If you ever feel like your shoot isn't going according to plan.

I think I'm one of the few people find the back story to how a film was made just as interesting as the film itself. A couple of days ago I was reading a little bit about the filming of the Palm D'Or winning Apocalypse Now. A few days into the principal photography, Francis Ford Coppola (the film's director) had to replace Harvey Keitel for Martin Sheen as the movie's protagonist. Sheen, who was struggling with alcohol abuse suffered a heart attack in the middle of the jungle by himself and had to crawl to a road in order to get help. A massive typhoon wiped out some of the sets which shut down production while they were moved and rebuilt. By that point, the project was six weeks behind and two million dollars over budget. Marlon Brando arrived in the Philippines for his role so out of shape that Coppola was forced to rewrite the ending, have Brando only wear black, photograph only his face, and have a taller actor play him for wider shots. Many of the extras playing Viet Cong soldiers were members of the Philippine police and military and kept leaving during shooting to fight drug lords. Several very expensive films were eventually cut from the final edit wasting even more of the budget. At first critics thought the film would be a disaster, but it ended up sealing a director's legacy (one who had already made the Godfather Parts I and II, the Conversation, American Graffiti, and had written Patton). So ever you're having issues shooting a project, just remember, one of the greatest directors of all time had so many issues with one film that it's amazing the movie was even finished.