5. The Passion Of The Christ
Its a well-known assertion that lightning never strikes twice. During the filming of The Passion of the Christ, both lead actor Jim Caviezel, and assistant Jan Michelini were struck by lightning (the latter was evidently struck twice. Michelini had previously received burns when his umbrella was hit by lightning. In this instance, however, the pair were dramatically struck during the filming of the sermon on the mound. Heres what Caviezel had to say about the incident: I was lit up like a Christmas tree! I was doing the Sermon on the Mount. I knew it was going to hit me about four seconds before it happened. I thought, "I'm going to get hit." And when it happened, I saw the extras grab the ground. What they saw was fire coming out the right and left side of my head. Illumination around the whole body. And during the shot they said, "Do you have it on camera?" What happened was Mel had said, "Action" and the cameras were panning to me and here is where this light just flashed. And by the time the cameras got to me, I hear Mel screaming out, "What the heck happened to his hair?" I looked like I went to see Don King's hair stylist. Five minutes after I got hit, , an assistant, walks over and says are you okay? And then he got hit. The difference was that they saw the bolt come down and hit Jan; they didn't see that when I was standing there. All I felt was this giant tremendous slap on my ears and a few seconds of a pink, red static infront of my eyes. As a fun little side note to that story, Michelini is credited in The Passion of the Christ as Jan 'Lightning Boy' Michelini. This was not, however, the only odd occurrence during the filming of the shot. Among miscellaneous mishaps is also the story of John Debneys battle with Satan while composing the music for the film. The computer system he was using for the composing evidently regularly froze on the image of Satan from the film. This was happening for months, evidently, crashing his computer and forcing him to reboot in order to resume work. Debney evidently reached the final straw four months into his work on the film: The computers froze for about the tenth time that day and it was about nine o'clock at night and so I got really mad, and I told Satan to manifest himself and I said, Let's go out into the parking lot and let's go. Satan did not appear, but the composer was evidently able to work better after that incident.