The only one I know of is Easy Rider. I’m sure many have been conceptualized under the influence, but I doubt there’s many in which the director and/or cast and crew were doing it on set.
You know, it might be this LSD I’m currently trippin’ on, but I could be SURE this topic existed somewhere here before.
It’s getting me all jittery. Pass me a blunt, man…
—DiB
@ POLARISDIB
I’m beginning to suspect they ALL have been done before.
It’s just your paranoia. I feel it too. What if this was all there was? What if…. we’re actually on the Internet…. logging into the worlllddddd….
—PolarisDiB
Oh, and before I get any more silly, in answer to your question, David, I hear that Jodorowsky was stoned out of his mind while shooting Holy Mountain (and BOY does it show).
—PolarisDiB
That’s incredible…because THE HOLY MOUNTAIN still looks great on a scale that seems hard to manage if/when altered.
Well something to keep in mind…
Okay, so the auteur theory has it that a movie is the “director’s” movie. However, movies are mostly collaborative and they have crews. Jodorowsky may be stoned out of his mind, but if he’s pointing coherent enough to explain what he wants, which is completely possible (I myself managed to make an animation for a guy raving on mushrooms, it was a pretty humorous situation. The animation would have been a lot of fun if we actually turned the drawings into film cells, but whatever). The crew itself had to be sober and productive, and they probably took Jodorowsky’s direction in spades because this was a situation where they were actually paid to do it (thank you Lennon and Ono? I guess???). So it LOOKS incredible, the production value is great. It’s just otherwise an absolute mess of directionless narrative and empty symbolism, which certainly feels like conversations I’ve had with stoned people to me!
Another example of this is I Heart Huckabees. David O. Russell was an absolute mess while shooting that movie, and the result is that the movie is a mess, even though everyone else in the project did their job and the gritty-teethed stress they all had doesn’t show up in the final production, amazingly enough. Now in this case I kinda think I Heart Huckabees messiness works for it, and though a lot of people I know cannot stand that movie (and I even know some people who have not managed to get past twenty minutes of the movie without feeling violated), still it worked out in its own idiosyncratic way. I should look up Russell since I’ven’t heard anything about him since that whole fiasco, the story behind the filmmaking is infamous and Russell’s name is worse than Troy Duffy’s at this point, so it’s very possible Russell may never get a chance to make another movie, at least one as highly distributed and well-funded, as I Heart Huckabees ever again. AND this is after he got into a fist fight with George Clooney, so honestly as fun as Russell’s movies are (and I do really like them), the man needs to get some self-control or else this is a perfect example of how drugs do not help make great art.
This being a long tangent on the whole crew-versus-director getting drug-talk into actual production theme, not a comment on the thread as a whole.
—PolarisDiB
Post-script: out of sheer curiosity, I looked up O. Russell’s current IMDb listings. Looks like he did The Fighter, a movie Aronofsky was attached to originally, and a movie called The Nail which Being There only with vapid actors and a nail in the head instead of too much television. Then he’s slated to do Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is…. cool…. I guess?
Just FYI.
—DiB
I’d find it hard to believe Oliver wasn’t Stoned while filming Natural Born Killers.
Can you imagine the trouble you’d get into if you punched Clooney’s pretty face?
Hal Ashby was stoned thru most of his films(including the classic Shampoo), particularly his later films.
Peckinpah smoked a lot of weed (reportedly creating conflict with Heston during the shooting of Major Dundee). Not sure about during his best films. Scorsese’s cocaine addiction coincided with The Last Waltz. Ashby is a good one although people often blame his late career decline in the 1980s on drugs as well.
@Polarisdib. I never heard anything about O’ Russell being stoned while making any of his films. He just seems like an extremely difficult character – a totally different topic.
I know that during the filming of The Holy Mountain, Jorodowsky made all the crew take LSD before and during the making of the movie…don’t know anything about a director thought
I can’t speak for the film world, but television, I can. There are plenty of people who work under the influence. I guessing here, but I would imagine that drugs were much more widely used in the 70’s and 80’s. This is what I hear from people I have worked with who were around then.
I could see Jodorowsky being tripped out while making “The Holy Mountain”. I was stoned when I first saw it and I understood it on a totally different level than i would have if I were sober. For a movie like that, it seems like it would work best to make it that way.
I’ve read internet rumours that say QT was on coke or something ridiculous while filming the Kill Bills. Of course: if the script was in shape and the crew was professional, then not a whole pile of stuff could’ve gone wrong, right?
Love it or think it’s trash, KBI&II is excellent filmmaking. Whether or not anyone was on drugs while it was being made, the entire thing’s completely cogent and precise — think of the fight scenes at House of Blue Leaves and the tricksy narrative to master; even the recurring visual motive of the Bride turning her eyes away after each killing but the last (think: sunglasses, after Buck, not looking Nicky into the eyes after her mother’s stabbing, plucking Elle’s eye out, looking to the falling snow with her back to the camera after O-Ren Ishii, etc.).
Of course, a lot of that could’ve been done in pre-production and then just carried out; but I doubt QT would just amble around a movie set he’d envisioned, doing whatever it is people on coke do.
I guess this question of being a zoned-out director has two implications: (1) a way of excusing “bad” work by important directors and (2) praising that director’s inner vision and brilliance despite any substances — as evidenced by “important” films resulting.
The problem with the auteur theory (as much as I agree with it) is that it supposes the success is the director’s doing, always. Of course it is. But a lot of mediocre movies could’ve been great had it been for other non-director-related circumstances. And a lot of great movies would’ve suffered if not for the person making the calls.
It’s kind of funny to think of the one person we attribute a movie’s success to being totally out of it, but for someone with an alcohol-dependency problem or say a Lars von Trier-type who might very well have needed medication to get out of his house and work at all on something like say Antichrist, it’s really difficult to separate the person with what they did while filming. David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock went home every night and took their pants off one leg at a time. So whether we can find some “cause” or “source” of a particular director’s working-mind, it’s still as helpless in appreciating the movie as much as say knowing that one director had this particular childhood trauma or that director another.
The work will stand on its own; the gossip about the people who crafted it will fade away.
Just sayin’.
Fassbinder died of a sleeping pill and cocaine overdose. It’s hard to believe that his drug use could not have spilled over into working on projects, whether writing or directing, especially when he had 1-4 films coming out a year in his later period where he must have been constantly writing and shooting.
The Blues Brothers – the crew and cast in a blizzard of cocaine.
david lincoln brooks
I know, what a question.
Still, do you think some important movies we know of were conceptualized and filmed while the director—— and, to varying degrees, the cast perhaps——- was high on pot or LSD? Stoned on heroin? Coked to the gills?