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Tommy Lee Jones Was Fucking Miserable Making Batman Forever

Batman Forever may not be the greatest Batman movie, but there's a touching story hidden behind the scenes that almost makes it all worth it. It's the story of how Tommy Lee Jones loves his son more than he hates Jim Carrey. And he really hates Jim Carrey.

Warner Bros. Pictures

After Tim Burton was kicked off the Batman movie franchise for not selling enough Penguin action figures, Warner Bros. brought in director and human strobe light Joel Schumacher. Schumacher's producer had become close with Jones while filming Under Siege and The Fugitive, and thought it would great to ruin his new best friend's reputation. He gave the script to Jones, whom he wanted to play Two-Face, but after reading it, the actor said he didn't get it. The producer replied with all the grace and diplomacy you'd expect from someone who'd made several Steven Seagal vehicles:

Hollywood Reporter

Jones called back after a few hours to accept the role. Except for a mini-stroke, what could have possible gotten him to change his mind in such a short time? Schumacher discovered the answer when he went to visit Jones a few weeks later ... and saw his son Austin's collection of Batman comic books. Yep, Jones' true motivation was to finally star in a movie that his kid could watch, instead of trying to explain to Austin why daddy is trying to stop the nice man from finding his wife's one-armed killer.

On top of having to sit in a makeup chair for three hours a day to look half man, half burger patty, Jones had to endure something even worse: Jim Carrey, who played the Riddler. On the night before filming a big scene together, Carrey saw Jones at a restaurant and stopped by his table to say hi. Jones' face turned ashen gray. He got up, hugged the comedian tight, and said, while shaking: "I hate you. I really don't like you." When Carrey asked him why, Jones replied with "I cannot sanction your buffoonery," because Tommy Lee Jones is so old that he was taught his insults by Mark Twain.

Warner Bros. Pictures

5

Everybody Was Like, "Fuck Casablanca"

An actor's career lives and dies on their instincts -- a professional gut feeling which sometimes tells them they're making a terrible, awful piece of garbage. You know, like what happened to Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Casablanca was set up to fail from the start. Hastily adapted from an unproduced play called Everybody Comes To Rick's, Jack Warner (of the Warner Bros.) had little hopes for its success. In order to make the best of a bad situation, they brought in director Michael Curtiz, who was not only an amazing filmmaker, but also the kind of maniacal workaholic who thought lunch breaks were for lazy people. And they were going to need a strict taskmaster to keep everything together, especially since the screenplay was in no way ready when they had to start filming and the two leads had the enthusiasm of a cat at bath time.

Between an ever-changing script and an ever-shouting Curtiz, all Bogart and Bergman knew about Casablanca was that it was sloppy, with tons of bad dialogue and absurd situations. When actress Geraldine Fitzgerald took them to lunch (lazy), all they could do was talk about how to get out of the movie. This shit sandwich had literally killed their appetite.

Warner Bros. Pictures

4

Evangeline Lilly Only Agreed To Make The Hobbit If There Was No Love Triangle (And Then They Added One)

One of the more baffling aspects of the Hobbit trilogy was the out-of-place romantic rivalry between inexplicably hot dwarf Kili and beautiful mop Legolas over the affection of the elf Tauriel. There seemed to be zero chemistry between all the actors involved, but there's a perfectly valid reason for that: None of them knew they were supposed to fancy each other until the movie was almost finished.

New Line Cinema

When Evangeline Lilly was asked to play the role of Tauriel, an elven warrior created specifically for the movies, she only had one demand: no love triangles. After being trapped in one for six seasons on Lost, she wanted nothing to do with that crap. The producers assured her that there was nothing like that in the script, so Lilly signed onto the films. Then, after an entire year of shooting, they informed Lilly that they needed some vital reshoots between herself and actors Aidan Turner and Orlando Bloom. Why? Oh, because instead of the mentor/mentee relationship with Legolas and a flirty competitiveness with the dwarf Kili, Tauriel now had the high elven hots for these two dudes.

New Line Cinema

3

Brad Pitt Was Bored To Tears Filming Interview With A Vampire

When an interviewer once noted that Brad Pitt looked "miserable" throughout 1994's Interview With A Vampire, the actor responded "I am miserable." You see, Pitt was excited about the movie at first, but didn't get his hands on the script until two weeks before shooting started, only to read that all the juicy bits had been given to Lestat, Tom Cruise's vampire.

The screenwriter had butchered author Anne Rice's story -- which was surprising, because the screenwriter was Rice herself. Plus, it didn't help that Rice hated Pitt's guts, publicly calling his and Cruise's casting "the worst crime in the name of casting since Bonfire Of The Vanities" (the Batman v. Superman of the early '90s).

Warner Bros. Pictures

The work was tolerable at first, until the crew moved to Pinewood Studios (near London) in the dead of winter. According to Pitt, at Pinewood, his working day boiled down to "wake up in darkness, go be sad and blink painfully in a drafty mausoleum, go back home in darkness." It was like working night shifts at the Louvre McDonald's.

Warner Bros. Pictures

2

Christopher Lee Kept Getting Guilt-Tripped Into Playing Dracula

Famed pretend wizard and real-life secret agent Christopher Lee rose to fame playing Dracula in Hammer Film Productions, a London-based studio famed for their low-budget horror films. But after his third Dracula flick, Lee felt that the studio was just churning out movies -- he famously had no dialogue at all in that film because, according to him, the lines they gave him sucked. Much to Lee's chagrin, the sequels barely gave him anything to do, as if as if the producers had figured out that Christopher Lee hanging out in a Dracula costume with fangs was terrifying enough. And sure, they were right. Christopher Lee could wear a Pikachu costume and still be terrifying. But that's not the point.

Hammer Film Productions

When he finally announced he was quitting, Lee got a frantic call from Hammer co-founder Sir James Carreras begging him not to abandon the studio. Apparently, they'd already sold the next movie to the distributor based on the promise of Lee's appearance. When that didn't work, Carreras moved on to full-on emotional blackmail, saying, "Think of all the people you're putting out of work." That line worked on Lee, who admitted that he didn't want to be responsible for hundreds of people ending up on the street. So he wound up pumping out four more Dracula films for Hammer, which he did "under protest" -- though you couldn't really tell, because glaring intensely was also part of his job.

1

Marlon Brando Was Even More Of A Goddamn Maniac Than You Ever Realized

Marlon Brando has a long and storied past as one of the most difficult actors to work with in Hollywood history. But like all good villains, Brando has his origin story -- a singular moment in which he tipped over from brilliant actor to every director's nightmare. That moment was 1954's Desiree, a movie most notable for providing Google Images with pictures of Brando dressed as Napoleon.

20th Century Fox