10 Films That Directors Just Made Up On The Fly

Have you heard about Alien: Covenant? The film that was Prometheus 2 then Alien: Paradise Lost, before it adopted its current title, may be in trouble. Not the kind of trouble that Prometheus faced (namely, putting Damon Lindelof in charge of the script) - this is much worse. Ben Child at the Guardian has added up all the info we have on Covenant so far and come to the conclusion that Ridley Scott is seemingly just making the film up as he goes. The changing title is just the start of it. Lindelof was re-hired to pen the Prometheus sequel, then fired. The idea to keep the xenomorph out of the picture was introduced, then dropped, while long after filming began with Noomi Rapace replaced on lead character duties by Katherine Waterston, it was announced that Rapace would return for the sequel after all. Alien: Covenant isn't the first of its kind; plenty of pictures have, over time, been tinkered extensively with and near-enough improvised by the filmmaker through production. Inspired by the speculation that Sir Ridders is doing just that, here are ten more films that were seemingly just made up on the fly. 10) Alien 3 Alien Covenant isn't a one-off. Hell, it isn't even the first film in the Alien franchise to be a victim of delayed planning and indecisiveness. Alien 3 went through numerous iterations before it finally came to shooting - Vincent Ward's 'wooden planet' vision, featuring space-monks interpreting the xenomorph as the Devil incarnate, came close to being the filmed final idea - but when shooting did finally begin, no final script was ready. Director David Fincher, who was brought in at the last minute, oversaw a production wherein $7 million in sets were built then discarded because the script was constantly changing. Ideas were lifted from Vincent Ward's concept and from David Twohy's prison planet script, to make a mash-up so jumbled it took a year just to edit some sense into the film. The final cut, however, is still no one's idea of coherent. Also, Fincher has since disowned it. 9) Iron Man Iron Man is a fine first movie from Marvel Studios, a funny, action-packed superhero flick and origins tale - and there's not much there to suggest the movie was just made up on the fly. And yet, made up on the fly it was, according to star Jeff Bridges, who describes a process that sounds very much like Robert Downey Jr. and director Jon Favreau just running with whatever ideas came into their heads then going to shoot. We mostly have Bridges to thank for having the lowdown on how Iron Man clumsily came to be. According to him: "They had no script, man." Instead, Favreau and Downey would improvise sequences in rehearsals and call writers on the day to flesh out their outline for the movie. Apparently, the release date came well before the script; says Bridges: "You would think with a $200 million movie you'd have the shit together, but it was just the opposite." 8) Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest And At World's End Iron Man turned out surprisingly well for a film that was shot minus a script. The same can't quite be said for Pirates of the Caribbean movies two and three, which bear many of the hallmarks of a messy, confused production. Dead Man's Chest and At World's End were shot back-to-back, but - despite the enormity of the endeavor - nobody thought to finish a screenplay for either movie before the 21 month-long shoot began. In January 2005, there were only storyboards by director Gore Verbinski and a "preparatory script" from writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio to go on. No final screenplay had actually been written at this point. All the same, filming began the next month, in February 2015, and Elliott and Rossio were forced to join production for the long haul, writing the film as it shot. Unsurprisingly, Disney almost canceled the risky project before it began. 7) This Is Spinal Tap Unlike Iron Man and the back-to-back Pirates movies, the creators of This Is Spinal Tap made a conscious decision to go ahead and make a film without a script in place. Director Rob Reiner and his three stars Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean were given $10,000 to write a screenplay, but instead they made a 20-minute test film so producers would have confidence in their collective ability to ad-lib comedy. After the initial mash of footage (100 hours were shot in total) was whittled down to a more manageable 82 minutes, the result was one of the greatest comedy movies of all-time - and it was entirely improvised by the cast (and Reiner) from beginning to end. Christopher Guest has since then gone on to make a career of directing heavily improvised comedies, but none even come close to the original and best. 6) Knight Of Cups For years, Terrence Malick has been moving away from traditional storytelling and towards a kind of abstract, dialogue-light experimentation. It seemed like Malick had reached his limit in pushing this style with the ponderous To the Wonder, but this year's Knight of Cups went even further. Anyone left perplexed by the film will be relieved to discover the cast, and indeed Malick himself seemingly, also had little idea of what the film was about. There had been a script, but star Christian Bale never saw any pages, and it appeared as though Malick wasn't drawing from it anyway. Bale, despite having worked with Malick before, was clueless as to what the film would turn out to be. As has become his wont, Malick effectively made the movie in the edit bay, spending two years molding the reams of footage he now collects like materials for a canvas. 5) Gremlins In the days before CGI, films heavy with special effects would often require a lot of impromptu creativity and last-minute ideas to make the fantastical appear real. Gremlins follows Christopher Columbus' screenplay fairly closely, but Joe Dante, the director, later admitted about the film: "We were inventing the technology as we went along, as well as deviating from the script as we discovered new aspects of the Gremlin characters." Dante and his effects team were finding out during the shoot what could and couldn't be achieved in terms of FX. As such, they worked three months solid, feeling their way in the dark as they attempted to meet the demands of the script. The director and his crew added the scene wherein Gizmo has darts thrown at him simply in order to relieve the frustration of figuring out the arduous effects work. 4) The Hobbit Trilogy It takes balls for a filmmaker to publicly admit their mistakes. Take Peter Jackson, who made a trilogy of movies for an incomparable $675 million, only to later admit he was "winging it" the entire time. It's particularly noticeable in final film, The Battle of the Five Armies, but overall the Hobbit movies are a mess. The reason why? According to Jackson, in his own words: "I didn't know what the hell I was doing." As filming approached, Jackson had almost no time to prepare, following the sudden departure of original director Guillermo del Toro. Jackson worked 21-hour days, and ultimately still ended up "making it up as a I went along." He shot scenes without storyboards and in many cases without finalized scripts. Eventually, Jackson had to halt the production for a period, simply to rediscover what the films were supposed to be about. 3) The Bourne Identity According to star Matt Damon, The Bourne Identity shoot wasn't a "nightmare" as some have claimed ("we finished," he has since cheerily reasoned). Filming certainly proved contentious, though, as Doug Liman - up to that point an indie filmmaker not used to working on tentpoles - took a hands-on, creative approach to a movie the studio wanted to keep tight controls on. They didn't figure the director was so indecisive that he would add $8 million to the budget. One problem was Liman constantly changing his mind and re-working scenes throughout the shoot. The film's screenwriter, Tony Gilroy, resorted to faxing pages of the revised screenplay to Liman almost for the duration of production. According to Damon, there were "four rounds" of reshoots in total, with the entire final third of the movie extensively re-written and re-shot. Luckily, the film turned out to be a minor spy classic. 2) The Island Of Doctor Moreau It seemed that the original director on The Island of Doctor Moreau, Richard Stanley, at least had an idea of where he wanted to go with it. But once Stanley was fired - three days into shooting - any solid plan went out the window. John Frankenheimer was brought in as a replacement, to rein in a spiteful Val Kilmer, martial a difficult Marlon Brando and make use of sets and a script he barely cared about or understood. Stanley's script was rewritten to suit Brando and Kilmer was replaced in the lead by David Thewlis, but the production ran no smoother. Brando did as he pleased in his scenes, bringing bizarre ideas to the film to mess with Frankenheimer, while Thewlis - since admitting "we all had different ideas of where it should go" - rewrote his character himself. Predictably, critics hated the mess that came out the other end. 1) Apocalypse Now "We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." These are the infamous words spoken by Francis Ford Coppola, regarding his 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now and how the shoot came to be one of the most chaotic in Hollywood history. So bad that at one stage Coppola, freely admitting "I have no idea where to go with this," considered shooting himself rather than continuing trying to make sense of the movie. There was a screenplay for Apocalypse Now (though writer John Milius was so full of ideas he churned out over a thousand pages), but once on-set Coppola added new ideas as he filmed. A proposed five-month shoot lasted over a year, 1.5 million feet of film was shot, and Coppola was forced to improvise both Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper's scenes and concoct an ending out of nothing. That the final film is merely coherent is seriously miraculous.