11 Movies That Made It Up As They Went Along (But Were Awesome Anyway)

9. Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola’s sort of adaptation of Heart Of Darkness is pretty much THE gold standard for how not to make a film. It started out with good intentions, but a giant storm set things back very quickly, then Francis Ford Coppola fired his leading actor Harvey Keitel after two weeks of filming, brought in a notoriously troublesome Marlon Brando for a king’s ransom and generally went through the list of everything you don’t want to happen on a set. Including Martin Sheen having a heart attack he played off as heat stroke so the film’s financing wasn’t pulled.

And remarkably, several months after filming officially started, as he was watching a rough cut of footage, Coppola STILL HADN’T WRITTEN AN ENDING to the thing. He was writing as he went and simply improvised his ending because Brando was simply too fat to film the ending as it was originally written. Which makes the decision to hire him in the first place all the more baffling, really.