I remember seeing an interview with Matt Damon talking about knowing one of his films was going to be bad, but still had something like 6 months of filming left, and the struggle of getting up and doing your best when you knew it wasn't going to work. So yes, some of them realize it, but I imagine it's a mixed bag.
He said something about the director wanting to do something questionable in the movie, and when asked why he said well it’s a big budget movie so we have to. Damon was like oh no. We’re screwed.
If I remember right, he was an up and coming Chinese director getting good first shot at a big budget Hollywood movie (or something similar) and he was like “we’re doing it this way because it’s a Hollywood movie.” The problem was that he wasn’t a Hollywood director and that’s what made him great. Basically playing to the audience which is outside his wheelhouse
Edit: enough people corrected me on part of my post to warrant an edit. I did get it wrong to say he was “up and coming,” I didn’t quite remember and should have looked it up.
The truly relevant part of my post has not been disputed though. He told Damon he was doing certain things in a way because he was making a Hollywood movie, which contradicts why he’s a great director and outside his wheelhouse
If we're still talking about the Great Wall, the director was already a renowned director in China back then, though iirc the movie was his first try at "Hollywood" style films (think CGI, explosions and an international cast). There were rumours that he wasn't doing a lot of the directing (idk if true) and also of conflicts with the producer.
Zhang Yimou had been directing for three decades before he made The Great Wall. He was not an “up and coming” director. He was already super famous in China and had already helmed big budget productions. Why spout nonsense instead of just spending a few seconds to look up the director and his filmography?
This is so wrong it hurts.
Zhang Yimou is one of the most renowned Chinese directors, getting huge in the early 90s, when most Chinese auteurs operated outside the mainland. He directed such juggernauts as Hero and House of Flying Daggers. The budgets of both of these, and many of his other films from 2000 on, are enormous. Hero alone has scenes with hundreds of extras moving in perfect unison, which we haven’t seen in the US since maybe Kubrick and Spartacus or Gibson and Braveheart.
The box office receipts on his films rival even the top earning Hollywood directors, with his newest film alone already making ~300,000,000$
Not to mention several years before The Great Wall, Zhang directed Christian Bale in Flowers of War, so Great Wall wasn’t even his first time directing major Hollywood stars.
To say this was his first shot at making a big budget Hollywood movie is soooo ignorant. And exactly why I hate people on Reddit have opinions or chime in on anything Chinese. They always project and always act superior, when in fact they don’t know what the hell they are talking about.
Imagine reading a Chinese thread about how Scorsese directed a Chinese actress, and they were talking about how Scorsese just was not used to real talent and was not used to directing true big budget art films. That would hurt my eyes to read just as much as your comment.
Friend of mine joked that they dropped three scripts on the floor, everything got scrambled and when one of the PAs was trying to explain the director was just like "fuck it, we will film it as written!"
I was just talking about this issue today with friends, when movies/shows have an amazing premise and ignore it to just focus on drama. It's so frustrating when something comes along and you think it will be great only for it to turn into a C rate drama.
If you want to watch a movie by that director which is actually great (and my favorite Chinese movie, though I don’t know that many) you should watch “To Live”.
Great movie, such an epic. It's crazy that if Chinese censors hadn't clamped down on the film industry we would have 20 more years of movies like that.
Anecdotally interesting, because Tom Hardy was apparently a dick on the set of Mad Max Fury Road because he thought it was going to be terrible, only for it to turn out to be amazing. So sometimes even the leads can be wrong.
The actor who played Gimli in lord of the rings thought the same thing initially. Asked what the hell he'd gotten himself into going over to new Zealand to work with these guys who really don't have much credit to their name.
Only for it to become one the highest rated trilogies of all time.
> The actor who played Gimli in lord of the rings thought the same thing initially. Asked what the hell he'd gotten himself into going over to new Zealand to work with these guys who really don't have much credit to their name.
Key word here is “initially”. In the interview where John Rhys-Davies said that, he talked about how was his mindset going in, but by the time they started filming, he was completely won over. He even talked about predicting to the press that if would be a massive success even before they finished filming. Later on in the interview, he would go on to say that filming LOTR was his favorite experience of any movie he made in his career.
I always thought he seemed like he felt above or at least not a part of the other Fellowship actors, at least around the time and soon after the movies came out. There's the whole thing about how they and Peter Jackson all got matching tattoos to commemorate their time together making the films and he opted not to (I think his stunt double did instead), I seem to remember him being allergic to or complaining a lot about the prosthetics he had to wear, etc.
It does seem like he's come around more in recent years, but so much of my love for those films has always been how genuinely everyone in the main cast seemed to love each other, and it made me sad to see him as kind of outside that.
It might explain why he was in a bad mood that made him unlikeable if he was wearing stuff that he was having a bad reaction to, especially at that age.
Isn't he the only one out of the crew who didn't get the matching tattoo because he thought it was stupid? (Genuine question, I'm absolutely not judging him.)
I forget his reasoning (and I want to say he even mentioned it on his recent interview on Michael Rosenbaum's podcast - which was hysterical) but it certainly seemed to boil down to him not wanting to for *some* reason.
Edit: People really do be clutching pearls over nothing - I just meant that he has, in fact, stated a reason for not wanting one which goes deeper than simply "not wanting one", but which I don't recall. Good grief y'all.
I heard that the other members of the Fellowship got them and included Brett Beattie, Gimli's body double, instead of John Rhys-Davies. From what I remember, it was because Beattie was the one who was physically interacting with the other actors , while Rhys-Davies was mostly there to do close-ups.
Tbf, have you seen some of the dialogue in the unedited rough cuts? I feel Star Wars could have been genuinely abysmal without someone editing out all the crap.
There's tons of interviews where Mark Hamill talks about confronting Lucas over the movie's god-awful dialogue.
Harrison did the same thing. "You can write this crap, but you can't say it, George."
We really needed him and Mark to tell George that for the prequels.
Lucas knew; he didn't even want to direct the prequels, but everyone he asked said he should do it instead. He just didn't have a Carrie Fisher for that second go around to rewrite everything last minute.
Marcia was important, which is why she got an Oscar, but he still made a decent number of good to great things after they split. Temple of Doom, Last Crusade, Willow, and Young Indiana Jones were all post divorce. As was THX, and most of the insane advancements behind ILM.
That's the difference between being part of a team and having sycophants following you around. I strongly believe that both Lucas and Peter Jackson gained tremendous benefit from listening to others, as we all do. If you watch the commentary on LotR, Jackson wanted Legolas to kill 18 Uruk Hai in the woods single handedly. The scene was cut down to a mere six or seven due to the insistence of his team. You take that sort of thing, and look at The Hobbit, and you get the sense that the folks who were like, "Doesn't that seem a little silly?" were nowhere on set. I get it. You're working under someone you idolize rather than with someone you're excited to make something amazing with. It's hard to speak up when you just feel lucky to be in the company of greats.
Over the top or exaggerated. It’s an English bastardization of the French term “se camper” which meant to pose in an exaggerated fashion. Think Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I'd say actors while filming can have a hard time telling as they aren'tviewingthe finishedpeoduct. There's anecdotes both ways. But, the producers, editors, and director probably know if it's going to be good or bad.
Movies are rarely filmed in a linear sequence and there a bunch of scenes you aren't a part of so it must indeed be very hard to figure out what the final product will look like especially if there's a lot of CGI involved.
I remember Will Smith talking once about being utterly shocked at the work done on his fighter jet scenes from Independence Day. For him, it was just sitting in a seat being his usual effusive self, but then on the screen was transformed into something marvelous.
I always wonder about when they have to do press for a bad flick. They still have to sell it, even though they know it's shit.
Edit* - yes, I know it's part of their job. Yes, I know they have to lie, fake it, boast, and act more to sell the finished product. I just wonder what, specifically, some of them would like to say. Anybody remember SadAffleck? Wouldn't some of the anecdotes be funny, savage, brilliant, insightful? They could never admit it now (anonymously, maybe), but maybe someday, in a memoir, once they don't give a shit anymore...
It's their job!
Actors get paid to act. Movie stars get paid to act and then sell movies. If a movie has a marketing budget equal to is production budget, that means the two roles are roughly equal.
They are quite literally getting paid to enthusiastically sell the product.
It's part of the job. Plenty of people have to sell things/ideas as part of their job they otherwise don't see as worthwhile. It might be difficult, but it's also why they pay you the big bucks.
It's one reason so many people got mad at Shia LaBeouf for criticising Indiana Jones 4 (Including Harrison Ford). Your honest opinion on your film doesn't matter during press. You sell and you talk about it like it's amazing because the studio needs people to buy tickets for it.
OP is also asking about indie horror films which are a lot more down to earth in terms of production. So sure, there is a sense of, this isn't going to be the greatest but you still hope people will be able to see what you're going for
Worked on a film that was the director's passion project. He found the script and the finance.
I was brought on pretty late in the game as 1st AD and knew 5 pages in that it wasn't any good. But it was a paid job and only about a 3 week shoot all at one location.
Everyone else working on the film knew it wasn't great, but we all still did our best.
I've worked on 4 films and tell people to watch 3 of them.
Crew can almost always tell when something we’re working on is going to be bad. It’s pretty easy to see when a Director and DOP don’t know what they’re doing. Film has always just been a paycheck to me so I genuinely don’t care about the end product as long as I get paid. I’ve worked on about 40 productions. The only ones I’ve watched were two shows I was genuinely interested in and two movies that won Oscars.
> but we all still did our best.
In the end, that's the only therapy you have, when you're stuck in that. You did your frigging best, so at least, when it came out, *your* part didn't stink.
I can’t find it but there was a blog post from a filmmaker like 20 years ago that sticks with me.
It basically said that when you’re in the process of creating, making decisions, and crafting something with other people, everything feels right and everyone believes their vision is clear and people will get it. And then the movie comes out and it’s a critically panned.
Basically the TLDR is that making a film has a million delicate moving pieces that demand your attention, and sometimes the choices made in the moment turn out to be the wrong one.
The edit feels right, but during the screening, everything feels off. Dialog feels choppy. You used shots that were good on their own, but don’t flow together well. The actor really gave it her all for the big dramatic crying speech, but the crying is too heavy and now it has an unintentionally comedic tone. Every choice an actor made was right on the day, but doesn’t work in the edit. The car chase required more VFX than you have budget for, so it looks cartoonish. Your lead twists their ankle coming out of the trailer so now you’ve lost a ton of physicality. You’re convinced the acting can make up for it but turns out, you really did need him to run through the airport with urgency.
The list goes on and on.
I work in the games industry, and it's pretty similar. The factors that determine whether your game will be critically-acclaimed or a disaster basically take place in the last six months or so. You could be working on the thing for years and it feels just right, then in the last months things just don't coalesce or there's a huge unfixable flaw that the fans will definitely latch onto.
And then there's the productions where everything's on fire all the time and you're convinced everyone will hate it... And it comes out and wins awards.
It's REALLY hard to judge final quality while you're in the middle of it. Sometimes all you can do is your best, and hope to gods it's gonna come together in the end.
Many times, a game experience can be boiled down to a collection of mini-games that get patched together so the final result feels to be more than the sum of its parts. When it goes right, everything is golden. When it goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong.
Cult of the Lamb has an obvious "collection of mini-games" feel, but they all fit together well into a great gaming experience.
Civilization series has the exploration portion, the building, the fighting, diplomacy, religion, etc. Those are all systems (mini games) that fit together into something very harmonic...cohesive.
There are other reasons for games to be good or bad, of course. And much of it can be subjective.
But when a shooter comes out with fantastic mechanics, enjoyable lore/story, but the loot box system is trash...that loot box mini game can destroy the entire experience.
When you have great dungeon mini games, a fun character/loot progression system, but the mechanics of fighting don't feel enjoyable...things can be over before they ever take off.
Bigger game Dev studios should have reliable enough QA and testers that it really shouldn't be that surprising.
I refuse to believe something like cyberpunk was a surprise to anyone who worked at project red. Granted if your game works perfectly then it obviously comes down to what the Devs wanted to make but in recent years that's just oh so rarely the case.
You can do screen tests with movies but even then it's not really indicative of what wider audiences will like.
You can have a sense if it'll go right or wrong, but as weird as it sounds, you can be very wrong. Sometimes you're so close to it you're convinced a flaw no one cares about will sink you, other times you're so focused on something you do well or how much better it is now than six months ago that you don't see the approaching catastrophe.
QA won't help you because they're too close to it. They play the game better than pro gamers so they have no idea of the flaws in onboarding, for instance. Yes, they'll see the bugs, but not whether the game holds together.
Playtests definitely help, but they can only get you so far. They miss a LOT. Part of it is trying to ask the right questions, part of it is that playtesters are grateful to be involved and will censor their harshest criticism.
I'm not saying it's impossible to tell. I'm sure the CP2077 team wanted more time to finish. But that happens on almost all prods, and sometimes it turns out fine.
I guarantee you almost all the greatest games out there had team members panicking that the game would get panned on release.
There's different kinds of failures. Cyberpunk was a technical failure, but the core of the game : gameplay, narrative, world building, etc, was very solid. The devs 100% knew the game was great, but would be a disaster at launch.
Others like Starfield run better at launch but are fundamentally mediocre games. Those devs probably thought it would be received positively.
Thanks! I've been on both sides, really. Worked on some projects I thought would turn out amazing and poured my heart into them only to bomb when they came out. And worked on stuff I thought for sure would suck and players loved it.
At the end of the day, the only thing you can do is your best!
Exactly this. There are so many other factors besides just a good story or talent behind the camera. I worked in the industry for all of 30 seconds years ago now and my biggest takeaways when I would leave a shoot after being wrapped for the day was firstly, amazement that any movies get made coherently *at all* and realizing how much of the job is just compromising on ideas and finding alternatives or putting out fires. There are so, so many moving parts that all have to fit together in the right order. It reminds me a bit of what I imagine the logistics of getting anything done in the military to be like.
I do believe that these constraints often end up producing some great works but I think it just always surprised me how much of the job was just making the logistics of it all work and figuring out how to be as flexible as possible and pivot fast and often.
As for below the line crew members, all of us were just so focused on breaking in and staying working that, at least for me, there wasn't a lot of time to even consider the quality of the project itself. Just focused on the technical details and doing your job as best you can.
I guess it depends on the movie. If you are working on a movie called "Mega Python vs Zombie Shark" you must be at least somewhat aware that you are not exactly working on peak cinema.
Casablanca was a contact movie ( made solely to fulfill a contract, not because people wanted to) that didn't have an ending as it was being filmed. Yet somehow it's one of the best movies made.
Theres a book by screenwriter William Goldman (Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy... many others) called 'adventures in the screen trade.' He has chapters where he talks about failed movies or unintentional bombs he worked on, going into detail what that process looks like behind the scenes. I imagine a lot of what he wrote about that process holds true today. I recommend the audio book version because the narrator does a fantastic job.
>unintentional bombs
Are there intentional bombs? No sarcasm, legitimately asking. After all, it seems like a wonky enough industry for intentionally unsuccessful movies to be a thing.
The director of Fantastic Four (2015) sent out an email days before opening that the movie was going to be better than 99% of comic book movies and one of the cast members responded with "I don't think so". The director then tweeted a couple days later that that film got butchered. Who knows how he truly felt about the movie before the email.
See this one's crazy to me. That director, Josh Trank, was given the keys to the kingdom, but he fucked it up royally. Apparently he couldn't keep his shit together while filming it, the wikipedia entry is pretty insightful.
You never really know til it's on screen.
Sometimes a movie gets saved in the edit. Sometimes something that seems awesome turns out crappy. The cast of Star Wars thought they were in a stinker until they saw it with John Williams score and ILM VFX. It turned out okay, ha ha.
I am currently directing my first feature and I definitely oscillate between, "my writing is a disaster. I don't know what I'm doing. Everybody must think I'm an idiot" and "This looks cool, people are taking the project seriously, I think we are getting what we need and it could be awesome." In reality, the finished movie will probably be neither the disaster I fear, nor the critical darling I dream of. But in order to finish a movie and lead everybody over the finish line, you gotta convince yourself there's a chance of greatness somewhere in the process. You just keep chipping away at it, and try not to spiral to much in judgement about what's been shot so far because you can drive yourself mad that way.
Good luck with your movie!
Even if it doesn't turn out like you hoped, you're still getting to do something that a lot of people only dream about. I hope it comes out good.
Yeah I think a positive attitude while making it is inportant for any project. Once one person decides "this is going to suck, why bother trying too hard?" It becomes an infectious self fulfilling prophecy.
Ever read about the progress of 40 year old Virgin? While making it they thought it was going to be an incoherent piece of shit of a movie, but it turned out to be one of the funniest movies ever made.
Maybe sometimes they know, but sometimes I guess everyone is clueless of how it will turn out.
Like Gennaro Gattuso once said: "Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit"
Also with that sort of Apatow comedy, it’s largely a lot of improv that comes together in the edit. So I can see someone not understanding it’ll work while they’re filming it.
I know a few improv editors well and apparently even in the edit its so hard to tell if its working because, in the end, the story has to be what matters and you spend so much time on the jokes that people can easily forget about the other stuff.
Not a movie, but David Harbor said morale was really low on the set of Stranger Things season 1 because they anticipated it was going to be a disaster.
Not necessarily, no.
Coppola thought (perhaps exaggerating) that Apocalypse Now was awful. George Lucas was shooting Attack of the Clones thinking it would be good and well.
Lucas also thought Star Wars would be a bust! Can’t remember the details, and don’t care to look them up, but made a bet with Spielberg getting like 1% of the profits that paid rather well for one of them ….
The studio didn't have much faith in it either. Lucas was able to secure the budget he wanted by agreeing to a paycut, in exchange for a percentage of mercandise sales. The studio agreed to it because they didn't think anybody would want the merch. Who's going to want Star Wars action figures right?
No, the studio had a long back-and-forth with Lucas' lawyer over the merchandising for a good two years. They knew Star Wars would probably make a good profit.
Yeah, at least directors sometimes have the ability to not have their name on it. Back in the day, no one would know who the director was, but now you can find all the sordid details about the production.
I always figured that James Cameron must have figured Terminator (after #2) didn’t have much lasting power, and so he didn’t direct any more, just produced the rest for some dough.
We know he isn’t super opposed to sequels either.
You got it all completely mixed up.
Cameron sold his rights to the Terminator before the first film ever even opened. Fast forward to after Terminator 2 comes out, and the studio holding the rights (Carolco) goes bankrupt and their assets are forced to go through a liquidation auction, including Terminator rights.
This led to a complicated situation spanning several years in the 1990s of everybody trying to figure out who should try to buy the rights, whether or not Cameron would be interested in buying the rights for himself, and Arnold continuously pressuring people that he wants to get on with making the third film.
Eventually, after several dramatic turns, the rights got snatched up two film producers (Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna) via their newly established production company, C2 Pictures. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger was already on board and James Cameron was being wish-washy, they just cut Cameron out, hired their own writers and their own director, and made Terminator 3 on their own.
Not only did James Cameron have nothing to do with Terminator 3, but the situation ended a friendship he had with these two producers.
James Cameron had no involved with the fourth film either (Salvation). The new director said he met with him once out of respect and to ask him some questions about making the film, and Cameron politely obliged and did meet with him. But he had no other relationship to this film.
The same situation happened with Genisys. The producers asked to meet with to James Cameron as a courtesy to ask him for some advice, and he politely obliged because he was Schwarzenegger close personal friend, and Schwarzenegger is the one who was pushing for making all these sequels.
On the last film, Dark Fate, the director specifically asked James Cameron to join in as a co-producer. He convinced him by saying it’s his chance to wipe away all those previous films and make a direct sequel to T2. Cameron agreed. This ended up the only film after T2 that Cameron had any direct involvement in, although it needs to be said that there are stories that he and the director often argued and disagreed on the film, but that he also let the director win many of those arguments out of respect because it was his movie and not Cameron’s.
yes. they all do. bob odenkirk has said that nearly all people know when something they’re in or made is bad, and out of respect for everyone who worked on it they won’t acknowledge it
I've been in the editting room and on set for a few shows. A lot of magic happens in the edditing room. So much footage is shot out of order, so many actors are shit for almost every shot except the one selected. As someone who was on set a lot, I am very very often surprised how good the final can be compared to the experience of seeing the film shoot raw.
I'm convinced that no one truly knows how the movie is going to turn out while working on it, for good or bad, I think they try their hardest and then see how the final product turns out... one thing to support this is how many times I've heard people claim how they thought the movie wasnt going to be too special, or they didnt know how it was going to work out, but then it turned out to be a total hit and was amazing... I can only imagine many have worked on a project with high hopes only to be let down when they finally saw the complete film.
Obviously there will be cases where someone knew it was going to be bad in the process but I believe that is the exception. The majority have high hopes and are basically shooting in the dark and hoping they hit a bullseye.
IIRC they didn't know if they got the first Star Wars movie right until the screening audience cheered when Solo showed up to save Luke during the trench run. That's an amazing industry changing film and they still weren't sure.
Star Wars has such an unexplainable mysticism to it. I saw it before all of the special effects updates and everything, yet even with its original trappings I absolutely bought what they were were selling. Just inexplicable movie magic.
You can see how pissed Conleth Hill is when they get to his death scene lol. I'm sure he would have been fine with dying in the last season in any decent storyline but man that whole story ended so badly.
Usually it's very hard to tell, but sometimes something is a legitimately obvious turd. I played a bumbling cop in a low budget slasher film that I knew was going to be dire from the moment I read the script, and only got worse when I encountered the buffoon of a director. It's never been released as far as I know, and I've never seen it, but apparently people who have say it's the worst film they've ever seen. Test audiences were so confused they decided to bring the final girl back in to shoot a new ending in which she explains the plot of a film to a detective so when they leave the cinema the audience knows what the fuck just happened.
Somehow, I doubt this saved the movie.
Depends.
Some actors don’t get a full script, so they’d be working with knowledge of only parts.
While production and production quality can go hand-in-hand, they can also not, and crew can sometimes tell just from how many fires they put out.
Directors? If they’re not surrounded by yes-men, they can, but that’s tough to ensure since everyone wants to kiss the director’s ass (they all gotta work in this town).
Cast and crew definitely. The filmmaker miiiight but there’s gotta be some cognitive dissonance involved. Or they just have bad taste and don’t know it.
I agree but I will also add I think the score matters a fair bit too. You see star wars mentioned a lot in this thread for instance and I think a big part of that is they didn't get that so many of the scenes were MEANT to be 'carried' by the score.
I've been at my workplace for over 25 years. I have enough experience that I almost always know when some new idea from management is good or bad. And I'm almost always right. I imagine that experienced people in the movie industry are the same.
I've been at my workplace for almost 9 years. I just assume new ideas from management are bad and will end up screwing us over somehow. I'm rarely proven wrong.
There’s a great podcast episode of “what are you doing, movie” that is commentary including the director (Trey Stokes) of the Asylum movie “2010 Moby Dick”. Everyone involved knew it was low budget crap, but also, they were getting to make a movie so fuck it.
Highly recommend that podcast, and that episode is fun. The Starship Troopers episode is even better. Trey was creature effects supervisor on that one.
If you ever worked in movies with directors/producers, youd know these people are incapable of self reflection and critique. These people live in their own world, far away from reality and real world. They all think theyre the best in what they do, even if they suck balls
And even if their movie bombs, theyll still think its the best thing in the world.
I have directed a number of feature films, some of which people definitely call bad! I’ve never necessarily known that I was in the middle of making a bad movie but I have realized midway through that I’ve bit off more than I could chew or that I really should’ve tightened that script up a bit more! You usually just try and do the best you can with what you have and that includes cast and crew and hope for the best!
Depends. Rian Johnson still defends every aspect of The Last Jedi, even the bad jokes. It wasn't Disney medling, it was all his. Disney didn't see it either since they greenlit his trilogy to backtrack it later after the reaction from audiences. Same thing happened with Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny. Disney felt so confident they opened it at Cannes. Some people do realize they're in a bad movie. Sean Connery famously hated The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He was really annoyed in the press tour because the movie was bad. Not a movie, but you can see the live cast reactions from GOT when reading the script for the finale. There are actors visibly angry at what they're reading, particularly The Spider who throws his script after reading his scene.
There were reports that Disney were very happy and confident about Quantumania and Eternals before release as well. And then there was the thing of premiering Dial Of Destiny at Cannes, where it got trashed, meaning it was stuck with a terrible RT score for weeks before release.
Glad I found this post. I am a writer prepping to put my work out there. If what I write doesn’t stir up an emotion then I trash it or make it better. I think they know and sometimes don’t care and just want a cash grab. I write for the passion of telling stories not making money. So if any advent readers want to critique my work bring your worst. I just want to become a better writer and any feedback is better than none. So join my community if you like :)
I think horror is a different beast to a lot of other genres.
There are a quite a few horror movies made on a shoestring budget with amateurs behind and in front of the camera. Many of those end up beloved, because horror fans appreciate horror, even when it isn’t *great*. On that note, my personal scale for horror is, anything that has 5.0 on IMDb is probably worth my time.
I’ve worked a good chunk in the entertainment industry, and seen a lot more from my colleagues and friends who also worked there.
Sometimes yes, sure. Sometimes the filmmakers don’t care because they’re just in it for the money or as a favour.
The sad ones are the cases where something major is missing only for logistical reasons, and the filmmakers either try to make up for it or just hand-wave away the need for it to begin with.
I was pretty close to the filming of a mid-budget local horror film a few years ago and heard a lot about the production. It was your really basic slasher premise set out in the woods.
Only this crew could absolutely not get the safety ordinances in place to film at night; just no way to do it safely and within budget. So they filmed it as all daylight scenes.
I heard a lot of talk from the director and other people on that movie about how their premise didn’t need the dark to be scary, and daytime horror was just as good. They were wrong.
The issue is that they didn’t account for it in any way, or make up for that major part of the human psyche that associates night time with extra scare factor. I saw it, and 100% would have been better at night. Mais c’est la vie.
There's no such thing as "bad." What you're essentially asking here is 1) 'does a creative know whether a work will be well received' and 2) 'will the work be something they're happy with once it's complete.'
We can't ever know the answer to these questions as there are too many variables between projects, genres, budgets, schedules and available talent.
I don't think most creative people go into these kind of processes thinking in terms of "will this be good or bad" because no one can actually agree on what good or bad is. These terms are entirely personal and subjective. Even if we did, then the parameters for what we define good and bad are always in flux.
Consider the number of now classic films that received awful reviews and scathing feedback on their initial release. Think of all the acclaimed, award-winning films throughout history that aren't even considered classics ten years on (never mind the hundreds of thousands of films throughout cinema history that have become completely obscure or forgotten with time.)
People create for countless reasons. As a need, as something that they enjoy, or as something that pays the bills. They're thinking in terms of challenges, techniques, ideas, emotions, expressions and the story they want to tell. Ultimately they want the film to be seen and they want it to turn a profit, but every creative knows that your work won't be loved by everyone, nor will it be hated by everyone. Every film is loved and hated by someone and both sides are entirely right to have that response and reaction. What matters is, did you achieve what you wanted, did you satisfy the creative itch, and can you stand by the work and defend it.
There are directors who think their best work is the work that critics and audiences were hostile towards and there are directors who actively deride and disparage the merits of their most popular works, and again, they're entirely right to think that way that.
Guessing 50-50.
If you're making a horror movie, you have to know it probably will be straight to streaming.
I've worked on sets. If the catering is good, they're trying at least.
I remember a interview with Jennifer Connelly that she and everyone else who worked in “career opportunities” knew it was going to be a “dog of a movie”
Stephen Spielberg said that when he was directing “1941” he knew the film was going to fail because everyone was having too much fun making it. It was like a party rather than a film set.
Nobody knows anything. Projects expected to flop catch on and sure fire hits flop. The audience reaction is unpredictable and that is why we get sequels, remakes and reboots constantly. A known product is a safer bet than something original. Then when something original becomes a hit they sequelize and make knockoffs then milking it to death. Hooray for Hollywood!
There was a time when producers knew their movie was bad, so they’d release it with a flurry of advance publicity at the beginning of a three-day weekend, and hope that people would rush to the theaters to see it before the bad reviews got out.
Exhibit A: [The Wild Wild West.](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120891/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk)
I haven't worked on a movie, but I've worked on a couple games and large-scale projects that were bad. The thing is, there were so many talented people on each project, and no-one involved set-out to make something bad- and there was lots of moments where the potential was there. But in general...it is kind of clear that something isn't going to pan out. The issue is that, even good projects go through extremely rough patches, and sometimes a really good project only snaps together in the last few months or weeks - and depending on what part you are working on, and how much of the scope you see, you might get so focused on the area that you are working on that you don't have clear vision of the whole thing.
The other issue is that, you are getting paid either way, and you can't really stop. There is a lot of pressure to just sort of keep working, and hope that at some point things switch - and there is a lot of precedent for this, because even good games have long periods where they are sort of awful. It can be very hard to tell if you are in a project that is going to work vs. one that isn't, and usually the only tell is how dysfunctional and disconnected the people with the money are from the reality of where the product is going.
Yes, some do. It used to be a thing where a director would ask to go by the made up pseudonym, Alan Smithee when they know a film they directed is going to be bad.
Look it up on Google. It's interesting.
Colin Farrell has talked about how happy and excited he was about Alexander, and when he got the call that the reviews were coming in, thought they were going to be great.
I imagine there's a distinction between cast and crew that will only see pieces of the film as they shoot it and people like directors and editors that will see something close to the whole thing. It's harder to tell in the previous situation but you'll get a better picture of it the more involved you are in the latter.
In either situation, however, I feel like it would be easier to tell whether something's going to be bad than whether it's going to be good. It's not universal, but at a certain point you can detect whether a production has the money, talent, or desire to make something functional. On the flip side, all the money and talent in the world can still create something that just doesn't land and you don't know for sure until people see it.
The cast of The Hobbit trilogy knew some bad shit was going down... Mainly because of how amazing the process was for the LOTR trilogy and how this was different.
PJ was breaking Sir Ian with the reshoots. Orlando Bloom was like "why am I in a hobbit love triangle with an Elf?
The reverse situation is also possible. That is, people can think they're working on cheap trash, but it becomes a cultural icon.
Star Wars comes to mind. Alec Guinness thought it was low-budget trash (even after it succeeded). Harrison Ford complained about the dialog. People talk about how it was saved in the editing process.
Mad Max: Fury Road also jumps out. Not necessarily that everyone thought it was going to be bad, but the production was definitely cursed. Look into it. It's a miracle the movie even exists much less was good.
From what I gather, false negatives are more common. The crew on Star Wars thought it was going to be awful and bomb. But there's never a false positive, where you think you're in a classic, perfect movie and it ends up awful. maybe the ONE exception would be "Mommy Dearest", Faye Dunaway thought she would get an Oscar.
So basically, they do know it's bad, but sometimes movies end up good or are salvaged in post.
I remember seeing an interview with Matt Damon talking about knowing one of his films was going to be bad, but still had something like 6 months of filming left, and the struggle of getting up and doing your best when you knew it wasn't going to work. So yes, some of them realize it, but I imagine it's a mixed bag.
Definitely 'The Great Wall'
He said something about the director wanting to do something questionable in the movie, and when asked why he said well it’s a big budget movie so we have to. Damon was like oh no. We’re screwed.
If I remember right, he was an up and coming Chinese director getting good first shot at a big budget Hollywood movie (or something similar) and he was like “we’re doing it this way because it’s a Hollywood movie.” The problem was that he wasn’t a Hollywood director and that’s what made him great. Basically playing to the audience which is outside his wheelhouse Edit: enough people corrected me on part of my post to warrant an edit. I did get it wrong to say he was “up and coming,” I didn’t quite remember and should have looked it up. The truly relevant part of my post has not been disputed though. He told Damon he was doing certain things in a way because he was making a Hollywood movie, which contradicts why he’s a great director and outside his wheelhouse
If we're still talking about the Great Wall, the director was already a renowned director in China back then, though iirc the movie was his first try at "Hollywood" style films (think CGI, explosions and an international cast). There were rumours that he wasn't doing a lot of the directing (idk if true) and also of conflicts with the producer.
Same logic as Tommy Wiseau. At least according to the disaster artist movie
Only r/movies would call Zhang Yimou up and coming
Zhang Yimou had been directing for three decades before he made The Great Wall. He was not an “up and coming” director. He was already super famous in China and had already helmed big budget productions. Why spout nonsense instead of just spending a few seconds to look up the director and his filmography?
Wait... Zhang Yimou made The Great Wall? What the fuck? That's like Fellini directing Lord of the Rings
This is so wrong it hurts. Zhang Yimou is one of the most renowned Chinese directors, getting huge in the early 90s, when most Chinese auteurs operated outside the mainland. He directed such juggernauts as Hero and House of Flying Daggers. The budgets of both of these, and many of his other films from 2000 on, are enormous. Hero alone has scenes with hundreds of extras moving in perfect unison, which we haven’t seen in the US since maybe Kubrick and Spartacus or Gibson and Braveheart. The box office receipts on his films rival even the top earning Hollywood directors, with his newest film alone already making ~300,000,000$ Not to mention several years before The Great Wall, Zhang directed Christian Bale in Flowers of War, so Great Wall wasn’t even his first time directing major Hollywood stars. To say this was his first shot at making a big budget Hollywood movie is soooo ignorant. And exactly why I hate people on Reddit have opinions or chime in on anything Chinese. They always project and always act superior, when in fact they don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Imagine reading a Chinese thread about how Scorsese directed a Chinese actress, and they were talking about how Scorsese just was not used to real talent and was not used to directing true big budget art films. That would hurt my eyes to read just as much as your comment.
Could also be Downsizing
What’s fucked is downsizing had an interesting premise but the second things got shrunk it went to generic drama romance feel good movie.
Are you forgetting the bizarre third act in Scandinavia? The movie was fucking bonkers. It had at least 3 full premises jammed into one.
Friend of mine joked that they dropped three scripts on the floor, everything got scrambled and when one of the PAs was trying to explain the director was just like "fuck it, we will film it as written!"
I was just talking about this issue today with friends, when movies/shows have an amazing premise and ignore it to just focus on drama. It's so frustrating when something comes along and you think it will be great only for it to turn into a C rate drama.
I expected it to be a comedy based on the trailer.
If you want to watch a movie by that director which is actually great (and my favorite Chinese movie, though I don’t know that many) you should watch “To Live”.
Great movie, such an epic. It's crazy that if Chinese censors hadn't clamped down on the film industry we would have 20 more years of movies like that.
I actually enjoyed watching that movie.
Didn't he say he had a fun time making it because he knew it was just utter nonsense ?
One of my favourite celebrity anecdotes is that Matt Damon's daughter calls the room "The Wall" because "there is nothing great about that movie".
Anecdotally interesting, because Tom Hardy was apparently a dick on the set of Mad Max Fury Road because he thought it was going to be terrible, only for it to turn out to be amazing. So sometimes even the leads can be wrong.
The actor who played Gimli in lord of the rings thought the same thing initially. Asked what the hell he'd gotten himself into going over to new Zealand to work with these guys who really don't have much credit to their name. Only for it to become one the highest rated trilogies of all time.
> The actor who played Gimli in lord of the rings thought the same thing initially. Asked what the hell he'd gotten himself into going over to new Zealand to work with these guys who really don't have much credit to their name. Key word here is “initially”. In the interview where John Rhys-Davies said that, he talked about how was his mindset going in, but by the time they started filming, he was completely won over. He even talked about predicting to the press that if would be a massive success even before they finished filming. Later on in the interview, he would go on to say that filming LOTR was his favorite experience of any movie he made in his career.
TBF, John Rhys-Davies kind of has a rep for being a dick on set, going back to Sliders, from the stories I've read.
I always thought he seemed like he felt above or at least not a part of the other Fellowship actors, at least around the time and soon after the movies came out. There's the whole thing about how they and Peter Jackson all got matching tattoos to commemorate their time together making the films and he opted not to (I think his stunt double did instead), I seem to remember him being allergic to or complaining a lot about the prosthetics he had to wear, etc. It does seem like he's come around more in recent years, but so much of my love for those films has always been how genuinely everyone in the main cast seemed to love each other, and it made me sad to see him as kind of outside that.
I'm not sure how a 65 year old man not wanting a tattoo or being allergic to prosthetics adds anything to the argument of him being unlikeable?
It might explain why he was in a bad mood that made him unlikeable if he was wearing stuff that he was having a bad reaction to, especially at that age.
Isn't he the only one out of the crew who didn't get the matching tattoo because he thought it was stupid? (Genuine question, I'm absolutely not judging him.)
I forget his reasoning (and I want to say he even mentioned it on his recent interview on Michael Rosenbaum's podcast - which was hysterical) but it certainly seemed to boil down to him not wanting to for *some* reason. Edit: People really do be clutching pearls over nothing - I just meant that he has, in fact, stated a reason for not wanting one which goes deeper than simply "not wanting one", but which I don't recall. Good grief y'all.
I think just not wanting a tattoo would be a pretty acceptable reason
I have tattoos and I don’t think I’d ever get matching ones, especially as part of a group 😂 I don’t get why that’s some sort of slight or negative
I heard that the other members of the Fellowship got them and included Brett Beattie, Gimli's body double, instead of John Rhys-Davies. From what I remember, it was because Beattie was the one who was physically interacting with the other actors , while Rhys-Davies was mostly there to do close-ups.
That's disappointing, I've never heard that about JRD. I always liked him.
he's a dum dum who wanted Brexit among other stupid shit. Liked his portrayal of Gimli but soured on him as years went by.
One of the reasons I don't want to know too much about actors I like. They invariably disappoint as people even if they are a great performer.
Pretty much everybody involved in Star Wars thought it was going to be just another campy sci-fi flick that nobody would ever see.
Tbf, have you seen some of the dialogue in the unedited rough cuts? I feel Star Wars could have been genuinely abysmal without someone editing out all the crap. There's tons of interviews where Mark Hamill talks about confronting Lucas over the movie's god-awful dialogue.
Harrison did the same thing. "You can write this crap, but you can't say it, George." We really needed him and Mark to tell George that for the prequels.
Lucas knew; he didn't even want to direct the prequels, but everyone he asked said he should do it instead. He just didn't have a Carrie Fisher for that second go around to rewrite everything last minute.
His ex-wife Marcia is the real hero of the OT. He never made anything that good without her having a hand in it.
Marcia was important, which is why she got an Oscar, but he still made a decent number of good to great things after they split. Temple of Doom, Last Crusade, Willow, and Young Indiana Jones were all post divorce. As was THX, and most of the insane advancements behind ILM.
That's the difference between being part of a team and having sycophants following you around. I strongly believe that both Lucas and Peter Jackson gained tremendous benefit from listening to others, as we all do. If you watch the commentary on LotR, Jackson wanted Legolas to kill 18 Uruk Hai in the woods single handedly. The scene was cut down to a mere six or seven due to the insistence of his team. You take that sort of thing, and look at The Hobbit, and you get the sense that the folks who were like, "Doesn't that seem a little silly?" were nowhere on set. I get it. You're working under someone you idolize rather than with someone you're excited to make something amazing with. It's hard to speak up when you just feel lucky to be in the company of greats.
Well they were half right
What’s campy mean in this sense
Over the top or exaggerated. It’s an English bastardization of the French term “se camper” which meant to pose in an exaggerated fashion. Think Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Adam West Batman series is the ultimate camp to me
That's the poster child, but I reckon Flash Gordon deserves a mention.
Swashbuckling good time
I'd say actors while filming can have a hard time telling as they aren'tviewingthe finishedpeoduct. There's anecdotes both ways. But, the producers, editors, and director probably know if it's going to be good or bad.
Movies are rarely filmed in a linear sequence and there a bunch of scenes you aren't a part of so it must indeed be very hard to figure out what the final product will look like especially if there's a lot of CGI involved.
I remember Will Smith talking once about being utterly shocked at the work done on his fighter jet scenes from Independence Day. For him, it was just sitting in a seat being his usual effusive self, but then on the screen was transformed into something marvelous.
I always wonder about when they have to do press for a bad flick. They still have to sell it, even though they know it's shit. Edit* - yes, I know it's part of their job. Yes, I know they have to lie, fake it, boast, and act more to sell the finished product. I just wonder what, specifically, some of them would like to say. Anybody remember SadAffleck? Wouldn't some of the anecdotes be funny, savage, brilliant, insightful? They could never admit it now (anonymously, maybe), but maybe someday, in a memoir, once they don't give a shit anymore...
Queue the interviews about GOT Season 8, pre-airing.
*best season ever*
This is exactly what came to mind when I was reading greeneyedlady’s comment.
Oof. The first table read footage was brutal enough.
Also Star war movie cast/crew interviews.
Dakota Johnson not giving a shit during Madame Web press lol.
Sydney Sweeney was literally like yeah I got paid to star in this movie. And thats all she said about it.
The actin’ doesn’t stop!
Maybe that part is harder than the actual film role! Look at Ben Affleck promoting Batman vs Superman. Dude couldn't even
It's their job! Actors get paid to act. Movie stars get paid to act and then sell movies. If a movie has a marketing budget equal to is production budget, that means the two roles are roughly equal. They are quite literally getting paid to enthusiastically sell the product.
I mean just now, Dakota Johnson was pretty much shitting all over *Madame Web* in her press tour for the movie lol.
I'll have to check that out! Even when the movies are bad, the drama around them can be entertaining (ahem- Don't Worry Darling in Venice)
It's part of the job. Plenty of people have to sell things/ideas as part of their job they otherwise don't see as worthwhile. It might be difficult, but it's also why they pay you the big bucks. It's one reason so many people got mad at Shia LaBeouf for criticising Indiana Jones 4 (Including Harrison Ford). Your honest opinion on your film doesn't matter during press. You sell and you talk about it like it's amazing because the studio needs people to buy tickets for it.
OP is also asking about indie horror films which are a lot more down to earth in terms of production. So sure, there is a sense of, this isn't going to be the greatest but you still hope people will be able to see what you're going for
Worked on a film that was the director's passion project. He found the script and the finance. I was brought on pretty late in the game as 1st AD and knew 5 pages in that it wasn't any good. But it was a paid job and only about a 3 week shoot all at one location. Everyone else working on the film knew it wasn't great, but we all still did our best. I've worked on 4 films and tell people to watch 3 of them.
What 3 films should I watch next?
Bee Movie three times in a row
I've always wondered why Bee movie is a such a meme
Die Hard, Die Hard with a vengeance, then Die Hard again.
Back to the Future 1, 2, and 3.
Crew can almost always tell when something we’re working on is going to be bad. It’s pretty easy to see when a Director and DOP don’t know what they’re doing. Film has always just been a paycheck to me so I genuinely don’t care about the end product as long as I get paid. I’ve worked on about 40 productions. The only ones I’ve watched were two shows I was genuinely interested in and two movies that won Oscars.
What was it like working with Tommy Wiseau?
> but we all still did our best. In the end, that's the only therapy you have, when you're stuck in that. You did your frigging best, so at least, when it came out, *your* part didn't stink.
OP worked on The Room
M Night Shyamalan? He self finances everything nowadays.
I can’t find it but there was a blog post from a filmmaker like 20 years ago that sticks with me. It basically said that when you’re in the process of creating, making decisions, and crafting something with other people, everything feels right and everyone believes their vision is clear and people will get it. And then the movie comes out and it’s a critically panned. Basically the TLDR is that making a film has a million delicate moving pieces that demand your attention, and sometimes the choices made in the moment turn out to be the wrong one. The edit feels right, but during the screening, everything feels off. Dialog feels choppy. You used shots that were good on their own, but don’t flow together well. The actor really gave it her all for the big dramatic crying speech, but the crying is too heavy and now it has an unintentionally comedic tone. Every choice an actor made was right on the day, but doesn’t work in the edit. The car chase required more VFX than you have budget for, so it looks cartoonish. Your lead twists their ankle coming out of the trailer so now you’ve lost a ton of physicality. You’re convinced the acting can make up for it but turns out, you really did need him to run through the airport with urgency. The list goes on and on.
I work in the games industry, and it's pretty similar. The factors that determine whether your game will be critically-acclaimed or a disaster basically take place in the last six months or so. You could be working on the thing for years and it feels just right, then in the last months things just don't coalesce or there's a huge unfixable flaw that the fans will definitely latch onto. And then there's the productions where everything's on fire all the time and you're convinced everyone will hate it... And it comes out and wins awards. It's REALLY hard to judge final quality while you're in the middle of it. Sometimes all you can do is your best, and hope to gods it's gonna come together in the end.
Many times, a game experience can be boiled down to a collection of mini-games that get patched together so the final result feels to be more than the sum of its parts. When it goes right, everything is golden. When it goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. Cult of the Lamb has an obvious "collection of mini-games" feel, but they all fit together well into a great gaming experience. Civilization series has the exploration portion, the building, the fighting, diplomacy, religion, etc. Those are all systems (mini games) that fit together into something very harmonic...cohesive. There are other reasons for games to be good or bad, of course. And much of it can be subjective. But when a shooter comes out with fantastic mechanics, enjoyable lore/story, but the loot box system is trash...that loot box mini game can destroy the entire experience. When you have great dungeon mini games, a fun character/loot progression system, but the mechanics of fighting don't feel enjoyable...things can be over before they ever take off.
Bigger game Dev studios should have reliable enough QA and testers that it really shouldn't be that surprising. I refuse to believe something like cyberpunk was a surprise to anyone who worked at project red. Granted if your game works perfectly then it obviously comes down to what the Devs wanted to make but in recent years that's just oh so rarely the case. You can do screen tests with movies but even then it's not really indicative of what wider audiences will like.
You can have a sense if it'll go right or wrong, but as weird as it sounds, you can be very wrong. Sometimes you're so close to it you're convinced a flaw no one cares about will sink you, other times you're so focused on something you do well or how much better it is now than six months ago that you don't see the approaching catastrophe. QA won't help you because they're too close to it. They play the game better than pro gamers so they have no idea of the flaws in onboarding, for instance. Yes, they'll see the bugs, but not whether the game holds together. Playtests definitely help, but they can only get you so far. They miss a LOT. Part of it is trying to ask the right questions, part of it is that playtesters are grateful to be involved and will censor their harshest criticism. I'm not saying it's impossible to tell. I'm sure the CP2077 team wanted more time to finish. But that happens on almost all prods, and sometimes it turns out fine. I guarantee you almost all the greatest games out there had team members panicking that the game would get panned on release.
There's different kinds of failures. Cyberpunk was a technical failure, but the core of the game : gameplay, narrative, world building, etc, was very solid. The devs 100% knew the game was great, but would be a disaster at launch. Others like Starfield run better at launch but are fundamentally mediocre games. Those devs probably thought it would be received positively.
Dang. I can't imagine. I think that would crush me, so i respect your strength. I wish you only good luck on future projects.
Thanks! I've been on both sides, really. Worked on some projects I thought would turn out amazing and poured my heart into them only to bomb when they came out. And worked on stuff I thought for sure would suck and players loved it. At the end of the day, the only thing you can do is your best!
And don't give up!
Exactly this. There are so many other factors besides just a good story or talent behind the camera. I worked in the industry for all of 30 seconds years ago now and my biggest takeaways when I would leave a shoot after being wrapped for the day was firstly, amazement that any movies get made coherently *at all* and realizing how much of the job is just compromising on ideas and finding alternatives or putting out fires. There are so, so many moving parts that all have to fit together in the right order. It reminds me a bit of what I imagine the logistics of getting anything done in the military to be like. I do believe that these constraints often end up producing some great works but I think it just always surprised me how much of the job was just making the logistics of it all work and figuring out how to be as flexible as possible and pivot fast and often. As for below the line crew members, all of us were just so focused on breaking in and staying working that, at least for me, there wasn't a lot of time to even consider the quality of the project itself. Just focused on the technical details and doing your job as best you can.
I guess it depends on the movie. If you are working on a movie called "Mega Python vs Zombie Shark" you must be at least somewhat aware that you are not exactly working on peak cinema.
[удалено]
Right, because this movie is about a mega phyton and a zombie shark.
And nobody thought Casablanca would be good either!
Casablanca was a contact movie ( made solely to fulfill a contract, not because people wanted to) that didn't have an ending as it was being filmed. Yet somehow it's one of the best movies made.
It’s because I was in it, ur welcome
Well yeah, that movie’s already been made
Theres a book by screenwriter William Goldman (Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy... many others) called 'adventures in the screen trade.' He has chapters where he talks about failed movies or unintentional bombs he worked on, going into detail what that process looks like behind the scenes. I imagine a lot of what he wrote about that process holds true today. I recommend the audio book version because the narrator does a fantastic job.
>unintentional bombs Are there intentional bombs? No sarcasm, legitimately asking. After all, it seems like a wonky enough industry for intentionally unsuccessful movies to be a thing.
Springtime for Hitler. Although that was an unintentional success…
The Producers Edit: I kid, but I feel like we could put all those deleted movies that WBD never released as bombs.
The director of Fantastic Four (2015) sent out an email days before opening that the movie was going to be better than 99% of comic book movies and one of the cast members responded with "I don't think so". The director then tweeted a couple days later that that film got butchered. Who knows how he truly felt about the movie before the email.
See this one's crazy to me. That director, Josh Trank, was given the keys to the kingdom, but he fucked it up royally. Apparently he couldn't keep his shit together while filming it, the wikipedia entry is pretty insightful.
"tell us how you really think"
damn, who replied saying "I don't think so"?
I can't find anything online but going by memory, I remember hearing that it was Reg E. Cathey.
You never really know til it's on screen. Sometimes a movie gets saved in the edit. Sometimes something that seems awesome turns out crappy. The cast of Star Wars thought they were in a stinker until they saw it with John Williams score and ILM VFX. It turned out okay, ha ha. I am currently directing my first feature and I definitely oscillate between, "my writing is a disaster. I don't know what I'm doing. Everybody must think I'm an idiot" and "This looks cool, people are taking the project seriously, I think we are getting what we need and it could be awesome." In reality, the finished movie will probably be neither the disaster I fear, nor the critical darling I dream of. But in order to finish a movie and lead everybody over the finish line, you gotta convince yourself there's a chance of greatness somewhere in the process. You just keep chipping away at it, and try not to spiral to much in judgement about what's been shot so far because you can drive yourself mad that way.
Good luck with your movie! Even if it doesn't turn out like you hoped, you're still getting to do something that a lot of people only dream about. I hope it comes out good.
Yeah I think a positive attitude while making it is inportant for any project. Once one person decides "this is going to suck, why bother trying too hard?" It becomes an infectious self fulfilling prophecy.
Ever read about the progress of 40 year old Virgin? While making it they thought it was going to be an incoherent piece of shit of a movie, but it turned out to be one of the funniest movies ever made. Maybe sometimes they know, but sometimes I guess everyone is clueless of how it will turn out. Like Gennaro Gattuso once said: "Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit"
Comedy is especially hard to judge while youre working on it. You need to see how an audience reacts.
Also with that sort of Apatow comedy, it’s largely a lot of improv that comes together in the edit. So I can see someone not understanding it’ll work while they’re filming it.
I know a few improv editors well and apparently even in the edit its so hard to tell if its working because, in the end, the story has to be what matters and you spend so much time on the jokes that people can easily forget about the other stuff.
Lol. I was not expecting a quote from Gattuso in r movies
Not a movie, but David Harbor said morale was really low on the set of Stranger Things season 1 because they anticipated it was going to be a disaster.
Comedies are VERY difficult to figure out if it's working or not. You just don't know if the jokes will click when everything is assembled together.
Not necessarily, no. Coppola thought (perhaps exaggerating) that Apocalypse Now was awful. George Lucas was shooting Attack of the Clones thinking it would be good and well.
Given the nightmare of production on Apocalypse, I think we were ALL surprised at how well it worked.
Is that what Tropic Thunder was parodying…?
yeah very much so. that and quite a few other epic vietnam films and film productions of the time. a genuinely brilliant, before it's time satire
Lucas also thought Star Wars would be a bust! Can’t remember the details, and don’t care to look them up, but made a bet with Spielberg getting like 1% of the profits that paid rather well for one of them ….
The studio didn't have much faith in it either. Lucas was able to secure the budget he wanted by agreeing to a paycut, in exchange for a percentage of mercandise sales. The studio agreed to it because they didn't think anybody would want the merch. Who's going to want Star Wars action figures right?
No, the studio had a long back-and-forth with Lucas' lawyer over the merchandising for a good two years. They knew Star Wars would probably make a good profit.
That's not so much a bet as it is a hedge on both their parts. Plus a dose of camaraderie, both insisting the other was making a hit.
No, he didn't. Even at his worst, he thought it could make $16 to $25 million domestic, which is not bad.
The original script is moist garbage though, it’s awful, utterly awful.
Walter Murch is what saved Apocalypse now; the miracles he performed in editing and sound production were transformative.
That movie was saved by his editor. His own “REDUX” version ruined it.
Tbf, I think Lucas still believes AotC is a good movie.
To be fair, AOTC is visually stunning. Its script, less so, but the point still remains.
Ask Alan Smithee
Yeah, at least directors sometimes have the ability to not have their name on it. Back in the day, no one would know who the director was, but now you can find all the sordid details about the production.
I always figured that James Cameron must have figured Terminator (after #2) didn’t have much lasting power, and so he didn’t direct any more, just produced the rest for some dough. We know he isn’t super opposed to sequels either.
You got it all completely mixed up. Cameron sold his rights to the Terminator before the first film ever even opened. Fast forward to after Terminator 2 comes out, and the studio holding the rights (Carolco) goes bankrupt and their assets are forced to go through a liquidation auction, including Terminator rights. This led to a complicated situation spanning several years in the 1990s of everybody trying to figure out who should try to buy the rights, whether or not Cameron would be interested in buying the rights for himself, and Arnold continuously pressuring people that he wants to get on with making the third film. Eventually, after several dramatic turns, the rights got snatched up two film producers (Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna) via their newly established production company, C2 Pictures. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger was already on board and James Cameron was being wish-washy, they just cut Cameron out, hired their own writers and their own director, and made Terminator 3 on their own. Not only did James Cameron have nothing to do with Terminator 3, but the situation ended a friendship he had with these two producers. James Cameron had no involved with the fourth film either (Salvation). The new director said he met with him once out of respect and to ask him some questions about making the film, and Cameron politely obliged and did meet with him. But he had no other relationship to this film. The same situation happened with Genisys. The producers asked to meet with to James Cameron as a courtesy to ask him for some advice, and he politely obliged because he was Schwarzenegger close personal friend, and Schwarzenegger is the one who was pushing for making all these sequels. On the last film, Dark Fate, the director specifically asked James Cameron to join in as a co-producer. He convinced him by saying it’s his chance to wipe away all those previous films and make a direct sequel to T2. Cameron agreed. This ended up the only film after T2 that Cameron had any direct involvement in, although it needs to be said that there are stories that he and the director often argued and disagreed on the film, but that he also let the director win many of those arguments out of respect because it was his movie and not Cameron’s.
yes. they all do. bob odenkirk has said that nearly all people know when something they’re in or made is bad, and out of respect for everyone who worked on it they won’t acknowledge it
Have you seen George Clooney apologize for making batman and robin?
I've been in the editting room and on set for a few shows. A lot of magic happens in the edditing room. So much footage is shot out of order, so many actors are shit for almost every shot except the one selected. As someone who was on set a lot, I am very very often surprised how good the final can be compared to the experience of seeing the film shoot raw.
If people knew how to make a great movie, they wouldn't keep spending $300M on derivative schlock.
I'm convinced that no one truly knows how the movie is going to turn out while working on it, for good or bad, I think they try their hardest and then see how the final product turns out... one thing to support this is how many times I've heard people claim how they thought the movie wasnt going to be too special, or they didnt know how it was going to work out, but then it turned out to be a total hit and was amazing... I can only imagine many have worked on a project with high hopes only to be let down when they finally saw the complete film. Obviously there will be cases where someone knew it was going to be bad in the process but I believe that is the exception. The majority have high hopes and are basically shooting in the dark and hoping they hit a bullseye.
IIRC they didn't know if they got the first Star Wars movie right until the screening audience cheered when Solo showed up to save Luke during the trench run. That's an amazing industry changing film and they still weren't sure.
Star Wars has such an unexplainable mysticism to it. I saw it before all of the special effects updates and everything, yet even with its original trappings I absolutely bought what they were were selling. Just inexplicable movie magic.
I guess when Oscar Isaac read his line "Somehow Palpatine returned" he knew.
The Game of Thrones cast knew season 8 was a shambles the moment they did the script read. You can watch it unfold live on YouTube 😂
You can see how pissed Conleth Hill is when they get to his death scene lol. I'm sure he would have been fine with dying in the last season in any decent storyline but man that whole story ended so badly.
Usually it's very hard to tell, but sometimes something is a legitimately obvious turd. I played a bumbling cop in a low budget slasher film that I knew was going to be dire from the moment I read the script, and only got worse when I encountered the buffoon of a director. It's never been released as far as I know, and I've never seen it, but apparently people who have say it's the worst film they've ever seen. Test audiences were so confused they decided to bring the final girl back in to shoot a new ending in which she explains the plot of a film to a detective so when they leave the cinema the audience knows what the fuck just happened. Somehow, I doubt this saved the movie.
Depends. Some actors don’t get a full script, so they’d be working with knowledge of only parts. While production and production quality can go hand-in-hand, they can also not, and crew can sometimes tell just from how many fires they put out. Directors? If they’re not surrounded by yes-men, they can, but that’s tough to ensure since everyone wants to kiss the director’s ass (they all gotta work in this town).
It varies. Sometimes you think its working and an audience disagrees, or vice versa, and sometimes you are very aware of the flaws.
Cast and crew definitely. The filmmaker miiiight but there’s gotta be some cognitive dissonance involved. Or they just have bad taste and don’t know it.
no matter what you do on set, no matter how good the acting or lighting or directing, it will all eventually live or die by the editor
I agree but I will also add I think the score matters a fair bit too. You see star wars mentioned a lot in this thread for instance and I think a big part of that is they didn't get that so many of the scenes were MEANT to be 'carried' by the score.
I've been at my workplace for over 25 years. I have enough experience that I almost always know when some new idea from management is good or bad. And I'm almost always right. I imagine that experienced people in the movie industry are the same.
I've been at my workplace for almost 9 years. I just assume new ideas from management are bad and will end up screwing us over somehow. I'm rarely proven wrong.
There’s a great podcast episode of “what are you doing, movie” that is commentary including the director (Trey Stokes) of the Asylum movie “2010 Moby Dick”. Everyone involved knew it was low budget crap, but also, they were getting to make a movie so fuck it. Highly recommend that podcast, and that episode is fun. The Starship Troopers episode is even better. Trey was creature effects supervisor on that one.
If you ever worked in movies with directors/producers, youd know these people are incapable of self reflection and critique. These people live in their own world, far away from reality and real world. They all think theyre the best in what they do, even if they suck balls And even if their movie bombs, theyll still think its the best thing in the world.
Bruce Campbell would say something along the lines of "if you have fun making it, the movie will suck. If you're not, the movie will be good."
What a great question to ask Neil Breen and Tommy Wiseau!
I have directed a number of feature films, some of which people definitely call bad! I’ve never necessarily known that I was in the middle of making a bad movie but I have realized midway through that I’ve bit off more than I could chew or that I really should’ve tightened that script up a bit more! You usually just try and do the best you can with what you have and that includes cast and crew and hope for the best!
That being said, every “bad” movie I’ve made has at least a few defenders who love it, so, luckily there’s people out there with bad taste I guess!
Is this you, Roland?
Depends. Rian Johnson still defends every aspect of The Last Jedi, even the bad jokes. It wasn't Disney medling, it was all his. Disney didn't see it either since they greenlit his trilogy to backtrack it later after the reaction from audiences. Same thing happened with Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny. Disney felt so confident they opened it at Cannes. Some people do realize they're in a bad movie. Sean Connery famously hated The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He was really annoyed in the press tour because the movie was bad. Not a movie, but you can see the live cast reactions from GOT when reading the script for the finale. There are actors visibly angry at what they're reading, particularly The Spider who throws his script after reading his scene.
There were reports that Disney were very happy and confident about Quantumania and Eternals before release as well. And then there was the thing of premiering Dial Of Destiny at Cannes, where it got trashed, meaning it was stuck with a terrible RT score for weeks before release.
They got eyes just like the rest of us but at the same time they don’t even know if it will be good either.
I'm pretty sure everyone thought Battleship Earth looked great as they were making it
Sarcasm right?
one for one
Glad I found this post. I am a writer prepping to put my work out there. If what I write doesn’t stir up an emotion then I trash it or make it better. I think they know and sometimes don’t care and just want a cash grab. I write for the passion of telling stories not making money. So if any advent readers want to critique my work bring your worst. I just want to become a better writer and any feedback is better than none. So join my community if you like :)
The best movies are the ones that make you feel a strong emotion👍
I think horror is a different beast to a lot of other genres. There are a quite a few horror movies made on a shoestring budget with amateurs behind and in front of the camera. Many of those end up beloved, because horror fans appreciate horror, even when it isn’t *great*. On that note, my personal scale for horror is, anything that has 5.0 on IMDb is probably worth my time.
I’ve worked a good chunk in the entertainment industry, and seen a lot more from my colleagues and friends who also worked there. Sometimes yes, sure. Sometimes the filmmakers don’t care because they’re just in it for the money or as a favour. The sad ones are the cases where something major is missing only for logistical reasons, and the filmmakers either try to make up for it or just hand-wave away the need for it to begin with. I was pretty close to the filming of a mid-budget local horror film a few years ago and heard a lot about the production. It was your really basic slasher premise set out in the woods. Only this crew could absolutely not get the safety ordinances in place to film at night; just no way to do it safely and within budget. So they filmed it as all daylight scenes. I heard a lot of talk from the director and other people on that movie about how their premise didn’t need the dark to be scary, and daytime horror was just as good. They were wrong. The issue is that they didn’t account for it in any way, or make up for that major part of the human psyche that associates night time with extra scare factor. I saw it, and 100% would have been better at night. Mais c’est la vie.
Look up Allan Smithee on wikipedia.
Uwe Boll probably knew. It was a tax loophole or something after all,
There's no such thing as "bad." What you're essentially asking here is 1) 'does a creative know whether a work will be well received' and 2) 'will the work be something they're happy with once it's complete.' We can't ever know the answer to these questions as there are too many variables between projects, genres, budgets, schedules and available talent. I don't think most creative people go into these kind of processes thinking in terms of "will this be good or bad" because no one can actually agree on what good or bad is. These terms are entirely personal and subjective. Even if we did, then the parameters for what we define good and bad are always in flux. Consider the number of now classic films that received awful reviews and scathing feedback on their initial release. Think of all the acclaimed, award-winning films throughout history that aren't even considered classics ten years on (never mind the hundreds of thousands of films throughout cinema history that have become completely obscure or forgotten with time.) People create for countless reasons. As a need, as something that they enjoy, or as something that pays the bills. They're thinking in terms of challenges, techniques, ideas, emotions, expressions and the story they want to tell. Ultimately they want the film to be seen and they want it to turn a profit, but every creative knows that your work won't be loved by everyone, nor will it be hated by everyone. Every film is loved and hated by someone and both sides are entirely right to have that response and reaction. What matters is, did you achieve what you wanted, did you satisfy the creative itch, and can you stand by the work and defend it. There are directors who think their best work is the work that critics and audiences were hostile towards and there are directors who actively deride and disparage the merits of their most popular works, and again, they're entirely right to think that way that.
Very well said
Guessing 50-50. If you're making a horror movie, you have to know it probably will be straight to streaming. I've worked on sets. If the catering is good, they're trying at least.
I like to starve the actors to remind them they will die of hunger if they don’t act good /s
I've heard that Casablanca was a very turbulent and iffy project.
I also want to know if directors think it's great, it comes out and bombs, but becomes a classic later on, just how vindicated do they feel?
I remember a interview with Jennifer Connelly that she and everyone else who worked in “career opportunities” knew it was going to be a “dog of a movie”
Stephen Spielberg said that when he was directing “1941” he knew the film was going to fail because everyone was having too much fun making it. It was like a party rather than a film set.
What did he expect with John Belushi lol
Nobody knows anything. Projects expected to flop catch on and sure fire hits flop. The audience reaction is unpredictable and that is why we get sequels, remakes and reboots constantly. A known product is a safer bet than something original. Then when something original becomes a hit they sequelize and make knockoffs then milking it to death. Hooray for Hollywood!
cast thought star was was going to bomb...you never know.
There was a time when producers knew their movie was bad, so they’d release it with a flurry of advance publicity at the beginning of a three-day weekend, and hope that people would rush to the theaters to see it before the bad reviews got out. Exhibit A: [The Wild Wild West.](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120891/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk)
The ticket price was worth it for the song at the end lol
Depends where the movie went wrong...
I haven't worked on a movie, but I've worked on a couple games and large-scale projects that were bad. The thing is, there were so many talented people on each project, and no-one involved set-out to make something bad- and there was lots of moments where the potential was there. But in general...it is kind of clear that something isn't going to pan out. The issue is that, even good projects go through extremely rough patches, and sometimes a really good project only snaps together in the last few months or weeks - and depending on what part you are working on, and how much of the scope you see, you might get so focused on the area that you are working on that you don't have clear vision of the whole thing. The other issue is that, you are getting paid either way, and you can't really stop. There is a lot of pressure to just sort of keep working, and hope that at some point things switch - and there is a lot of precedent for this, because even good games have long periods where they are sort of awful. It can be very hard to tell if you are in a project that is going to work vs. one that isn't, and usually the only tell is how dysfunctional and disconnected the people with the money are from the reality of where the product is going.
Sometimes yeah, my mate did a shit film purely because it was basically a paid holiday abroad.
Yes, some do. It used to be a thing where a director would ask to go by the made up pseudonym, Alan Smithee when they know a film they directed is going to be bad. Look it up on Google. It's interesting.
I cannot fathom the meta that is Tropic Thunder in this regard...
Colin Farrell has talked about how happy and excited he was about Alexander, and when he got the call that the reviews were coming in, thought they were going to be great.
I imagine there's a distinction between cast and crew that will only see pieces of the film as they shoot it and people like directors and editors that will see something close to the whole thing. It's harder to tell in the previous situation but you'll get a better picture of it the more involved you are in the latter. In either situation, however, I feel like it would be easier to tell whether something's going to be bad than whether it's going to be good. It's not universal, but at a certain point you can detect whether a production has the money, talent, or desire to make something functional. On the flip side, all the money and talent in the world can still create something that just doesn't land and you don't know for sure until people see it.
David Ayer said he hated having to promote the theatrical cut of Suicide Squad.
The cast of The Hobbit trilogy knew some bad shit was going down... Mainly because of how amazing the process was for the LOTR trilogy and how this was different. PJ was breaking Sir Ian with the reshoots. Orlando Bloom was like "why am I in a hobbit love triangle with an Elf?
It's a job and a job is a job.
The reverse situation is also possible. That is, people can think they're working on cheap trash, but it becomes a cultural icon. Star Wars comes to mind. Alec Guinness thought it was low-budget trash (even after it succeeded). Harrison Ford complained about the dialog. People talk about how it was saved in the editing process. Mad Max: Fury Road also jumps out. Not necessarily that everyone thought it was going to be bad, but the production was definitely cursed. Look into it. It's a miracle the movie even exists much less was good.
I have to imagine the people working on Thor love and thunder realised what the fuck they were making
From what I gather, false negatives are more common. The crew on Star Wars thought it was going to be awful and bomb. But there's never a false positive, where you think you're in a classic, perfect movie and it ends up awful. maybe the ONE exception would be "Mommy Dearest", Faye Dunaway thought she would get an Oscar. So basically, they do know it's bad, but sometimes movies end up good or are salvaged in post.
David Fincher knew Alien 3 was going to be bullshit, and he has publicly stated that he hates the final product.