10 Famous Movie Scenes That Came From On-Set Issues
4. Al Pacino Is Too Blind - Scent Of A Woman
The best actors are often the ones who commit themselves to their roles. This doesn't necessarily involve going method, but certainly implementing some attributes of a character into an actor's daily life can help them better represent that character on set.
Veteran performer Al Pacino knows this better than most. During the filming of Scent of a Woman, Pacino had taught himself to focus his eyes on the unnatural middle distance, giving him a very realistic appearance of the blind, disgruntled veteran he was playing. This severely restricted his field of view and he would often bump into things he didn't notice for the duration of the shoot.
This was caught on camera in a scene where his character has a breakdown on the streets of New York. Upset at how vulnerable and dependent being blind has made him, Pacino paces around angrily until he runs into a trash can and falls to the ground, further cementing how invalid he feels.
This was, surprisingly, not planned. Pacino had legitimately not seen the trash can and just stayed in character when he fell, playing it off as yet another hurdle in his miserable life. The scene made the final cut of the movie and probably contributed to Pacino winning his one and only Oscar for the role.