no, for real, these are actual things that happened during filming:
-it was produced with a budget of around $400,000, so they had to make a lot of cutbacks. like, a lot. it even effected the staging of scenes. (watch lancelot’s helmet!)
-neil innes, who wrote the songs the characters sang in the movie, was originally supposed to compose a score for the film, but the budget meant that he couldn’t get the “epic” sound that he wanted. most of the score wound up being taken from a stock music catalog.
-the job of directing fell onto both terry gilliam and terry jones, who both had different ideas for the film. also neither of them had directed a feature film before, AND they were both acting in the film. (gilliam directed the cartoon sequences for the group)
-on the first day of filming the camera they had rented completely fell apart and they had to get a new one.
-it was filmed in rural scotland in the middle of fall, so it was damp and rainy most of the time.
-the hotel they were staying at was so cheap that they only had hot water for a few hours a day, so when shooting days ended they all made a mad dash back to their rooms just for a hot shower.
-graham chapman, who played king arthur, was battling with chronic alcoholism and was suffering the brunt of the symptoms. it got so bad the rest of the group told him “if you don’t fix your problems by next year we’ll kick you out”. thankfully he did, and recovered just in time for their next movie, life of brian.
-major revisions to the script would be made on the fly. patsy, the little guy who follows king arthur around, was originally supposed to have beens sir gawain, who would constantly break the fourth wall and tell the audience how the crew created the special effects. there was an entire sequence planned where the knights would meet a guy named “king brian the wild”, who would let people into his castle and force them to sing in close harmony before killing them. the running gag with the coconuts was a last minute decision, the thought process behind it being “well we can’t afford real horses and the movie is already pretty silly so why not show how we made the horse sounds?”
-tim the enchanter had a much more “magical” name in the script, but john cleese forgot it and just made up a name.
-originally the movie was supposed to end with a climactic battle sequence between arthur’s troops and the frenchmen at castle aaaargh. at first the frenchmen seem to have the upper hand, and almost decimate arthur’s troops…until a gang of swallows fly by and drop coconuts on their heads, finishing the joke set up at the beginning of the film. sadly the grail wasn’t in the castle and the knights go home dejected…only to wind up in modern london, where they buy the grail at harrod’s department store. but the budget wasn’t enough to get real swallows or make convincing fake swallows, and at that point they were sick of working on the film, so they said “fuck it the cops arrest everyone”.
so “a dnd session gone wrong” perfectly sums up both the movie and the process of making the movie.
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