30 Stories from Behind the Scenes of Blockbusters

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube

And did you know that it was a secret on the set of The Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader would say

I am your father? In the script, his line read, Obi-Wan killed your father

Only director Irvin Kirshner and the producers of the film knew the real line

Mark Hamill was told right before he filmed his close-up for the scene. And that's the first of many behind-the-scenes film facts I'm going to share with you today. Let's get started

Marlon Brando never read Heart of Darkness before filming its movie adaptation, Apocalypse Now

He fought often with director Francis Ford Coppola about this and Coppola would read the book out loud to him on the set

Speaking of Coppola, during a particularly hard day of shooting The Godfather, he was in a restroom stall when two crew members came into the room

They said, Coppola will never make another big picture. Everyone agrees that he doesn't know what he's doing

He got embarrassed and lifted his shoes up so they couldn't see him. When Shelob stabs Frodo in Lord of the Rings Return of the King, Elijah Wood had Alka-Seltzer

tablets in his mouth so it would foam. Another low budget special effect, Zachary Quinto, aka Spock, in the recent Star Trek

films can't actually do the Vulcan salute, so the crew glued his fingers that way

Speaking of Star Trek, the Michael Myers mask for the first Halloween movie was a Captain

Kirk mask painted white. It cost $1.98. Another movie villain associated with the color white is Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the lambs It was Anthony Hopkins idea to dress that way because he afraid of dentists Speaking of costumes the Cowardly Lion costume for The Wizard of Oz weighed 90 pounds The dude clothes in the Big Lebowski were much less work Jeff

Bridges mostly just wore stuff from his own wardrobe. Sean Connery wore a hairpiece every

time he played James Bond. While filming Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen attracted the attention

of the police, the FBI, and the Secret Service. Apparently, there were so many complaints about

a Middle Eastern man driving around America in an ice cream truck that a whole FBI team

was assigned to him. While shooting The Matrix Reloaded in The Matrix Revolutions, Keanu Reeves gave the entire

stunt team Harley Davidson motorcycles. Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster didn't have driver's licenses when they got cast

in The Fast and the Furious, so they had to take lessons before production. Another actor who had to get a driver's license to get a part, Nat Wolff in the movie Paper Towns

Charlie Sheen stayed awake for 48 hours before he filmed his scene in Ferris Bueller's Day

Wait a second, Meredith, how would Charlie Sheen stay awake for 48 straight hours? Oh

The scene in Pulp Fiction in which John Travolta stabs an adrenaline shot into the chest of Uma Thurman

was filmed differently than it looks. He pulled the needle out of her chest and then it was reversed in post

Rupert Grint was kicked off the Harry Potter set while Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe

were filming their kissing scene because he was laughing too much. Another laugher was Princess Bride director Rob Reiner

He left the set for giggling excessively while Billy Crystal was shooting some scenes

Crystal would tell Reiner go home and you just see it tomorrow Speaking of directors it took David Lynch five years to complete his film Eraserhead and during that time Lynch took on a Wall Street Journal paper route to support himself

and the project. Eraserhead was one of Stanley Kubrick's favorite films, by the way

He screened it for the cast and crew of The Shining. The ping pong scene in Forrest Gump was shot without a ball

It was added later with CGI. Which makes me wonder why they didn't use CGI for the domino scene in V for Vendetta

The domino V that gets knocked over contains 22,000 dominoes. It took four experts 200 hours to set up

Okay, gotta make a note of this. Career goal, become a domino expert

The script for Casablanca was still being written while they were in production, which

Ingrid Bergman hated because she didn't know which character she was supposed to act in love with

When she asked director Michael Curtiz, he told her to quote, play it in between

Another actor who had a problem with the script was Harrison Ford while filming Raiders of the Lost Ark

He had dysentery and he was supposed to film a long fight sequence with a swordsman

So when he got to set, he told Steven Spielberg, let's just shoot the sucker

Spielberg replied, I just thought the same thing this morning. Coolest person ever, or coolest person ever

By the way, Indiana, I'm not sure that's your best hero pose. And speaking of Indiana Jones, a hurricane hit the Hawaii set of a later Spielberg film

Jurassic Park, and the helicopter pilot who came to rescue the crew was Fred Sorenson

who played the pilot in the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark

Rocky has this unscripted moment when he points out that he wearing the wrong color shorts in the poster above the boxing ring The film prop department genuinely made that mistake so the line was added Alfred Hitchcock did all of his directing for Rear Window from within Jeff apartment

The other actors wore earpieces so he could tell them what to do. At the start of filming The Sound of Music, the film Mary Poppins hadn't been released

yet, so when Julie Andrews taught the seven child actors the song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

on the first day of filming, they thought she'd made it up and was a genius

In fact, of course, she hadn't made it up, but she is a genius. The Alien set had some unusual neighbors

The rock band The Who spent some time rehearsing one soundstage over

It came in handy when Ridley Scott was filming the egg chamber scene and borrowed some blue

laser lights from the band. During production on Groundhog Day, Bill Murray got bitten by the groundhog twice, so he had

to get rabies shots. And finally, I return to my salon to tell you that during an important scene in the movie

Memento, the character Teddy says, you don't have a clue, you freak

Actor Christopher Nolan didn't like the way that actor Joe Pantoliano said the line

so he went back and dubbed over it in post-production. Nolan himself delivers Teddy's line

One year after the film came out, the Sundance Channel's documentary show, Anatomy of a Scene

interviewed Pantoliano and asked how he felt about the dubbing. He responded

This is the first I'm hearing about it