Sex, drugs and amoebic dysentery: the 20 best making-of documentaries – ranked! | Movies

20. Document of the Dead (1985)

Behind-the-scenes footage from Dawn of the Dead is the highlight of this aficionados-only affair, which follows the satirical 1979 zombie horror all the way to its distribution. Director George A Romero, makeup maestro Tom Savini, and a few zombie actors spread the breeze in the deserted mall that gives the film its incongruous central location.

19. The Death of ‘Superman Lives’: What Happened? (2015)

Imagining what might have happened if Tim Burton’s Superman Lives had gotten off the ground, documentarian Jon Schnepp huddles on screen with his interviewees and insinuates himself unforgivably into the story. The material is almost good enough to transcend its conceit: there’s test footage of lead actor Nicolas Cage in his Man of Steel duds, as well as interviews with Burton, original screenwriter Kevin Smith, and producer Jon Peters, who was adamant that Superman should fight polar bears and a giant spider.

18. Becoming Bulletproof (2014)

A group of disabled actors make up the bulk of the cast of the short western Bulletproof, filmed in the California desert thanks to the inclusive arts project Zeno Mountain Farm. Fundamentally, Bulletproof itself isn’t about disability, but rather an attempt to highlight the lack of representation on screen – and bridge the gap. This affectionate documentary follows the film from pre-production to premiere.

17. They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018)

Orson Welles spent five years making what became his final film, The Other Side of the Wind, with three years passing before its star – director and sometime actor John Huston – stepped in front of the camera. After all this, the images were seized by the Iranian revolutionary government. A version finally premiered in 2018 and is now on Netflix, with this scattered documentary, presented by Alan Cumming, which strings together archival footage, new interviews and typically Wellesian tales of bluffs, follies and on-set procrastination.

16. Filmmaker: A Diary of George Lucas (1968)

A half-hour shot taken by Lucas of his new pal Francis Ford Coppola, who is hard at work on his fourth film, The Rain People, and isn’t too shy to chat with his leading lady, Shirley Knight. Contains a choice detail: in preparation for crossing the country to film this road movie, all the men on the crew, including Coppola, shave their beards to appear more presentable to the civil servants who hate the hippies they might encounter along the way.

By declining The Exorcist but tackling Exorcist II: The Heretic, John Boorman may have displayed a preference for poisoned chalices rather than champagne flutes. He’s frank and good-humored, if still a little shell-shocked, as he recounts the experience of filming the sequel once derided as “the stupidest big movie ever made,” and the despair that led him to consider self-immolation on Hollywood Boulevard. Sand-related illness, drunken Richard Burton, grasshoppers and tap dancing: it’s all there.

14. Condemned! The Untold Story of Fantastic Four by Roger Corman (2015)

Shot in a rat-infested studio on sets recycled from Carnosaur, a Jurassic Park rip-off, with special effects outsourced to a local company called Mr Film, this cheap superhero adventure was made in a rush to prevent the rights to Fantastic Four from returning from producer Bernd Eichinger to Marvel. (“This movie was never supposed to be shown to anyone,” Stan Lee said.) This heartwarming documentary, which shows the dispirited actors refusing to let their film die, seems even more relevant after Warner Bros. recently set aside certain films as tax write-offs, including Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, the latter of which was only narrowly saved.

13. Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013)

In attempting to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune in the mid-1970s, cinema shaman Alejandro Jodorowsky (Santa Sangre, El Topo) had teeth bigger than he could chew, as did David Lynch when his version met a painful realization in 1984. But Frank Pavich’s documentary proves that Jodorowsky’s intention to make “a film that gives you LSD hallucinations without taking LSD” was not not too fancy. Among those at his side were artist HR Giger, who went on to design the monsters in Alien, and a cast including Salvador Dalí, Mick Jagger and Orson Welles, the latter of whom was bribed to participate with the promise of having his favorite chef on set.

12. Lost Soul: The Cursed Journey to the Island of Dr. Moreau by Richard Stanley (2014)

When studio New Line tried to exclude South African director Richard Stanley from its own HG Wells adaptation, it asked a wizard called Skip to pull some cosmic strings. It worked for a while, helping Stanley charm the film’s star, Marlon Brando. But the black magic was no match for actor Val Kilmer, who demanded a 40 percent reduction in his own filming days, then spent his time on set playing power games. There was also nature to contend with, in the form of wildlife (a puma pisses on Stanley’s tailored suit) and a hurricane that ravages the location in Cairns, Queensland. Eventually replaced by sullen veteran John Frankenheimer, Stanley refuses to leave Australia, and that’s when things go from bad to worse.

11. No Frank in Lumberton (1988) / Blue Velvet Revisited (2016)

Two behind-the-scenes documentaries on Blue Velvet from the same director. Peter Braatz was still a film student when David Lynch, with whom he had corresponded for several years, invited him to Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1985, to plan the making of what would become his twisted masterpiece. Braatz assembled just under an hour of the resulting Super-8 material into his 1988 documentary, which straddled the line between orthodox and experimental. He then transformed it into a full-on ambient journey for the 86-minute 2016 version, which mixes flickering images and crisp black-and-white photography with a woozy score and the vocals of Lynch, Dennis Hopper and others to form an ethereal audiovisual collage.

10. The Sweat Box (2002)

Disney had high hopes for Kingdom of the Sun, a Prince and the Pauper-style animated musical drama set in the Inca Empire. The studio sent The Lion King co-director Roger Allers on a research trip to Peru and commissioned a suite of new songs from Sting. But it was back to the drawing board after a calamitous rough-cut screening; Allers and Sting were given a boost and the film was retooled into the lark comedy The Emperor’s New Groove. Sting’s wife, Trudie Styler, traces each disastrous step in a documentary that Disney did its best to suppress.

9. From Darkness to Light (2024)

A 10-cent title for the tale of a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic folly: Jerry Lewis’s abandoned and incomplete 1972 Holocaust drama, The Day The Clown Cried. Presenting himself as a former clown who entertained children in a concentration camp, Lewis falsely attempted to be taken seriously. “It was a bad job,” he admits here. It wasn’t just the questionable material that defeated the former Nutty Professor: unbeknownst to him, the option on the script had expired, rendering the entire project illegal. However, it was his decision to hire a repentant former concentration camp guard as a member of the crew. “He was a human being!” Lewis protests.

8. The Moving Poultry: The Truth is Stranger Than the Chicken (2008)

Some seventy fans of horror exploitation studio Troma worked on Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead for free while living in a deserted church on a rundown corner of Buffalo, New York, with a cold shower between them. Meanwhile, the chicken-themed zombie film was filmed at a nearby abandoned McDonald’s. This documentary captures all the horror that takes place on set, from sexually uninhibited auditions to time lapses between cast and crew. The actors leave, burst into tears and throw punches; a zombie extra accidentally catches fire; and bilious co-director and Troma boss Lloyd Kaufman comes off as both nonchalant and tyrannical.

7. The Scammers (2018)

When aspiring filmmaker Sandi Tan met the enigmatic Georges Cardona, he cited Fitzcarraldo as an inspiration and claimed to know the members of the Apocalypse Now crew. These images — of famously struggling productions that spawned their own breathtaking documentaries — seem like red flags given what followed: Cardona made Tan’s independent road movie Shirkers, swallowing $10,000 of his savings when he ran out of money, then disappeared with the resulting 70 reels of unprocessed film. She didn’t see the footage until decades later, when those reels were returned to her by Cardona’s widow. Tan’s sobering 2018 documentary attempts to make sense of this betrayal.

6. The Peddler (2010)

“Good directors will notice a lot of mistakes,” says Daniel Burmeister, a prolific camcorder writer and 67-year-old Santa lookalike. “But I love what I do: making handmade films.” In exchange for a month of food and lodging, Burmeister moves to a remote Argentinian village to bring the community together by making a film based on one of his own screenplays. His budget may be non-existent, but his resourcefulness is limitless: instead of a tracking shot, for example, he sits on a blanket, camera on his shoulder, while being dragged along the ground. This delightful and deeply humanist portrait of popular DIY cinema has all the charm and idiosyncrasies of a Jared Hess comedy.

Terry Gilliam was happy to have documentarians Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe on the set of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote after being impressed by The Hamster Factor, their behind-the-scenes film about the making of his previous 12…