It is all planning, repetition and some belief that there will be a call sheet tomorrow that will resemble the present day call sheet. Once a lead performer dies in the middle of the production, that beat is broken, artistically as well as emotionally and logistically, and it is up to all the rest to decide what to do next: to wait, to improvise, to give up.
Rewrites, stand-ins, voice and digital work come to the rescue of some projects. Others are left characterized by what was not photographed: the scenes that were omitted, the endings that got cut, the half-sentence of the performance.
These films demonstrate that certain times, the cinema resembles an assembly, part of a memoir, part of a problem solution, when the film must be completed even in the absence of the individual who gave it its root.
1. Furious 7 (Paul Walker)
The shooting of the film was suspended with Paul Walker, playing medallion-wearing Brian O’Conner, still required at crucial points, but instead, the movie came back with an oddly sensitive mandate: to finish the movie, without any more live action by a central character who could no longer exist in real-time. Director James Wan explained the move to delay the completion of the movie until after Walker was buried and a memorial held by the filmmakers, noting, We really did not discuss the completion of the movie until Paul was in his grave and we had a memorial in his honor (James Wan, quoted by BuzzFeed).
The team is known to have remedied the lack by watching all available footage to create a facial reference library, and making use of the brothers of Walker as stand-ins with computer-generated work added in the areas it was required. The progression stretched the schedule and extended the costs, but ultimately the finished film placed its cessation in the frame of tribute and not continuity, and it earned well over one and a half billion dollars.
2. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Heath Ledger)
The project was shot only half-finished when Heath Ledger passed away, so director Terry Gillian had to find an out of place solution typically characteristic of narrative to his problem: the character would transform within fantastical dreamscapes. The movie twisted into a series of performances as Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell put in their variations on the character of Ledger in the film as it skipped back and forth through the shifting realities. The philosophy saved what was already filmed but recognized and did not hide the discontinuity at the center of the production.
3. The Crow (Brandon Lee)
On-set accidents led to the death of Brandon Lee when a series of on-set accidents resulted in a fatal hazard on a firearm that was used on-set. The outstanding gaps in the film were filled with rewrites, a stunt performer, and a digital compositor working in the early years to finalize the scenes without destroying the presence of Lee. The outcome was a popular point of reference on how the ingenuity of production can co-exist with mourning, more so when the film that is created already dwells somewhere in-between life and death.
4. Gladiator (Oliver Reed)
Oliver Reed passed away before a climactic sequence was finished, involving the last actions of his character, and the film-makers were faced with the challenge of solving a problem of screen continuity, as well as story mechanics. Instead of shooting again what has been filmed, the filmmakers assembled the pieces of what can be used, reaction shots, pieces of dialogues, and some set up double work, and then put some digital effects so that a shooting can be built up into a recognition beat of the character. The completed scene could be considered a post-production as narrative rescue, carried out under pressure without making the moment a spectacle.
5. Hunger Games: Mockingjay (Part 2) Philip Seymour Hoffman
Philip Seymour Hoffman only passed away before they could capture a crucial scene involving one of the key scenes involving Katniss, played by Jennifer Lawrence. Rather than depending on the extensive digital recreation, the director Francis Lawrence as minimized the character and moved the essential dialogue offscreen through a letter read by another character. He admitted the loss afterwards in subdued manliness: There is not so much of him in it. His part would have been bigger, I would have liked it to be bigger (Francis Lawrence, quoted by The Guardian via BuzzFeed). The completed film bears that deficiency in the pacing-that is, the graceful manoeuvre of going round the clock, which makes a perceptible notch.
6. Game of Death (Bruce Lee)
The project was abandoned and Bruce Lee had shot only a few scenes before his death, which were later shot using a different creative style several years after his demise. Physical space instead was occupied with stand-ins in place of where Lee might have been, and disguises and edited old footage were trying to approximate a continuity that could not exist. Its techniques have always been controversial, and the final version exemplifies how completing a film can lose its way between homage and exploitation when the boundary between completion and exploitation becomes blurred.
7. Brainstorm (Natalie Wood)
Natalie Wood was killed in the middle of the filming, and most of her work was already shot, yet the project was practically and emotionally frozen. The studio hesitated, and contemplated making the film, then resumed with re-writings, and adjustments, and trimming off of scenes that could no longer be filmed, re-cutting, and re-writing, in order not to need to shoot any more. The resultant film is created through subtraction: a film that proceeded through the silent closing of doors which the script had initially intended to open.
8. Dark Blood (River Phoenix)
River Phoenix died on the project and the project was put on hold-unfinished film and story without the final shape. About twenty years later, the film was compiled by director George Sluizer with what had been filmed, and the missing scenes were narrated. The finished cut, which premiered in festivals in 2012, acts not so much as a release as a film object: a film that acknowledges what it cannot depict, and requests the audience to experience absence as an element of the text.
In all three instances, the incomplete film is another form of cooperation: between the things that were recorded and those that should be constructed, between the duty of a crew to finish the job and its duty to an individual in the middle.
The methods are different, recasting, dubbing, stand-ins, rewrites, digital reconstruction, however, the plot of the tale is the same: when a star is dead, then the production is no longer just a film. It is made a record of boundaries, and of cautious decisions made in regard to them.
