In Goodfellas, the ‘Am I a clown? Do I amuse you?’ scene, where Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) attacks Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) for calling him a ‘funny guy’, was Pesci’s idea.
He’d once worked at a restaurant where he got a nasty reply after telling a real-life mobster he was funny, so he suggested it to director Martin Scorsese, and they filmed it without a script to get genuine reactions from the cast.
Actor Christopher Lee served in the British special forces during WWII. While filming The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, he was told to scream when his character gets stabbed.
He replied, “Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody’s stabbed in the back? Because I do.”
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Stephen King sells the rights to some of his short stories for $1 so that film students can use them to make movies.
He calls them his ‘Dollar Babies.’
Just before he died, Freddie Mercury got to see an advance copy of the Wayne’s World headbanging scene that features ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’
According to guitarist Brian May, ‘the humor in it was quite close to our own. Because we did that kind of thing in the car, bouncing up and down to our own tracks!’
Freddie loved it, and, after his death, the film helped revive Queen in the US.
Bruce Willis’s iconic line from Die Hard wasn’t in the script.
“Yippee-ki-yay, motherf***er!” was actually just something Willis said to try and make the crew laugh, and he “never thought it was going to be allowed to stay in the film.”
The streets are always wet in movies.
Wet pavement not only looks better on camera, but, in the same way that it’s hard to see road markings when you’re driving in the rain at night, the water diffuses reflections and helps eliminate shadows caused by filming equipment and multiple light sources.
Just before he died, Freddie Mercury got to see an advance copy of the Wayne’s World headbanging scene that features ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’
According to guitarist Brian May, ‘the humor in it was quite close to our own. Because we did that kind of thing in the car, bouncing up and down to our own tracks!’ Freddie loved it, and, after his death, the film helped revive Queen in the US.
When Kevin Bacon goes to a wedding reception, he bribes the DJ so they won’t play Footloose.
“I go to the disc jockey and hand him $20 and say, ‘Please don’t play that song’, because, first off, a wedding is really not about me. It’s about the bride and groom. And… it’s embarrassing. ”
Vito Corleone’s cat in The Godfather was a stray that writer/director Francis Ford Coppola found on the Paramount lot.
It purred so loudly that some of Marlon Brando’s dialogue had to be looped.
In an ‘Ask Me Anything’ thread from Reddit (which is super depressing and totally sucks you down a rabbit hole [and is so sad in hindsight, but even now his jokes still cheer you up!]), Robin Williams comments on this by saying:
“I think I only called him once, maybe twice. I called him when I was representing People for the Valdheimers Association. A society devoted to helping raise money to help older Germans who had forgotten everything before 1945. I remember him laughing and going ‘thank you.’”
Emma Stone is a high school dropout.
She attended an all-girl Catholic prep school for one semester before deciding to drop out and pursue an acting career- so she created a PowerPoint presentation for her parents called ‘Project Hollywood,’ set it to Madonna’s song 'Hollywood,’ and convinced them to move her to Los Angeles.
After watching Willy Wonka, 5-year-old Jack Zerndt wanted to give everyone a Golden Ticket.
Instead, he and his dad, James, author of The Cloud Seeders, left $100 bills in 5 random copies of the book across Portland.
The first was found at a Goodwill with the note:
‘This book is free. If you need the money, please keep it. If you don’t, please give it to someone who does. You are not a Leftover. None of us are.’
On the set of Home Alone, Joe Pesci avoided Macaulay Culkin so that he’d be genuinely afraid of him.
He also gave Culkin a scar on his finger while rehearsing the scene where he says he’s gonna “bite off every one of these little fingers, one at a time,” because he actually bit him and broke the skin.
(Source)
The streets are always wet in movies.
Wet pavement not only looks better on camera, but, in the same way that it’s hard to see road markings when you’re driving in the rain at night, the water diffuses reflections and helps eliminate shadows caused by filming equipment and multiple light sources.
Jodie Foster was so scared of Anthony Hopkins during the filming of The Silence of the Lambs that she avoided him on set and didn’t speak to him off camera until the final day of the shoot - when Hopkins admitted that he’d been afraid of her, too.
