Some artists say that suffering is necessary to create meaningful art... but there have
to be limits, right?
Getting mauled by a lion, or driving a truck off a cliff is the kind of that suffering
seems to be reserved exclusively for those whose art is the Hollywood film—and for
better and worse, these movies were among the most hazardous to the health of cast and
crew.
Waterworld
While it's seen today as something of a curiosity, 1995's Waterworld was a spectacularly misguided,
career-derailing failure for Kevin Costner.
The most expensive film ever made at the time, it baffled audiences with its bizarre mythology
and uneven tone.
"Hey!
Hahah!"
And as might be expected from a film that takes place on a world covered in ocean, the
seafaring shoot was more than a little hazardous, and nearly killed several members of the cast
and crew.
Everyday unpleasantness included seasickness and constant jellyfish stings.
One costly set sunk, and a diver suffered an almost-lethal case of the bends during
the retrieval effort.
Female lead Jeanne Tripplehorn and child actress Tina Majorino had to be rescued by divers
when their sailboat fell apart, and Costner was pummeled by raging winds and seawater
for more than half an hour while suspended 40 feet in the air for a stunt.
Even one experienced stuntman, famous big wave surfer Bill Hamilton, was lost at sea
while commuting to the shoot on a jet ski, and had to be rescued by a production helicopter.
The entire shoot was one gigantic risk to life and limb, all for a film that, well…
"What do you think, Toby?
The truth!"
"… looks like s---."
The Expendables 3
Given the age of the cast, it stands to reason that the Expendables films have dished out
a few injuries to its stars, but The Expendables 3 really seemed to have it in for its unusually
old cast.
"Age is just a state of mind."
Then-68-year old Sylvester Stallone suffered a scary fall that necessitated a metal plate
in his back, which joined the one in his neck from an injury suffered on the set of the
first film.
Co-star Antonio Banderas injured his knee in his very first take.
But the production reserved its worst mishap for Jason Statham, who drove his truck straight
off a dock during a rehearsal and into the Black Sea.
Everybody panicked—except Statham, who calmly swam to safety as the truck sank into the
depths.
Still, Statham told Jimmy Fallon that he wasn't nearly as calm headed as everyone thought.
"So I'm like, 60ft at the bottom of the Black Sea, stuck in the mud, thinking, 'Hang on
a minute.
How am I gonna get out of this?
This is how it ends!'"
While Statham called it a "nightmare," instinct kicked in and he made it out safely.
Co-star Terry Crews summed it up, saying,
"Jason Statham is a true bad, bad dude."
Roar
If ever a film seemed specifically designed to threaten the safety of everyone involved,
it's 1981's Roar.
The brainchild of actress Tippi Hedren and her writer/producer husband Noel Marshall,
it's the story of a family attacked by wild jungle animals during a stay in Africa, and
it was executed in the most insane fashion imaginable.
Dismayed to find that you couldn't just rent lions, Hedren and Marshall bought a ranch
and began raising their own, along with tigers, leopards, cheetahs, and even African elephants.
Then they went ahead and shot their movie right there on the ranch with their own children,
working with some of the most incredibly dangerous animals on the planet.
"C'mon, you'll hurt my hand.
Ohh ohh ohh."
Of course, the injuries piled up.
Hedren was bitten on the head by a lion, and Marshall was bit so many times he developed
gangrene.
Hedren's daughter Melanie Griffith received stitches to her face and almost lost an eye
after an attack, and the cinematographer almost lost his entire scalp to a lion, an injury
requiring over 200 stitches.
Many of the attacks made the final cut of the film, which wasn't given any kind of North
American release until 2015.
Years later, Hedren estimated the number of injuries at over 100 and called Roar "the
most dangerous film ever made in history."
Troy
The 2004 war epic Troy was one of the most expensive, lavishly staged films to ever be
so indifferently received.
It's mostly remembered today for the strange fate of one of its stunt performers, and for
one of the most coincidental injuries in film history.
During a scene with many extras, stuntman George Camilleri sustained a severe injury
to his lower leg, requiring surgery.
A couple weeks later, he was re-admitted to the hospital, and quickly passed away from
a pulmonary thromboembolism, a common complication after an injury of his type.
The film's star Brad Pitt, cast as Achilles, also somehow managed to injure his character's
namesake tendon during the shoot, causing production to be shut down for ten weeks.
Hurricane Marty also damaged some sets, but Troy overcame all of these difficulties and
arrived triumphantly in theaters, only to be met with a solid thump.
Jumper
The 2008 sci-fi thriller Jumper didn't cause any problems until principal photography had
wrapped, but when it did, it was lethal.
Set dressers were tearing down exterior sets in the middle of a cold Toronto winter when
a freakish mishap occurred: a huge chunk of sand and earth which was frozen to a wall
came unstuck, striking three set dressers.
56-year old David Ritchie didn't survive, and another man sustained serious injuries
to his head and shoulders.
Toronto police described it as a "fluke accident," and the incident cast a pall over the highly
anticipated film, which unfortunately didn't score well with… anyone.
xXx
It goes without saying that xXx was a dangerous film to make, as the story of an extreme sports
badass who becomes a secret government agent.
Each stunt ramps up the danger, and one spectacular stunt unfortunately cost aerial stunt coordinator
Harry O'Connor his life, as director Rob Cohen recounts on the DVD commentary.
"Now, unfortunately, right there, smacking into the bridge, breaking his neck, and dying."
O'Connor's stunt remained in the completed film… right up until the point in which
he doesn't clear the structure.
Cohen considered the stunt to be so routine that he assigned it to his second unit, and
most of the cast and crew had already completed their work on the film.
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
The Resident Evil series of films is the most profitable video game-to-film series adaptation
of all time, but 2016's Resident Evil: The Final Chapter proved to be just as big a threat
to life and limb as the film's roving zombies.
Stuntwoman Olivia Jackson suffered horrific injuries when a camera rig failed to make
way for her during a motorcycle stunt, requiring her to be put into a medically induced coma.
Her list of injuries were extensive and gory, including having her skin torn from her face,
a severed neck artery, a shattered shoulderblade, a collapsed lung, a brain bleed, and the loss
of her left arm.
Unfortunately, the incident didn't seem to lead to increased caution on the set.
Only a couple months later, crew member Ricardo Cornelius was crushed when a Humvee slipped
off of a platform and pinned him to a wall.
Reports of the accident leaked only after the film had completed production.
Apocalypse Now
Perhaps no film shoot was as legendarily taxing on everyone involved as Francis Ford Coppola's
masterpiece Apocalypse Now; that everyone survived its filming is nothing short of a
miracle.
Shooting on location in Vietnam, the production was beset by tropical disease, and natural
disasters that wiped out entire sets, but those were the least of their problems.
Coppola was running a drug-fueled, psychologically abusive madhouse that was out of control from
the very beginning.
Lead actor Martin Sheen stepped straight into the worst possible environment for him at
that time.
In the middle of a personal breakdown and mired deep in alcoholism, Sheen was fed a
steady diet of alcohol and abuse by Coppola, who brought out the darkness in Sheen's character
by screaming at the actor and telling him how evil he was.
"Sometimes he goes too far.
He's the first one to admit it."
Sheen would eventually have a heart attack, yet somehow continued on with the production.
Coppola himself lost 100 pounds, and Dennis Hopper stumbled through the shoot on an insane
daily regimen of a case of beer, half gallon of rum, and three ounces of cocaine.
Actor Sam Bottoms spent the entire year-long shoot tripping on LSD.
Hopper later commented,
"Ask anybody who was out there, we all felt like we fought the war."
Ben-Hur
1959's Ben-Hur is well-known for its iconic chariot race scene, which was filmed on the
largest set ever constructed at that time, covering 18 acres.
It was also at the time the most expensive single scene in history at $4 million dollars,
and took over ten grueling weeks.
The action-packed sequence was virtually unprecedented in cinema, employing a "camera car" that put
viewers right in the middle of the chaotic, horse-drawn action.
Most impressive was this dangerous scene, where Ben-Hur is nearly thrown from his chariot.
The stunt was performed by Joe Canutt, who landed so hard that he really was pitched
violently off the chariot and in between its two horses.
"Well, it turned him a complete handspring over the chariot, and he managed to hang with
one hand and get a hold of the hitch rail and turn to flip off into the speeding wall."
He sustained only a cut on his chin, but to this day, rumors persist that studio MGM covered
up the death of a stunt performer—simply because it's so hard to believe nobody died
filming that scene.
The Conqueror
The second-to-last film produced by Howard Hughes would haunt him for the rest of his
life.
The Conqueror was a big-budget flop featuring a woefully miscast John Wayne as an unintentionally
comedic Genghis Khan.
During the last years of his life, Hughes bought up all the prints he could find and
watched the film obsessively, perhaps mortified by its failure, or perhaps racked with guilt
for having basically executed the entire cast.
The film was shot on location in the Utah desert, directly downwind from the area where
the US government detonated over 100 atomic bombs between 1951 and 1962.
An atomic bomb at the Nevada test site, 140 miles to the west.
But it's old stuff to St. George."
Eleven were detonated in 1953 alone, the year before The Conqueror began production.
The risks of nuclear fallout were not terribly well-understood at the time, and the Atomic
Energy Commission declared the area completely safe.
They were staggeringly, horrifyingly wrong.
In the decades following the film's production, no fewer than 90 cast and crew passed away
from cancer, including Wayne, lead actress Susan Hayward, and director Dick Powell.
A subsequent study concluded that Cold War-era nuclear testing had killed at least 11,000
Americans.
"When you saw the tragedy in terms of the families, it sort of… broke your heart."
Since 1990, Congress has paid $2 billion dollars to residents of the fallout area in which
The Conqueror was filmed.
It was one of Hollywood's biggest turkeys, it killed one of its biggest stars, and it
just may have finished the job of driving Howard Hughes totally insane.
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