8. John Huston (Dragged His Cast And Crew Into The Jungle For The African Queen)
When Orson Welles asked fellow film director John Huston the wild man behind such classic films as The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle to play Jake Hannaford, an analogue (in Welles' mind, at least) for Ernest Hemingway, it was a remarkably apropos bit of casting, since Huston had modeled both his writing and (to some extent) his life on Hemingway's macho ways. Huston was a large man, imposing, with a great booming voice that sounded like God speaking from the burning bush (no wonder Huston himself ended up making an ill fated film version of several stories from
The Bible...) and a predilection towards a party atmosphere on his sets, making for a "man's man" atmosphere. Following World War 2 during which he made several remarkable documentaries Huston became famous (or infamous, if you prefer) for preferring to shoot his movies on real locations, rather than the cozy confines of a studio. For The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, he dragged Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston and Tim Holt out to the most sunbaked areas of Mexican wilderness he could find; for his later The Man Who Would Be King, Huston took Sean Connery and Michael Caine out to locations in Morocco. Probably the most famous of all Huston's location jaunts was The African Queen, the Humphrey Bogart/Katherine Hepburn adventure/romance, which was largely shot on location
in Africa. Pretty much everybody involved remembers it as a miserable experience: Humphrey Bogart claimed he avoided getting sick only because he drank whisky instead of the local water, and Katherine Hepburn was almost deathly ill for large portions of the shoot, sitting with a bucket just off camera so she could vomit between takes. The only person
not a miserable wreck? Huston himself, who by all accounts had a blast on the hellish voyage, and according to (possibly apocryphal) stories was consumed with the desire to capture an elephant while on location. (The whole story was dramatic enough to be fictionalized in Clint Eastwood's film White Hunter, Black Heart.)