Scripts play a very essential part in the movies and the better the script the better the movie is going to be. There have been various cases over the years where scripts have paved the way for some of the greatest sequences in movie history. But sometimes things might be completely accidental and it might end up giving us some of the best cinematic moments. Often the making of these movies has certain moments surrounding them that end up making changes to certain moments in the project. These end up being some of the best moments in cinema history. Let’s take a look at a few iconic and epic movie moments that were completely improvised.
Knife Deflecting Scene (Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring)
Viggo Mortensen has multiple moments from the Lord of the Rings trilogy that was completely accidental. This time around he had managed to save himself from a knife that was flung at him in a single take. The knife wasn’t supposed to go at him as it had slipped from the other actor’s hand. According to Peter Jackson,
Having created our villain in Lúrtz, we obviously have to finish him off; and we were actually shooting two things at once, because whilst I was filming Boromir’s last stand, Barrie Osborne was just on the other side of the hill: we were only about thirty or forty feet away – he was just over the hill on the other side of the slope filming the fight between Lúrtz and Aragorn, so this was largely shot by Barrie. Viggo did this incredibly well. There’s a shot coming up where he had to hit the knife that gets thrown at him with his sword, and he did it first take. That was a real knife that was being thrown, and he literally did bat it away with his sword for real: it wasn’t anything fake about it. Do a little bit of computer-enhancement here to take Lúrtz’s arm off.
Hospital Explosion Scene (The Dark Knight)
Heath Ledger gave us an absolutely unique performance as Joker in the movie. But it seems that the scene where he is fidgeting with the remote to continue the explosions was actually improvised. According to director Christopher Nolan:
[Special effects supervisor Chris Corbould] was able to come up with a scenario in which Heath could actually be walking out of the building because what Chris worked out is if we put in a little beat where the first set of explosions stops as if something’s gone wrong, and the Joker just takes a second to look around surprised like the audience is surprised, then the major demolition comes in and he jumps straight into the school bus. In that way, he was able to come up with a practical scenario in which we could actually take a principal actor, walk him out of a building that’s about to be destroyed, and literally drop the building to the ground.
Sword To A Gunfight (Indiana Jones: Raiders of The Lost Ark)
This scene has ended up being one of the most iconic moments from the Indiana Jones movies. Here we see that Jones is forced to fight a group of thugs in close-quarter combat. One of these thugs pulls out a massive sword in front of him and waves it around showing his skills to Indy. But the Harrison Ford’s character finishes the fight sooner than imagined by shooting him with his gun. There were completely different plans for the scene but Ford wasn’t feeling well during the shoot and Spielberg asked him to go with what he favored. This ended up making for one of the most hilarious fight scenes ever.
Bond’s Blue Boxer Trunks (Casino Royale)
According to original plans, Craig was supposed to come out of the water in the most graceful manner possible. It was written like this in order to show his chiseled Greek God-like body. But things went off the rails when Craig ended up falling in the water and the director kept rolling. This led to the sequence where we can see James Bond in his blue boxer trunks.
Hayley Atwell Touching Chris Evan’s Chest (Captain America: The First Avenger)
The scene where Steve Rogers comes out of the experiment and Carter confronts him was completely improvised. According to Hayley Atwell:
That was an instinctive moment. I literally couldn’t help myself, because I hadn’t seen him with his top off until that moment. I mean…go for the man boob! And Joe loved it, he was like, do that again! So we ended up doing lots of takes just to see how far we could go, and then got a little bit over the top. There was the touching of the nipple, and it became like a Saturday Night Live sketch. It was kind of ridiculous. Really corny.
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