10 Mistakes That Actually Improved The Final Films
These happy little accidents led to some iconic scenes.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, accidents can sometimes turn out to be the greatest inventors of them all. Not every error leads to disastrous consequences. Sometimes, when we get things wrong, a situation can turn out even better than we'd ever imagined. These are the best kinds of mistakes. Instead of leading to misfortune, they give us something wonderful and totally unexpected.
If a petri dish hadn't been left open in Alexander Fleming's laboratory, for example, the world might have had to wait many years for the invention of penicillin, and that's just one example of many amazing things throughout history which came about purely by accident. This even applies to the world of Hollywood. Some of the most successful movies and iconic scenes might never have existed without a few 'happy little accidents' along the way.
Movie-making is normally a pretty strict business, with countless workers and executives painstakingly perfecting each shot and line of dialogue, but unexpected accidents happen on every set. Often, they don't lead to anything good, but they can sometimes actually make the movie even better than it was before.
10. Farts And Laughter Changed The Tone Of This Scene
Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects is arguably his greatest work. With just a $6 million budget, the film went on to make over $34 million at the box office and earn actor Kevin Spacey and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie Academy Awards.
One of the film's most iconic scenes is the lineup, memorable for the moment when the unintelligible Fenster, played brilliantly by Benicio Del Toro, steps forward and delivers his line, much to the amusement of his colleagues.
Singer originally wanted this to be a serious scene, but the story goes that Del Toro had a bad case of gas on the day of filming, with Kevin Pollak recounting how "Del Toro farted like 12 takes in a row". The actors kept giggling and putting each other off their lines, and Singer got mad after an entire morning was wasted trying to film the scene.
Even after the cast got yelled at by the director, they still couldn't keep it together and Singer decided to just keep the laughter in the final cut, using it as a way to develop the characters and establish the beginnings of a bond between them.