Last night's National Board of Review Gala honored this year's best films, including A Most Violent Year, Selma, Birdman, and many more.
BuzzFeed asked some of the attendees about their favorite memories on set.
“The hardest I ever laughed was when I read one piece of dialogue, which, the full line isn’t in the film, but I laughed so hard at the scene that [Chris Miller, Phil Lord] wrote that I literally fell to my knees and I couldn’t speak. It was when Batman goes on the Millennium Falcon and comes back to Wyldstyle and says that, if they’re going to have a successful relationship, she has to be cool with his addiction to partying with complete strangers. Which, for me, is the funniest notion.”
Jenny Slate, Obvious Child
“We only had 18 days, so we really made the most of it. There was one day where we were filming a scene where my character was taking a bath and the apartment had no hot water, and [the crew] was heating up pots of hot water on the stove and pouring them into the bathtub like I was in Anne of Green Gables or something. Very, very old-fashioned.”
Clint Eastwood, American Sniper
“I’d have to think on that. It was all pleasant to do. We shot in Morocco for two and a half weeks and the rest was in California.”
Michael Keaton, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
“We were talking about this the other day. I was so afraid to lose my focus that, while I do have good memories -- Ed [Norton] was talking about how many great memories he has and I remember thinking ‘Jesus, why wasn’t I paying more attention to how much fun we were having?’”
Phil Lord and Chris Miller (second and fourth from left), The Lego Movie
Phil Lord: “I think the thing that pops into my head was the assistant editors on a microphone just trying to think of the craziest thing we could possibly say.”
Chris Miller: “Another one is Liam Neeson plays Good Cop/Bad Cop and does two completely different voices for them and we said ‘you know, if you want, you can record all the Bad Cop lines first and then do the Good Cop ones’ and he said ‘no, I want to do it as a conversation with myself’ and then to watch him go back and forth was really hilarious, as a viewer, to watch him do that.”
Steve James (pictured right), Life Itself
“I have a lot of favorites but one that springs to mind is when Roger [Ebert] was describing leaving the hospital for the first time ever. He had the surgery and he almost died and when he was supposed to leave, he was telling this incredible story about how, if he hadn’t been listening to this Leonard Cohen song, they probably would’ve been in the car and he would’ve died. But because they listened to “I’m Your Man”, they were able to be saved. And he just kind of goes ‘if I hadn’t been listening to that song, I’d be dead!” And he’s saying it through his computer, and it’s just this kind of incredibly beautiful moment of acceptance and understanding and sort of seeing the human comedy of that.”
Morten Tyldum, The Imitation Game
“To be quite honest, we were a very tight-knit family of actors, we were a family on a mission. But there was no real drama happening. They were so committed and everybody wanted to get this right. We wanted everyone to do well and we had to shoot everything in eight weeks. Everyone was so focused and so driven and so precise. It was so hard, but it was also one of the greatest experiences of my life to shoot this film with this amazing cast.”