Game Of Thrones has been a grim death march of murdered pets, murdered parents, murdered siblings, murdered idealism, brutal torture, and horrible rape. Fortunately, the stories behind the scenes read less like the Marquis de Sade and more like Randy Newman lyrics. When one of the direwolves found itself out of a job, actress Sophie Turner's mom convinced HBO to let them adopt her. And so, just like in your fanfiction, Sansa and Lady are living happily together forever.
Meanwhile, when the cast members aren't killing and raping each other on-screen, they're enjoying more production vacation time than Adam Sandler.
We're going to naturally assume that Oberyn's not wearing a suit.
Seriously, they look like they have the best time together ...
It gets harder and harder to take all of these people seriously as they're butchering and knife-raping each other after you see that their off-screen lives are basically a '60s beach comedy.
Despite Varys clearly belonging to a Bond movie.
The Muppets Crash On Dagobah
The Empire Strikes Back wasn't exactly a breeze to film, especially the scenes on Dagobah. It took up to four hours to shoot two lines of dialogue in the hot, humid muck. Sometimes, they would even have to wear masks to stave off the nausea caused by the foggy, gassy confines of Yoda's backyard. Plus, getting the Yoda puppet to work properly was a technical nightmare.
With frustrations running high, Yoda operator Frank Oz decided that a surprise was in order. Hamill had just delivered the line "I followed my feelings," when Miss Piggy popped up next to him from out of nowhere and declared "Feelings? Ya wanna know about feelings? Get behind this couch and I'll show ya feelings, ya little runt."
Oz happened to also be the puppeteer responsible for numerous Muppets and Sesame Street characters, and he decided to have a few of his co-workers visit him on set. While it was rather scandalous to have Miss Piggy shamelessly flirt with Luke Skywalker right in front of her green beau, Hamill got over the awkwardness and sang a duet of "Feelings" with Miss Piggy. Sadly, their musical number wasn't filmed -- after all, it was simply a semi-spontaneous moment to perk up the folks on set. Though we do have some photos ...
And every picture from the visit looks like one of your weird childhood fever dreams come true. Look at Yoda with his thousand-yard stare, trying to tolerate those uppity young puppets. They're like his hyperactive grandkids, and that explains so much.
"My swamp these kids need to get off."
Martin Scorsese Loved Working With His Mom
Martin Scorsese doesn't really make movies you can enjoy with your mom. But hidden beneath his piles of drugs, profanity, and corpses is a family portrait featuring a sweet old lady who's always willing to help her son out with his little projects. We've told you before about how Martin's mom, Catherine Scorsese, held her own alongside Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, and Joe Pesci in an improvised scene in Goodfellas. But we shouldn't be surprised that she aced it, because that was far from the first time she'd played a violent gangster's sweet old ma.
In 1964, Martin was a film student working on his second short, It's Not Just You, Murray!, which was about -- shocker -- a gangster. Catherine played the doting mother in her son's grim wittle film, and that was only the start of a filmography that would make some actors jealous.
Catherine made cameos in most of her son's movies until her death in 1997. She was a mom in his feature debut, Who's That Knocking At My Door, she was a mom in The King Of Comedy, and she branched out to more diverse roles like "Woman on Landing" and "Fruitstand Customer" in Mean Streets and Cape Fear. She helped Martin long past the time his zero-budget student days made it necessary.
So Scorsese's movies may have more violence and foul language than the average war, but he still loved his mom so much that he brought her to the office with him. Hell, after Mean Streets put him on the map as a brilliant up-and-coming director, Scorsese used his newfound critical acclaim and commercial success to make his dream project ... a loving documentary about Catherine and her husband Charles (himself a veteran of eight Scorsese movies).
Perhaps it's Catherine's appearance in Casino, the end of 31 years of helping her son out with his movies, which best sums up her relationship with Martin. She plays a mom again, and she chides her fictional son for cursing so much. Does that sound like it was based on a true story? Call up your mom and ask her what she thinks.
The Set Of The Shining Was Full Of Silliness
Stanley Kubrick was both a genius filmmaker and a cruel tyrant, and The Shining was arguably his greatest achievement in both respects. We've already told you about the time he deliberately traumatized Shelley Duvall while stretching a 17-week shoot into a full year. Well, one of his closest collaborators on that marathon shoot, cameraman Garrett Brown, wasn't intimidated by the mad king of film, and decided to have some fun at Kubrick's expense.
Brown was using a mounted camera that had the then-revolutionary ability to wirelessly transmit filmed footage to a monitor for the director to review. But Kubrick was worried that the local rich people who lived in the hills around the set would pick up the transmissions on their TV antennas and ... we don't know, leak the plot of a movie that was already a bestselling novel? Whatever Kubrick's concerns were, Brown mocked them ruthlessly, all while imitating a rich old lady saying things like "Ooh, poor Mr. Brown -- Stanley's being very cruel to him today."
As Kubrick started to get worried, Brown played it straight, reassuring him that their signals couldn't escape the studio. But Kubrick had heard Brown's fake signals, and that led to the pair having long arguments about how antennas work. Brown took a monitor around outside and discovered that Kubrick was right -- their signals were leaking. Not that anybody had noticed or cared. So Brown memorized the places outdoors where the signal failed, then took Kubrick to all of them to "prove" that he was right.
Brown also discovered that Danny Lloyd (the kid who played, uh ... Danny) weighed exactly the same as the camera, so he did what he was practically obligated to do: He removed his camera from the mechanical arm, replaced it with a sling, then stuck Danny in the sling and flew him around. We've already discussed how Lloyd had no idea he was filming a horror movie at the time. And now, coupled with these fun flights of fancy, everything that's NOT The Shining must have been downright traumatic for the poor little guy.
You could make a movie that was nothing but a series of asses getting kicked, and it would kick less ass than Mad Max: Fury Road. But it's kinda hard to believe that a hellscape prone to apocalyptic sandstorms and roving war parties also doubled as the backdrop to a real-life episode of How I Met Your Mother. But Dane Grant and Dayana Porter, the stunt doubles for Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, fell in love while shooting the closest thing to a tender moment Fury Road had: a fistfight.
"It really was love at first sight. While we were punching each other we were falling for each other -- quite rapidly," said Dane, of the most Australian courtship possible. The two are now married and have a baby boy who damn well better be named Max.
Or a name that's nothing but a series of explosion noises.
According to Imperator Furiosa herself, "all of us girls had a knitting circle," which grew to include Tom Hardy and Nick Hoult, who played Nux. Word is that while Hardy proved to only be a mediocre wool warrior, Hoult mastered the grandmotherly arts, and even knitted everyone Christmas presents. "I knit, I crochet, I knit again!" he almost certainly never, ever said.
Jacopo is the author of The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy, and its sequel, License To Quill, which you should totally pre-order so that they can be made into movies! Adam Koski also recommends you check out License To Quill.
Not all films are fun and games. For instance, Sly Stallone spent nine days in a hospital after Dolph Lundgren punched the shit out of him. Learn about that and more in 5 Amazing Performances By Actors Who Weren't Acting. Also check out 12 Classic Movie Moments Made Possible By Abuse And Murder, and learn how The Wizard Of Oz was pretty much a poisonous nightmare.
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