Many of them might disagree with this statement, but a screenwriter isn’t a god. While there are plenty of great movies that have deviated very little from the shooting script, the final product is almost never going to be a word-for-word copy, unless perhaps you’re making a Shakespeare adaptation. In some cases, there are entire scenes that weren’t part of the original shooting script, either because they weren’t written at all or because their meaning was substantially changed from the original intention by virtue of improvisation or compromising on-set factors.
Let’s break down 10 such scenes that have gone on to become famous, proving that a willingness to be flexible and accept diversions from the shooting script can result in some incredibly memorable movie moments.
1. The Dance of Death in The Seventh Seal (1957)
The penultimate shot of Ingmar Bergman’s legendary medieval fantasy movie The Seventh Seal sees Death (Bengt Ekerot) leading the dead in a dance on a hilltop as they pass from this life. It is a stirring farewell that holds tremendous symbolic importance, and it wasn’t planned at all.
According to Bergman himself, writing in his 1990 book Images: My Life in Film, “We had packed up for the day because of an approaching storm. Suddenly, I caught sight of a strange cloud. [Cinematographer] Gunnar Fischer hastily set the camera back into place. Several of the actors had already returned to where we were staying, so a few grips and a couple of tourists danced in their place, having no idea what it was all about. The image that later became famous of the Dance of Death beneath the dark cloud was improvised in only a few minutes. That’s how things can happen on the set.”
2. Willy Wonka’s Entrance in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Willy Wonka’s (Gene Wilder) entrance in the Roald Dahl adaptation Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory - which involves him hobbling toward the gathered crowd on a cane and appearing to fall, before perfectly executing a somersault and bouncing back to his feet - wasn’t on the page at all.
While the moment was planned before production, the idea came from Wilder himself rather than screenwriters Roald Dahl or David Seltzer (who performed an uncredited rewrite on Dahl’s script). Wilder mentioned it in 2013 during his final interview, in which he describes telling director Mel Stuart his idea for the scene and says that his reasoning was, “From that time on, no one will know whether I’m lying or telling the truth.”
3. The Street Confrontation in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Perhaps the most famous example of a scene that was radically changed because of on-set woes is the moment in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark where a sword-wielding man showcases some impressive moves before Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) summarily shoots him dead. The casual nature of this particular approach to conflict resolution both provides the scene with a hilarious punchline and underscores how cool the character is. However, it was originally planned to be a much more intense fight scene full of stunts and choreography. Ford was sick with a stomach illness that had been impacting the majority of the cast and crew and suggested a quicker way to end the scene, so he could be done with filming for the day.
This story was confirmed by Ford’s co-star John Rhys-Davies during a recent interview on the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast, where he described his own stomach illness during that time and recalled Ford saying, “You’ve got me for three hours, Steven. It’s a three-day shoot. It’s a stupid scene anyway; he’d just take out his gun and shoot him.”
4. The Crawling Scene in Dirty Dancing (1987)
Dirty Dancing is full of non-stop iconic dance moments, but one of the most recognizable is the image of Frances "Baby" Houseman (Jennifer Grey) and Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) crawling toward one another across the floor allegedly wasn’t choreographed.
Although the story hasn’t been officially confirmed, multiple notable sources (including Vogue France) have stated that the crawl was performed by Grey and Swayze during rehearsal for the “Love is Strange” number and that director Emile Ardolino thought it was so great that he put it into the final cut.
5. The Jewelry Case Scene in Pretty Woman (1990)
Another famously improvised moment that became iconic is the part of Pretty Woman where Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) snaps the necklace case shut while Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) is reaching for it. Roberts’ laugh was so genuine and charming that, even though the on-set gag wasn’t intended to go into the finished product, they made a last-minute editing room decision to put it in.
Director Garry Marshall described coming up with the gag during a 2012 ET interview: “I said, ‘Richard, you gotta wake her up a little, so when she reaches for the box, slam it.’ It was a soft box. I would never hurt her.”
6. The Press Conference in Iron Man (2008)
Even though Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are known for being planned within an inch of their lives with pre-viz and complicated scheduling to manage huge casts of A-list stars, the franchise kicked off with a much more loosey goosey production. This is so much the case that one of the most important developments in the entire franchise was improvised: Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) revealing to the world that he is indeed Iron Man at the end of 2008’s Iron Man.
The final line, “I am Iron Man,” was improvised by Downey Jr. himself and more or less obliterated the notion of secret identities in the MCU. In a 2018 Deadline interview, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said that that moment “inspired us to go further in trusting ourselves to find balance of staying true to the comics and the spirit of the comics but not being afraid to adapt and evolve and to change things.”
7. The Diarrhea Scene in Bridesmaids (2011)
The iconic gross-out scene from Bridesmaids where the group’s dress shopping is ruined (and then some) by a sudden attack of food poisoning wasn’t originally part of the plan. In fact, the idea for the scene came when the hit comedy movie was already in production.
Cinematographer Robert Yeoman later told HuffPost that “They brought those pages in and said, 'This is what we’re going to do,' and I remember at the time being a little horrified by the whole thing… But [director] Paul [Feig] seemed to have a handle on it, so I said, 'Okay, Paul, you run with this one.'"
8. The “Get Help” Scene in Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Nearly a decade after Iron Man, fellow MCU movie Thor: Ragnarok got a last-minute scene addition. For the scene where Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) manage to get into a secure room by pretending that one of them is injured, director Taika Waititi suggested adding a prelude where the characters discuss the trick as if they’d done it many times in the past, adding a new layer to the characters’ dynamic by calling back to their childhood.
On IMDb’s What to Watch, Hiddleston said that “Taika came in in the morning and said, 'It would be really fun if you came into the room and pretended it was a game you used to play as kids.' As we worked it out, it was something completely improvised. It gives you such an insight into the way Taika works."
9. The Bathroom Dance in Joker (2019)
In an eerie scene from Joker, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) hides in a bathroom after murdering three men and performs a dance that feels like a triumphant release for the character.
Per IndieWire, director and co-writer Todd Phillips revealed that the scene was originally very different: “In the script, Arthur was to come into the bathroom, hide his gun, wash off his makeup, stare at himself in the mirror and say, ‘What have I done?' When we got to the set on the day, Joaquin and I stood around, and this didn’t seem very much like Arthur. Why would Arthur care to hide his gun? We tossed around a million ways to just do something different.
It was an hour in, and I said, ‘Hey, I got this music from Hildur Guðnadóttir, our composer,’ and I wanted to play Joaquin this piece of music. He just started to dance to this music. It was just me and him alone in the bathroom. There were 250 people on the crew waiting outside. He just started doing this dance, and we looked at each other and knew it was the scene. It made sense to us. When I first met Joaquin, I told him Arthur is one of those people who has music in him. Music and dance became a theme in the film. This is the second time we see him dancing, and it’s a little bit of Joker coming out.”
10. The Grave Scene in Saltburn (2023)
‘Saltburn’ (2023)Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
In Emerald Fennell’s psychological thriller Saltburn, social climber Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) visits the grave of the target of his obsession, Felix (Jacob Elordi). While losing himself to his grief, he strips off his clothes and ends up… getting to know the grave biblically.
Keoghan told Deadline that the specifics of the scene were improvised, saying that “I wanted to see what Oliver would do next. I wanted to see what the next level of obsession was. And by that [I mean], I just wanted the camera to roll. Not to kind of preempt it or rehearse it, and what happened, happened. It was one take, and I think it was right. It moved the story forward.”
Were you shocked to learn that these iconic movie scenes weren’t part of the original plan, or do you have more scenes to add to the list? Sound off in the comments below!
