Obsession is a curious thing. It can be an admirable trait, as some of the greatest human beings to have graced the earth have been those who were overtly fascinated in a particular field. It can be a sickness, as some people have seen life fly by them as they remain engrossed in one particular facet. And it can also be terrifying, with some people channeling this particular behavior in wicked, wicked ways.
These aspects of obsession apply to filmmaking in the same way that they do in real life. During movie production, obsession can act as the ground for a masterpiece to be built from, a distraction from other important things in life, or as the powerful catalyst for some truly terrifying work.
Filmmaking is a miraculous process, and obsession is often necessary in order get a movie off the ground at all. An apocryphal story that circulates within the movie world states that there once existed a producer who stood and exuberantly applauded at the end of every single film screening he saw, simply because he knew what a revelation it was for a film to get made at all.
Somewhat inevitably, the obsession that hums across the cinematic production world has occasionally bubbled over into seriously problematic areas. Certain filmmakers have occasionally become so obsessed with a particular project, and so determined to see it burst into life on the big screen, that they have stopped at nothing during the production process – reaching the point where they have actively broken laws in order to push their film out into the real world.
Listed here are five separate occasions where the incredible process of filmmaking involved some actions that were not simply obsessive, but ultimately, illegal.