10 Films That Directors Just Made Up On The Fly

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.