Some of the most talked-about scenes in film and TV history are the ones that look like nothing at all — someone catching a tray, walking through a door, having an argument in an apartment. No stunts, no CGI, no explosions. Yet behind the scenes, these 12 “simple” moments turned into some of the most grueling shoots in Hollywood history:
1. Tom Cruise walked through a door — 95 times — for Eyes Wide Shut. Director Stanley Kubrick, notorious for demanding endless takes, reportedly had Cruise walk through a doorway 95 separate times because he wasn’t satisfied with the shot. The scene lasts only a few seconds, yet it has become one of the most cited examples of Kubrick’s exhausting perfectionism.
2. Tobey Maguire really caught a full lunch tray with his bare “Spidey sense” in Spider-Man (2002. The studio wanted the high school cafeteria scene cut entirely to save time, but director Sam Raimi insisted on keeping it. Maguire spent a 16-hour day catching a tray, food, and drinks one item at a time — no CGI trickery, just glue on his hand and a lot of patience. That made it one of the franchise's most beloved moments.
3. The most iconic murder scene in film history took an agonizing amount of choreography to pull off in Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock’s shower murder in the iconic 1960 film looks brutally simple onscreen, but the sequence — including Janet Leigh’s character stumbling and collapsing — required painstaking camera and editing work to get the timing and framing exactly right and not show anything explicit.
4. A single apartment argument in Marriage Story took two full days and dozens of takes to shoot. The explosive 11-page fight between Charlie and Nicole in Marriage Story looks as if it were captured in a single raw, emotional burst. In reality, Noah Baumbach, Adam Driver, and Scarlett Johansson rehearsed for days and then filmed dozens of long takes over two days. Driver called it “one of the hardest things” he’s ever done, and Baumbach gave both actors a bottle of wine afterward.
5. Mark Hamill had to look “groggy” while actually freezing in the snow for The Empire Strikes Back. The scene where Luke Skywalker sees a vision of Obi-Wan while injured in the snow required Hamill to lie in genuinely freezing conditions between takes, with the crew packing real snow onto his face to sell the visual. He described retreating to a tent between setups to warm up and just get through the shoot.
6. Tony Stark, quietly building a gadget in a cave, turned out to be the hardest scene to shoot in Iron Man. It wasn’t the explosions or fight scenes — it was Tony Stark assembling his arc reactor in extreme close-up. Prop master Russell Bobbitt called it the most challenging task of his career at Marvel, since the close-ups demanded real engineering precision to make Robert Downey Jr. look like he actually knew what he was building.
7. Peter Weller, catching a simple set of keys took an entire day to shoot in RoboCop. The scene is barely half a second onscreen — RoboCop catching a thrown set of keys — but it took a full day to film. Weller's restrictive rubber gloves kept causing the keys to bounce off his hands, and at one point, they even ricocheted off and hit an extra.
8. Brie Larson’s biggest obstacle in Captain Marvel wasn’t a stunt — it was a cat. Larson trained extensively to do her own stunt work as Carol Danvers, but the scenes with her character’s cat companion, Goose, were the real struggle, thanks to Larson’s severe cat allergies. The crew used a stuffed double whenever they could, but several shots still required a real cat.
9. A backpack handoff between two shrinking-and-growing characters required a motion-control camera in Ant-Man and the Wasp. The scene where Ant-Man and the Wasp pass a backpack back and forth while randomly changing size looks like a quick sight gag. In reality, it required custom-built props at multiple scales and a motion-control camera system that director Peyton Reed said involved “a lot of programming and higher mathematics.”
10. Jack Nicholson breaking down a door with an axe in The Shining took dozens of takes to get right. The “Here’s Johnny!” scene reads as one unhinged burst of chaos, but Kubrick’s exacting standards meant the door — rebuilt multiple times as Nicholson actually hacked through it — had to be destroyed and reset again and again until the director got the take he wanted.
11. Charlie Chaplin made his co-star repeat a line more than 300 times in City Lights. In one of the simplest moments in the film — a blind flower girl asking "Flower, sir?" — Chaplin, a notorious perfectionist, had Virginia Cherrill repeat the line over 300 times to get the exact take he wanted. It's part of why the "simple" silent film took more than two years to complete.
12. A quiet conversation between a Hobbit and a wizard required an entirely new camera rig in The Lord of the Rings. The scene of Frodo and Gandalf talking inside Bag End looks like a simple two-person conversation, but achieving the illusion of a Hobbit's smaller scale next to a full-sized actor meant building forced-perspective sets and rigging a system where even a small camera pan required physically sliding Ian McKellen and parts of the set to maintain the trick.
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