Making a film is an intense experience for all parties involved. For two to six months (on average), members of cast and crew are asked to leave behind friends, family and ordinary lives, and submerge themselves in another world. The farther up the food chain you go, the more consuming the process becomes. Tim Burton, among others, has talked about the fact that when you're directing a movie you're basically
always working seven days a week, preparing for next week's work when you're not actually shooting...people love to tell stories about crazy directors becoming absolutely obsessed with the granular details of their films, but really, if you were spending seven days a week creating your own fantasy universe, wouldn't
you start to sweat the details, too? There are instances in movie history, though, where directors took it one step further more or less living out (whether literally or metaphorically) the films they were making, as they were making them. Sometimes, the directors had enough foresight (or enough ballsy insanity) to put themselves into these "life imitating art/art imitating life" scenarios; sometimes the parallels seem to have been sheer serendipity and coincidence; often times, the parallels brought the filmmakers fairly close to madness. Filmmakers like those can below...