The men and women who work on Hollywood blockbusters may seem distant, unknowable, and perhaps even all-powerful to the average ticket buyer. But the truth is that these people are so desperate to entertain audiences that they will selflessly endure hardship, discomfort, tedium, and even grievous bodily injury for their movies, all in the name of entertainment. This is one takeaway lesson from “9 Incredibly Hard To Shoot Movie Scenes,” an informative new Screen Rant video narrated by Rob Flis, dissecting some very tricky sequences from films like Iron Man 3, Kill Bill, Spider-Man, and The Abyss.
Another lesson from the video is that there is a limit to what CGI can do. Moviegoers may now presume that everything they’re seeing on screen is digital fakery, just a bunch of ones and zeroes being manipulated by some nerds in an air-conditioned room somewhere. But on some occasions, the only way to convincingly stage a scene in a movie is to have actors, actresses, technicians, and stuntmen do things that would be severely frowned upon by insurance underwriters. Those poor folks in The Abyss spent so much time underwater they could have sprouted gills, for instance, and the pretend astronauts in Apollo 13 were about five seconds away from upchucking due to the very real weightlessness they were enduring. And that thing about Tom Cruise doing his own stunts? It’s true. Some of the trickiest stuff, meanwhile, is the most banal, like making Elijah Wood and Sir Ian McKellen appear to be drastically different sizes in those Lord Of The Rings movies. Yes, making movies is way less glamorous and way more hazardous than casual viewers might imagine. Rest easily, viewers, knowing that a human life was put at risk to bring you Cliffhanger with Sylvester Stallone.
[via Laughing Squid]