10 Movies Made Under INSANE Conditions
4. With Mostly Untrained Animals (Who Injured Half The Crew) - Roar
If you figured the marketing for Noel Marshall's 1981 adventure-comedy Roar was merely blowing smoke by dubbing itself "the most dangerous film ever made," think again.
The movie revolves around an American naturalist, Hank (Marshall), who lives on an African nature preserve with a huge collection of large animals, and when Hank's family comes to visit, they find themselves facing off against the preserve's non-human residents.
For starters, Roar was shot in Marshall's Californian homes over a gruelling period of five years, but what made production truly torturous was that Marshall shot the entire film with real, largely untrained animals.
In addition to the difficulty of capturing usable footage from animals with no training, a total of 70 people - roughly half the entire cast and crew - received injuries from the animals throughout the shoot.
In one notably dangerous scene, star Tippi Hedren - who was also Marshall's wife - had her face coated in honey in order for a leopard to lick it off, while later a lion bit her head, and an elephant fractured both her hand and ankle.
Hedren's daughter Melanie Griffith, who also appeared in the film, was meanwhile bitten on the face by a lioness, resulting in 50 stitches and the near-loss of her eye.
As for Marshall himself, he had his hand bitten so badly by a lion it was initially feared he might lose an arm, and was eventually bitten enough times that he developed gangrene. Cinematographer Jan de Bont didn't fare too well either, being scalped by a lion, requiring 220 stitches.
Many of the animals themselves were also endangered when flooding destroyed one of Marshall's properties where they were housed.
Dozens of crew members ended up quitting the film amid the torrid production, and due to the prolonged shoot, the budget ended up ballooning to $17 million - which it predictably failed to recoup at the box office.
When people say "they don't make movies like that anymore," sometimes that's a good thing, because if a filmmaker attempted such a lunatic feat today without providing sufficient protections for their cast and crew, they'd be quite rightly crucified for it.