5 Movies That Were Surprisingly Dangerous To Film

Only two people didn't share this hell: Schwarzenegger and co-screenwriter Ron Shusett. Shusett was so incredibly careful about not catching anything that he'd only brush his teeth with bottled water, and he insisted on getting a B12 shot every week. Everybody made fun of him, but their laughter soon turned into anguished cries muffled by the bathroom door. On the other hand, Schwarzenegger had food flown in from Los Angeles, cooked for him by a private chef in his own trailer. Eventually, Schwarzenegger's chef got ill, so he had to eat with everyone else, which is when judgment day came back for his bowels.

The army wasn't exaggerating or just playing a prank either. Karl Urban says that sometimes when you looked down in the middle of a fight scene, you'd see something like a bomb's fins coming out of the ground. As running around and jumping up and down isn't recommended when you're on a minefield, the army would be coming in every day and cleaning up the area, removing bomb after bomb like a bunch of Jeremy Renners. At one point, some of the area was sealed off with tape, which caused Viggo Mortensen to ask if everything outside was safe -- turned out the answer was no, the area outside the tape just had fewer bombs.

In the shot where Aragorn and the others ride toward the Black Gate, Peter Jackson was particularly anxious about mines. He remembered the army outlining the zone that was cleared, and he thought that the actors might have gone a little outside that zone -- so he and the crew were just dreading the possibility of them riding onto a land mine. Luckily, it turned okay, and we didn't end up with a Fellowship Of The In Memoriam at the Oscars.

However, Jackson's concern seemed to be a one time deal as he was otherwise almost giggling with trollish delight about the fact that the movie was being shot in a place where there was a chance that you could get blown up if you took the wrong step. "Typical Pete Jackson," said Dominic Monaghan, which makes us wonder how many ghosts in The Frighteners were just spirits of crew members from his prior films. According to Viggo Mortensen, the whole thing layered a bit of tension and chaos onto what was already a very chaotic shoot.

Robin Shou didn't just tell others to get the crap kicked out of them -- he definitely practiced what he preached. He'd rate each fight on a scale from one to three, corresponding to how many ribs he'd bruised in it. In his fight with Keith Cooke (Reptile), he even fractured two ribs -- Cooke threw Shou at a pillar in a way that made him land at a nasty angle. Shou didn't breathe a word about it to the crew, though, since he didn't want to risk losing the role. He just told Cooke that he got hurt on the right side of his ribcage and asked him not to hit there and, when the fight was wrapped up, he went to the hospital. We assume Bridgette Wilson-Sampras immediately called him a baby and told him to pop them back in.

Without CGI, how did they even do that -- did the whole thing involve props and clever editing? Was the bird sedated? The answer is no. Michelle Pfeiffer just swallowed a live bird.

Basically, what you see on screen is precisely what happened -- she held it in her mouth for about five or six seconds and then opened it for it to fly out. It was all done in one take, too (that part might not be so surprising, as we wonder what the process of forcing a bird into somebody's mouth two dozen times would look like). And she didn't even stop to think about what could happen.

Looking back today, she wonders what she was thinking -- and, yeah, the more you think about it, the dumber it seems. The bird could have, say, gotten scared and pooped in her mouth, or it could have started pecking at her tongue and cheeks, or it could have gotten stuck and flapped around while trying to get out, accidentally biting her, or-- well, you get the idea. It's a spectacularly ridiculous thing to even try.

This is probably why Tim Burton says that he doesn't think he's "ever been so impressed" as he was by that. It's just one of the funny physical things she did that helped make the role great, he says -- just like, say, how her eyes nearly flutter in the scene where she comes back to life. All that might be a nice way to dress up what's basically elaborate trolling, though -- Pfeiffer says she thinks Tim likes to torture her a bit, like a mischievous little brother. One with all the resources of a film studio at his disposal, apparently.

The result? Connery backed away from the shark's grey mass in pure existential terror. That's not a fanciful description -- you can see what happened if you watch Thunderball because that's the shot they used in the movie. The look of genuine surprise and visceral horror is there because Sean Connery really thought the shark could bite him any second.

The crew was watching the whole thing from above and told him to get out as quickly as possible. He got out so fast that, he says, he thinks he "was dry when he touched the side." It is kind of miraculous if you think about it -- in the scene, the shark was so close that Connery could have karate chopped it on the nose. Which means the movie really should have been called Thunderballs, in honor of Connery's testicles.

Top image: New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. Pictures