5 Movie Stunts That Went Terribly Wrong

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Kate Winslet Almost Drowned Making Titanic

We've previously talked about how James Cameron almost drowned the stars of The Abyss, and how he himself was almost claimed by Poseidon in the process. But a similar scenario arose when he was filming Titanic, because let's be honest, making that movie was explicitly tempting fate.

The sequence of the ship sinking alone broke the bones and ruptured the organs of several actors, and Kate Winslet says she almost drowned. During one scene you don't remember because it's not one of the two famous ones, Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are belowdecks and must outrun a big wave.

They encounter a gate and manage to get it open, but during one take, Winslet's gigantic old-timey coat got caught on the gate and she was dragged beneath the water. She managed to wriggle out of the coat, but not before she reached the point where she felt like her lungs were going to burst.

Cameron downplayed the incident as an actress being dramatic, pointing out that Winslet got right back to work and commenting, "We simply let Kate think she was nearly drowning." You know, for dramatic purposes. But Winslet said that she didn't want to look like a wimp, and that the shoot was so excruciating that on some days she'd wake up thinking "Please, God, let me die."
 

Winslet also had a fun time filming underwater scenes, as she was weighed down 12 feet below the surface of a water tank and given an air supply, but sometimes ended up sucking in water instead. And because she was wearing a dress instead of a wetsuit, she came down with pneumonia. By that point, it's possible that she was actually praying for Cameron's death, but that would be rude to admit in an interview.

Related: 5 Great Movie Scenes Made Possible By Reckless Endangerment

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The Exorcist Permanently Injured Ellen Burstyn's Back

We've talked before about how Exorcist director William Friedkin may have been in need of his own exorcism, given that he surprised his actors with pea soup puke, kept the sets freezing cold to create more realistic shivering, and oh yeah, fired guns off at random intervals to keep everyone on edge. But that didn't leave us with any room to dig into the story of how he messed up Ellen Burstyn's spine, and you know what they say: Every spine deserves its own story.

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Kubrick Almost Killed A Stuntman Making 2001

2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most acclaimed science fiction movies of all time, which is the polite way of saying that it doesn't have even a single cool laser fight. But its portrayal of weightlessness was considered groundbreaking, and the special effects work done to show life in space was intense, even if it didn't involve any explosions. How intense? According to a book about the making of 2001, Kubrick risked stuntman Bill Weston's life.

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David Fincher Let Daniel Craig Pass Out Filming The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

All of us, and cinematic history as a whole, appreciate Daniel Craig's iconic turn in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as ... uh ... the Dragon Tattoo? It talks and helps the heroine solve mysteries, maybe? Boy, we all kinda forgot about that ser- wait, there's another one coming out this year? OK.

Anyway, Fincher took a page from the Kubrick madly scribbled journal of filmmaking and let Craig pass out during filming, although he did bring an exciting new innovation called "caring about the fate of others" to the process. Craig had to be lifted into the air with a plastic bag over his head and act like he was being suffocated, which is an easy mindset to get into when you're, um, being suffocated.

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Ghostland Allegedly Left Taylor Hickson With A Disfigured Face

You're probably not familiar with Taylor Hickson, but she had a bit role in Deadpool, a few decent parts in some indie flicks, and was generally considered a potential up-and-comer. In 2016, 19-year-old Hickson was working on a horror movie called Ghostland when a scene called for her to bang her fists on a pane of glass. And well, let's just say that she really owned it.

In situations like that, movies normally use safety glass, which is tough to break and doesn't shatter into a million razor-sharp pieces if it does. But according to a lawsuit filed by Hickson that uses fancy legal words to make accusations of incredible ineptitude, the Ghostland set used regular glass ... which broke, sliced open her left cheek, and dug into her face. A bloody Hickson was rushed to the hospital, where she received 70 stitches to fix up a gash that stretched from her chin to near her left ear. By the following year, she'd undergone laser and silicone treatment, but was still left with a permanent scar.