Making movies is hard. We all know this. The planning, the pre-planning, the money, the designs, the sets, the mishaps, the studio notes, the recastings, the emergency rewrites, the reshoots—it’s a wonder anything gets made at all. But plenty do, even the films with decidedly difficult production processes. For some of these films, the story of their making is almost as good as the movies themselves.

There’s an art to a great making-of documentary, and even more of an art to a making-of documentary that revolves around an unusually arduous production. There are always problems that arise with any project of this kind of scale, but some problems are bigger and more widespread than others, and some films, for one reason or another, end up having a whole lot of problems. These are the movies whose filming was so near-impossible that the fact that any of them actually got to a theater feels like a miracle. (And a few of them didn’t even make it that far.) Basically, if a movie looks like it was particularly difficult to make, chances are it probably was.

Many of the movies you’ll find here are famous partially because their productions were so difficult they got their own documentaries. For others, the cracks are visible only after all the problems come to light years later. A few of these were never released in their original form—one of them was never made at all. Whatever the case, watching these making-of documentaries will make you appreciate the lengths that people will go to to make sure even a small piece of their vision sees the light of day, even if it means turning your cast and crew into nervous wrecks to get there.

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