10 Movie Scenes That Took The Most Amount Of Takes Ever

10. Quint Assembles The Harpoon Gun...50 Times - Jaws

Though Steven Spielberg has a reputation for running smooth productions which come in on-time and under budget, his 1975 blockbuster debut Jaws was anything but an easy ride.

For starters, the planned 55-day shoot had almost tripled in length before principal photography was completed, causing the budget to balloon from $4 million to $9 million.

The primary reason for the troubled shoot was a series of constantly malfunctioning mechanical sharks, forcing Spielberg to get creative with how he presented the shark to the audience - which, ultimately, wasn't much at all.

But amid tensions between himself and his cast and crew, Spielberg also resorted to sly means to keep everyone distracted, such as in one instance having Robert Shaw, who played Quint in the film, act out a scene 50 times to get the "desired" take.

In what Spielberg called a "strategic indulgence," he shot 50 takes of Shaw assembling Quint's harpoon gun, a totally straight-forward action, in order to both stop the cast and crew from "going crazy with boredom" while the shark was being fixed, and also to make it appear to the studio as though they were actually doing something.

Thankfully this is the only significant report across Spielberg's entire career of him demanding excessive takes from an actor, and at least it had a grander purpose to it.