10 Most Notoriously Nightmarish Film Shoots
Film productions that lived up to the saying - "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong".
United ArtistsWhen you sign onto a film, obviously your hope is that it will be smooth sailing. You'll get along with the cast, the director will be nice to you, you'll be shooting in a tropical paradise, and you'll generally have an awesome experience that you'll spend the entirety of the press tour gushing about. Yeah. That would be nice. Unfortunately, as glamorous as the film industry can appear, this is pretty much a pipe dream. Sure, every once in a while you get lucky, but you can't bank on that. That's why, a lot of times, you'll see directors and actors working together over and over again. It's that fear of the unknown -- they're just trying to minimize the chances of having a bad set experience. Because everyone who works in the movie industry has at least one personal anecdote of a film that went so badly wrong they considered shooting one of their own thumbs off, World War I style, to get the hell out of there. Monsoons, prima donnas, egotistical directors, deaths -- all this and more has happened on the truly terrible film sets, the ones that have gone down in history as the worst of the worst. 10. The Abyss
20th Century FoxAsk Ed Harris why he hates this film so much. Go ahead. Ask him. And then stand back, because his head will probably explode, and you don't want Ed Harris brains all over your shoes. Just on the surface of things, any film that uses extended underwater sequences is going to be painstakingly complicated work. Even movies that feature one or two underwater scenes are notoriously horrible to film, and The Abyss takes place almost entirely underwater. Every cast member had to become a certified diver, and they all had to undergo the decompression process after filming each scene. So that's bound to be an irritating process in and of itself. Then add in the fact that Ed Harris almost drowned while filming, and you can start to see why The Abyss was so hellish. As the story goes, he ran out of oxygen, but the safety diver got stuck on a cable and could not get to him. Even to this day he refuses to talk about this movie, and his costar Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio said of the film, "The Abyss was a lot of things. Fun to make was not one of them."