Outside of the carefully controlled confines of the studio, there are so many factors that need to be considered when planning and setting out to do a location shoot, and whilst the final results are often spectacular in a way that only being in situ can be, there can sometimes be issues behind the scenes.
The most important maxim is of course preparing, checking and then preparing and checking a little more. Ultimately, if a production crew fails to prepare, they are setting themselves up to fail.
With that said, not all troubled location shoots are simply the result of failing to prepare, not having the right lighting equipment, failing to have a backup generator or not hiring an ATV to get through difficult terrain, although these are often factors.
There are some quite unusual troubled shoots, but within even the most seemingly inexplicable black swan event there are lessons to be learned.
Lost In La Mancha
Former Monty Python alumni and surreal director Terry Gilliam spent 29 years trying to make an adaptation of the novel Don Quixote, struggling for decades, with multiple versions of the script and multiple permutations of the cast and crew until it was finally released in 2018.
The most infamous lost version of what became The Man Who Killed Don Quixote first entered production in 2000, with a production so infamously disastrous that a documentary, Lost In La Mancha is all that has been released of it.
Terry Gilliam was somewhat infamous for his films struggling during the production phase, he nearly always went over budget and there were often unfortunate circumstances surrounding the actors.
The location shoot for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was doomed from the start thanks to the sudden realisation whilst on set that the site they planned to film in was very close to a training range used by NATO bomber pilots.
To Mr Gilliam’s credit, he rightly figured that he could get the visuals he needed and record the audio entirely in post-production, although it does show a lack of foresight in location scouting.
The bigger issue was a flash flood which destroyed the look of the location and damaged a lot of film equipment, forcing an expensive reshoot.
Days after this, Jean Rochefort, who played the eponymous Don Quixote ended up with a herniated disc in his back, which meant that he would be out of the production and the entire film was cancelled, leading to a $15m insurance payout, a record at the time.
In a moment of serendipity, a crew was working on a documentary alongside the film, which ended up being the only footage that would be released of the original version.
Apocalypse Now
Another film with such a disastrous production that a documentary about its troubled making was released, Apocalypse Now is both one of the greatest films ever made and a seemingly endless list of potential pitfalls for directors shooting on location.
Whilst Francis Ford Coppola often simplifies the troubles by saying that in the jungle there were too many of them, with too much money, too much equipment and creeping insanity, there were a lot of little issues.
Besides the effects of Typhoon Olga, which stopped production entirely for six weeks, there was the fact that the military equipment they borrowed from the Philippine Military kept being recalled as part of a counter-insurgency operation.
Lead actor Martin Sheen nearly died after suffering a heart attack, not helped by the intense conditions in the jungle.
Finally, a set of corpses used for the ending scene at Kurtz’s compound were initially real and had been inadvertently sourced from a graverobber, leading to a police investigation and a hasty rewrite of the script.
In short, anything that could go wrong ultimately did, and the budget doubled as a result.