10 Films That Directors Just Made Up On The Fly

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.