Samuel L. Jackson asked George Lucas for a purple lightsaber in Attack of the Clones (2002) so he could find Mace Windu in the crowded battle scenes. That is the kind of story on this list: 11 true behind-the-scenes facts from blockbuster films, from a glued lunch tray to a 2 a.m. mountain hike.
Updated October 31, 2026.
Most of us have a favorite movie we’ve seen so many times we could say the lines along with it, and these stories make a second watch even more fun. A sick actor, a dog that won’t sit still, a stunt nobody wants to fake. That’s where the good stuff comes from. Most of it surfaces years after the premiere, long after the hype of that season’s fall film lineup has worn off. None of it changes how good the movies are, but it’s fun to learn how they got made.
Take Christopher Lee. Before shooting Saruman’s death, he asked Peter Jackson if he had ever heard the sound a man makes when he’s stabbed in the back. Jackson said no. Lee, who served with the Royal Air Force in World War II and said he was attached to special forces, told him he had, and that he knew what to do. Samuel L. Jackson’s purple lightsaber is the opposite kind of story. There’s no deep mythology behind it. He just wanted to stand out.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe; Bella, a Neapolitan Mastiff, as Fang
Behind the Scenes: Harry and Ron follow the spiders into the Forbidden Forest with Hagrid’s big, rough-looking dog Fang to find out whether Aragog was behind the attacks at Hogwarts. Fang was played by a rotating group of Neapolitan Mastiffs, and one of them, Bella, got attached to her co-star. Radcliffe has said she kept leaping in front of him to protect him from the animatronic spiders, per Modern Molosser’s history of the dogs who played Fang. Apparently that meant the scene had to be shot again and again. Anyone who has tried to take a photo with a dog knows they have their own plans, and dogs can be pesky guests on a film set.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Cast: Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore, Vin Diesel, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Jeremy Davies, Adam Goldberg
Behind the Scenes: Captain Miller’s squad crosses France to find a private whose three brothers have been killed in action and send him home to his grieving family. Before filming, the main cast went through six days of boot camp run by Dale Dye and retired Marines: long runs with full packs, little sleep, cold and wet. Matt Damon skipped it. Spielberg kept him out on purpose so the others would resent him and his character, per Wikipedia’s production history, and you can feel it on screen.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Cast: Harrison Ford
Behind the Scenes: Indiana Jones is a swashbuckling archaeologist racing the Nazis to the Lost Ark. In one famous scene, a sword fighter takes on Indy in a Cairo market. The fight was planned as an extended sword duel, and the swordsman spent weeks practicing for it. Then Harrison Ford came down with dysentery. Ford told ET he asked Spielberg why they didn’t just shoot the guy, and Spielberg said he had been thinking the same thing. Indy pulls his revolver and the fight is over in seconds. Oh, modern technology! Spielberg said the change put the shoot a day and a half ahead of schedule. Everyone has had a day when they felt so sick that any shortcut sounded great, and that’s certainly one way to shorten a film shoot.
Spider-Man (2002)
Cast: Tobey Maguire
Behind the Scenes: Peter Parker has just gotten his spider powers, so his reflexes are sharp. He catches Mary Jane’s falling lunch on a tray, every item landing back in place, and Sam Raimi did it with no visual effects, which is astonishing. Tobey Maguire’s hand was glued to the tray. The shot took 156 takes and 16 hours, per Wikipedia’s production notes. Anyone who has ever tried to catch a falling plate knows it’s hard to get right once, never mind 156 times. That’s a long day for a cafeteria scene.
Armageddon (1998)
Cast: Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton
Behind the Scenes: Michael Bay’s movie about oil drillers sent by NASA to nuke an asteroid took $553.7 million worldwide on a $140 million budget, the biggest worldwide gross of 1998 per Wikipedia. At home it finished second for the year, just behind Saving Private Ryan. Sending oil drillers to blow up an asteroid defies logic, but the movie was a smash anyway. The science is another story. Today I Found Out reported in 2010 that NASA shows the film in management training and asks new managers to spot the impossible parts. More than 168 have been counted, though I’m sure more are lurking. Neil deGrasse Tyson told Stephen Colbert in 2023 that until Moonfall (2022), no movie broke more laws of physics per minute.
Django Unchained (2012)
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio
Behind the Scenes: In the film, Django teams up with a German bounty hunter, Dr. King Schulz, and the trail leads to Candyland, the plantation where Django’s wife is held. During the dinner scene there, Leonardo DiCaprio slammed his hand on the table, smashed a small glass and cut his left hand. He kept going, bleeding, and stayed in character as the cruel Calvin Candie. When Tarantino called cut, the other actors gave him a standing ovation, and the take made the final cut, per Wikipedia. Compare that with the SNL habit of breaking character over a lot less.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Cast: Sean Bean
Behind the Scenes: Peter Jackson shot the trilogy in New Zealand, and the films started a whole tourism business there for fans of the books and movies. The last film, The Return of the King, won all 11 Oscars it was up for, tying the record. Oscar nights rarely go that smoothly; our list of the most shocking moments in Oscars history has the other kind.
Sean Bean is afraid of flying. After a rough 40-minute helicopter ride to a snowy location, he refused to go up that way again. Anyone who dislikes flying knows the lengths people will go to avoid it. For a shoot on a mountain outside Queenstown, he set off on foot around 2 a.m. in full Boromir costume and reached the top at about the same time as everyone else, Viggo Mortensen told Empire. They should’ve been charitable and dropped him a cup of coffee!
Titanic (1997)
Director: James Cameron
Behind the Scenes: James Cameron is a stickler for detail, and he spent like it. Titanic cost $200 million, about $1 million per minute of screen time, per Wikipedia. It became the highest-grossing film ever and held that spot until Cameron’s own Avatar passed it in 2010.
Wonder Woman (2017)
Cast: Gal Gadot
Behind the Scenes: In the film, Diana, the daughter of Zeus, sets out to end World War I, which she blames on Ares, the god of war. Reshoots ran in November 2016, when Gal Gadot was five months pregnant. A green cloth over her belly let the effects team remove the bump in post-production, per Wikipedia.
The Hangover (2009)
Cast: Ed Helms
Behind the Scenes: Stu wakes up in Vegas missing a tooth. That gap is real. Ed Helms had worn a dental implant since he was 15, and his dentist took it out for the film, per Slashfilm. Helms wore a removable fake tooth while he was still shooting The Office and didn’t tell his castmates there why.
The Social Network (2010)
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield
Behind the Scenes: In one of the deposition scenes, a lawyer asks, “Who was the movie star?” and gets “Does it matter?” back. The movie star was Natalie Portman, a Harvard graduate who attended from 1999 to 2003, per The A.V. Club. Portman invited Aaron Sorkin to dinner to tell him about Harvard’s social life, including parties with the Winklevoss twins, and Sorkin called her input “really helpful.”
Blockbuster Movie Behind-the-Scenes Questions
Was the Spider-Man lunch tray scene done without CGI?
Yes. Sam Raimi’s 2002 film did the catch with no visual effects. Tobey Maguire’s hand was glued to the tray, and the falling food still had to land on it for real. Wikipedia’s production notes put the shot at 156 takes and 16 hours of filming before one take worked.
Does NASA really show Armageddon in training?
Today I Found Out reported in 2010 that NASA uses Armageddon in management training and asks new managers to spot everything impossible in it, with more than 168 errors counted. The article does not list them. Neil deGrasse Tyson told Stephen Colbert in 2023 that until Moonfall came out in 2022, Armageddon broke more laws of physics per minute than any other movie.
How much did Titanic cost to make?
James Cameron’s Titanic cost $200 million, which works out to about $1 million per minute of screen time. It became the highest-grossing film of all time and held that record until Cameron’s own Avatar passed it in 2010. Titanic also won 11 Oscars, a record it shares with Ben-Hur and The Return of the King.
Why does Mace Windu have a purple lightsaber?
Samuel L. Jackson asked for it. While making Attack of the Clones (2002), he asked George Lucas whether Mace Windu could carry a purple lightsaber so he would be easy to pick out in the big battle scenes. Lucas said yes, and Windu became the Jedi you can spot from across the arena.