Movie Scenes That Took Forever To Film

The making of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy was an adventure as epic as the story it told. Bringing J.R.R. Tolkien's sprawling fantasy world to the screen required a massive army of artists, builders, and actors to transform New Zealand into Middle Earth. Principal photography alone took over a year, with pick-up shooting and postproduction adding a further three years to the final tally. The undertaking was so complex that over twenty hours of documentary footage would eventually reveal the process on the trilogy's DVD releases.

There's no shortage of scenes that took forever. Each film in the trilogy has at least one standout, like Fellowship of the Ring's Council of Elrond sequence, in which over a dozen characters deliver complex plot exposition. The final chapter, Return of the King, features an emotional farewell that had to be shot over three separate days because of camera and costuming errors.

The trilogy's centerpiece action scene of the trilogy, though, is probably The Two Towers' climactic Battle of Helm's Deep. A 2017 piece at Relevant recounts the ways in which the enormity of this production has yet to be topped in the last 15 years of action blockbusters. Shot over three months, mostly at night, with torrential downpours both real and simulated, the sweeping conflict takes up 40 minutes of screentime. But what makes it really resonate is Jackson's ability to keep the focus on the emotional arcs of the story's heroes. 

The true story of the R.M.S. Titanic is often seen as a warning about mankind's hubris. The ostentatious vessel, built to break records and demonstrate English superiority while catering to the wealthiest people, was unprepared for the disaster that ensued when it struck an iceberg. The belief in the ship's invincibility led to over 1,500 of its 2,224 passengers perishing at sea.

During production, James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic seemed destined to fall victim to ambition as well. Cameron intended to set an original love story against the backdrop of a painstaking recreation of the original ship and its sinking. Elaborate sets, difficult conditions, and Cameron's exacting perfectionism saddled the project with a constantly bloating budget and a schedule that spiraled out of control as the release date slid from July to December. A highly unusual partnership between 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures was required to keep Titanic afloat, as it became the most expensive movie ever made at the time. 

The risks paid off, as the film became a massive success, hailed for its grandeur and spectacle. The intricate ship sets and harrowing sinking scenes may have provided Titanic's most dazzling moments, but the most difficult scenes to shoot involved no effects or recreations at all. Cameron embarked on a dozen expeditions to the real shipwreck, more than two miles below the ocean's surface, over the course of two years. On these lengthy and often dangerous dives, the filmmaker not only researched the vessel, but shot extensive footage of its present state for use in the movie's opening scenes.

Many of the most famous and accomplished filmmakers earned their reputations by being unrelenting perfectionists. There may be no director more iconic for extreme demands than Stanley Kubrick, who brought extensive research and exacting preparation to a variety of genres. The most famous example of his methodical process is probably his 1980 horror masterpiece The Shining.

Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel was in production for over a year, its shooting schedule stretching beyond expectation as the director constantly reworked the script and shot take after take in search of the perfect mood. A fire further delayed the film, and rather than compromise the film's content, Kubrick used it as a chance to write even more. The Shining's setbacks even affected the neighboring production of The Empire Strikes Back.

One scene in particular took so long that it landed The Shining in the Guinness Book of World Records for highest number of takes for a scene with spoken dialogue. Kubrick shot 127 attempts at a sequence in which Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) faces off against her increasingly deranged husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson) with a baseball bat. "Stanley pushed me and prodded me further than I've ever been before," Duvall would recall later. "It's the most difficult role I've ever had to play." 

Not only did Steven Spielberg's Jaws define the modern summer blockbuster, it demonstrated how to create tension by withholding the reveal of what the audience is afraid of. This wasn't entirely intentional, as the mechanical shark's frequent breakdowns forced Spielberg to show the beast much less than he originally planned. The young director was forced to develop clever ways to suggest the maneater's presence without the use of the troubled robot.

One of these quick fixes ironically led to the most disastrous day of an already beleaguered production. The heroic fishermen harpoon the shark with a series of floating barrels that signal its presence beneath the surface. For a scene in which the ominous floaters circle the boat known as the Orca, the film's effects technicians affixed a pulley system that controlled their movement to the bottom of the hull.

Unfortunately, the planks of the Orca weren't strong enough to support this rig, and a quick yank on the barrel's ropes tore a hole in the boat's hull. It began to sink rapidly, sending the crew scrambling to rescue the cast, equipment, and an entire day's footage from the sea. Although this and several other disasters pushed the shooting schedule from the planed 55 days to a whopping final tally of 159 days, the Orca was repaired, the footage was saved, and Jaws went on to reshape movie history.

Animation is an entirely different process from live-action filmmaking, and everything takes longer. Whether hand-drawn, stop-motion, or computer generated, the task of giving life to inanimate objects never comes quickly. The technical challenges presented in the early years of the medium were especially daunting, as meticulous frame-by-frame renderings and camera movements had to be calculated and carried out manually, with no guarantee of quality until a shot was finished.

Fantasia, the third animated feature from Walt Disney Studios, is a marvel on every level, particularly in the context of its 1940 production. It may have been underappreciated at the time, but the achievement of Fantasia's marriage of technical innovation with artistic ambition is hard to deny. For the grand finale of their "concert feature," Disney and his artists envisioned a climactic clash between the sacred and profane, pairing Modest Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" with Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria." For the film's 75th anniversary, Classical MPR chronicled the struggle to capture this juxtaposition.   

The visuals for "Ave Maria" called for the longest single shot in the history of animation at the time, as the camera followed a procession through a densely layered forest and into a cathedral of trees. This meant that a line-up of background paintings had to be set up end-to-end across the length of a huge soundstage. The scene was completed once, only to have the horrified crew realize they had put the wrong lens on the camera. A second attempt was foiled by an earthquake. All the while, the scene was frequently halted so that the soundstage could be used for Walt's weekly badminton game. The final shot was at last achieved in time for the film reels to be flown to New York mere hours before Fantasia's premiere.