"I Have Too Much Money, I Have Too Much Crew, I Have No Script" — 13 Movies That Literally Made Up Their Plot As They Went Along

"We started the film without a script, without a cast and without a shark," Richard Dreyfus said of making Jaws.

1. Jurassic Park III was meant to be written by Michael Crichton and directed by Steven Spielberg. But Spielberg was busy and Craig Rosenberg ended up writing the first script. This got rejected, so Peter Buchman wrote the second script — that was the film's working script until a month before production, when Spielberg rejected THAT script, too.

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Then, new script writers came on, but people were naturally confused; there was sort of a mish-mash of all three scripts going on. Joe Johnston, the director of the film, said "We never did have a final script. We did not have a final script until after we wrapped the movie. We shot pages that eventually went into the final script but we didn’t have a document."

"The joke on the set was it was going to be the wrap gift, everybody got a script. We had a script for the day we were shooting and maybe the next day and sometimes a week ahead of time, but we never had a story that had a beginning, middle and end while we were making the film. We had to go back to Hawaii to shoot the ending because when we were there the first time, we didn’t know what the ending was going to be," Johnston added.

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2. Pretty Woman was almost a completely different film called 3000. The title of this incredibly dark movie referred to the amount of money Julia Roberts' character was paid for her time — and she died at the end of the original.

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“The company that was making it folded, and the movie disappeared and I was crushed,” Julia Roberts recently told Graham Norton. “And the next thing I knew, they said, ‘Disney picked up this film... and Garry Marshall is going to direct it.’”  

"I was like, ‘oh, of course, this makes perfect sense to me,’” Julia sarcastically said. “I went in to meet Garry [the director], and he told me all the ways he was gonna change this and make it funny." She revealed some changes were so last-minute that they were, in Graham's words, “kind of writing [the movie] as they were filming.”

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"We would break at lunch at maybe 10:15 in the morning because we were out of pages,” Julia said. “We would just kind of, make it up ― Garry would do things like this... ‘Uhhh ― be funny! Action!’,” she said.

3. According to Iron Monger actor Jeff Bridges, Iron Man started filming without a script in 2007. "They had no script, man. They had an outline," he told In Contention back in 2009.

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"We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn't know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, 'You got any ideas?' Meanwhile the crew is tapping their foot on the stage waiting for us to come on," he said. 

"You would think with a $200 million movie you'd have this sh*t together, but it was just the opposite," he added.

4. Edge of Tomorrow, based on the Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill, started filming without a firm script, producer Erwin Stoff told The LA Times. "It definitely is not the most calm-inducing experience to be facing the start date without a script. You have to have a cast-iron stomach," he said.

Warner Bros.

The movie's crew also had to build a last-minute, fully-functioning beach that they nicknamed "the b*tch," stretching what was meant to be a two-week shoot into a three-month rigamarole. Ah, showbiz.

5. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End didn't have a script, according to director Gore Verbinksi. In fact, they shot the end of the third movie while filming the second one, with no idea how it'd slot into the story.

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"We actually had to write night after night after night, we're leaving this location, we have to write the final scene. I was mentioning we had to shoot Jack's last scene in Pirates 3 on the third or fourth day of filming 2 without a script for Pirates 3. That scene [with Jack’s compass pointing towards the Fountain of Youth] was shot Day Four while we're shooting Pirates 2 because we're never coming back to that location," he said.

"I mean they literally left me with, in the script, ‘The greatest three-way sword fight ever filmed,’" the director later added.

"After (the first movie) was successful, Pirates 2 and 3 started to fall into the ‘release date-driven experience’. There’s a calendar and dates and 'we need two more of these babies. How soon can you do it?' So you don't have scripts and you're making a movie to a release date," Verbinksi said.

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6. Casablanca went through multiple script rewrites. While most films are shot out of sequence to save time, this was shot in order, because they only had half of the script when they started filming.

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The movie was based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick's, which meant the crew had a vague outline to work with — but only a vague one. 

7. Director Gareth Edwards said of his movie Monsters "We shot it without a script, and we did this scene-by-scene outline. It was a risky thing to do."

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He said of his writing method, "Say you see a target on the wall and a bullet hole in the bull's-eye — there are two ways of doing that. One way is to paint a target, fire a bullet and try to hit the bull's-eye. That's the way I think most films are made. With ours, we fired first and wherever the bullet landed we'd paint a bull's-eye on top. It makes you look a lot cleverer than you really are. We were just seeing what we get and then we made that into our film." 

8. Alfred Hitchcock's film Topaz was based on Leon Uris' novel Topaz, and the writer was helping Hitchcock write the script. However, the author and the director didn't get on — so Leon left the project before the script was done, just days before the movie went into production.

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Hitchcock hired screenwriter Samuel Taylor after that, but there wasn't enough time to finish the entire script before filming started. 

9. Development of Alien 3 was stalled during the Writers Guild of America strike in 1987, and in the end, the two-film plan for Alien 3 and Alien 4 was ditched by the time writers started working again. But set designers had already built elaborate sets, props, and backdrops for the films — and they were too expensive to drop. Plus, the movie already had a release date.

20th Century Studios

So, Alien 3 has to be written around the sets in the studios. 20th Century Fox went through two other directors to finish the last-minute project before landing on David Fincher, who didn't have time to create a full script.

"We have had to make a lot of changes in the script as we’ve gone along,” Sigourney Weaver told Empire Magazine. “We were building the sets before we had a script and having to cast it quickly, because of time concerns. That was not the way that Fincher wanted to do his first film."

20th Century Studios

10. "We started the film without a script, without a cast and without a shark," Richard Dreyfus said of making Jaws. The movie went through multiple rewrites and plot changes — in fact, it ended up taking more than 100 days (and more than three times the budget) to film the iconic movie.

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Part of the reason seems to have been director Steven Spielberg's indecision with the film. He was reluctant to take the project on in the first place, and made dramatic changes when he got it (like filming the movie in open water instead of in a cage).

11. The writers of the original Transformers movie didn't want to come back for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. But even when director Michael Bay coaxed them into the project, the 2007 writer's strike was on — so Michael ended up writing his own "scriptment" from the two weeks' worth of work his writers had put in before the strike began.

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Transformers actor Shia LaBeouf has complained about the lack of material in the film. Speaking about Revenge of the Fallen in an interview for Dark Of The Moon, Shia referenced a documentary he's seen before the interview about The Heart of Darkness, saying that its director said "I have too much money, I have too much crew, I have no script..." 

"And that's sort of like, where we were at in the second movie," Shia said. "We were given a date, we were given a bunch of money, we were given a bunch of toys, and no script."

12. Men In Black 3 was shot without a second or third act — for tax reasons. The film started shooting in November, scheduled a break from December until mid-Feb, and then finished the movie and the script after that; there was a tax incentive to take this winding route in New York at the time.

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"It was a crazy production. We had a writer actually on the soundstage writing the words moments before the guys had to say them. I don't think that's any way to make a movie. But I've seen a rough cut and I was actually shocked at how good it was," SFX creator Rick Baker said at the time.

"We knew starting the movie that we didn't have a finished second or third act. Was it responsible? The answer is, if this movie does as well as I think it will, it was genius. If it's a total failure, then it was a really stupid idea," Men In Black 3 director Barry Sonnenfeld added.

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13. Gladiator's script was so far from ready that Russell Crowe almost dropped out of the project. "It had 21 pages when we started shooting,” Crowe said. "Your average script is about 110."

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"Well, it’s me and Ridley working together, but it’s also — you know, it’s the dumbest possible way to make a film,” Rusell said of the movie.

"Desperately, at one point in time, Ridley gave the crew a day off ‘cause we simply didn’t know what we were going to shoot the next day,” Crowe said. “We didn’t know what we were going to shoot, so we had to go back to my house—you know, me, him, and David Franzoni, one of the producers who was also the original writer — and try and work it out," he added.

Can you think of any other examples? Let us know in the comments below!