12 People Who Totally Broke The Law To Make Great Movies

8. Real Drug Use - Easy Rider

Long before Danny Dyer was popping pills to get into the right frame of mind for Human Traffic, marijuana was playing a massive part of the production of Easy Rider, not least on director Dennis Hopper, who struggled badly with drug-induced paranoia to the extent that his tirades were secretly recorded and sent to the studio by crew to explain why they kept having to quit.

That's also possibly why he pulled a knife on Rip Torn, who was intended to play Jack Nicholson's role. Clearly having learned nothing from the dark side of his own drug experiences, Hopper got his actors - and himself - high on weed: the scene in the film where the three leads smoke marijuana wasn't faked (though Peter Fonda swears blind nobody actually took LSD), and Hopper got Jack Nicholson so high for his iconic UFO speech that it got in the way of filming.

But since most of the crew ended up being hippies picked up at communes across the country who were more often than not stoned themselves, nobody seemed to mind.