That perennial bard of the crazed overreacher, Werner Herzog, has described the process of guerrilla film-making as “the sacred right of trespass”. The German director, who has taught classes in forging documents and picking locks as part of his Rogue Film School, once used a fake shooting permit to pass over the border between Peru and Ecuador while a war was being carried out between the two countries during the shooting of his surreal 1982 adventure drama Fitzcarraldo. As Netflix releases Loev, an Indian romance about two gay men that was shot surreptitiously over just 16 days to avoid breaking the country’s strict laws on homosexuality, here are six more movies that were filmed in secret.
Louie Psihoyos’ excoriating critique of Japanese dolphin hunts
The Oscar-winning 2009 documentary The Cove followed the activist Ric O’Barry as he fought to expose the capture and slaughter of hordes of bottlenose dolphins in the small Japanese village of Taiji. Facing open hostility from local fishermen and police, Psihoyos’ team used cameras disguised as rocks to film in the restricted cove of the title, where hundreds of dolphins at a time are rounded up for sale to aquariums or, even worse, as food to be sold at local supermarkets. At one point, Barry reveals quite how scared his team are that they will be discovered. “Today they would kill me, if they could,” he says of the villagers. “And I’m not exaggerating: if these fisherman could catch me and kill me, they would.”
Jonathan Glazer’s abstract horror of fear and dislocation
Starring Scarlett Johansson as a white van-driving alien who preys on single men in urban and highland Scotland, Under the Skin imagined the cold and curdled bearing of an extra-terrestrial with no understanding of the humans it is encountering, let alone the sexuality with which it is luring them towards an unknown fate. Glazer largely used hidden cameras to shoot unscripted conversations between the Hollywood star and unwitting passersby, in the expectation that real encounters would trump their fictional equivalents every time. “There were times I said to [producer] Jim [Wilson], let’s just dump the last two-thirds of the script and stay in the van,” Glazer told the Guardian in 2014. “Because I loved the idea of leaving the door open to reality. The surprises. The treasure.”
Abel Gance’s early 20th century anti-war polemic
Perhaps the earliest example of the “secret” film, Gance’s 1919 diatribe against the horrors of the first world war, J’Accuse, was filmed surreptitiously as part of the film-maker’s work with the French army’s section cinématographique, which had been set up as a patriotic document of the Gallic wartime effort. In reality, the young film-maker’s perspective couldn’t have been more different from that of his employers: shooting on real battlefields, Gance produced a relentlessly disquieting document of wartime horror, of families ripped apart, loved ones raped by the enemy and the descent of shellshocked infantrymen into irreversible madness. The film’s climactic sequence, in which dead soldiers rise from their graves to march on the living and accuse them of being unworthy of their sacrifice, was filmed using real troops who would later return to the battlefield, where Gance estimated four in five eventually met their doom.
Randy Moore’s darkling vision of Disneyworld
Shot at real Disney parks in Orlando, Florida, and Anaheim, California, the 2013 fantasy horror Escape from Tomorrow reimagines the wholesome tourist destination of Disney through the Lynchian mirror cracked, as visitors are decapitated on rollercoaster rides and smiling, squeaky clean attendants are revealed to be members of a sordid prostitution ring. As you might well imagine, Moore did not have permission from the Mouse House to film on location, so was forced to use guerrilla filming techniques to capture footage. Scripts were stored on mobile phones, which were also used to record sound, and the entire movie was shot on two Canon digital cameras chosen because they resembled the kind of equipment that tourists might be expected to carry. The first-time director also chose to film in monochrome because he knew he would be working entirely in available light, while crew members were only allowed to enter the park in small groups to avoid attracting the attention of security. For at least a year after its completion, it appeared unlikely the movie would ever be publicly released. But Disney ultimately chose to ignore the film rather than enter litigation, and Escape from Tomorrow finally debuted in cinemas in October 2013.
Dan Trachtenberg’s mysterious sci-fi inflected psychological thriller
JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield saga had a history of subterfuge long before the second instalment, 10 Cloverfield Lane, debuted in cinemas. When the trailer for the first film hit the web in 2008, it was released incognito with only the release date of the movie where the title might have been. The 2016 sequel was shot under the title Valencia to avoid drawing attention to its connection to the original, and even its star Mary Elizabeth Winstead was unaware how closely the two films were connected until days before the release of the first trailer. Audiences were also kept in the dark right up until the final scene as to the real reason John Goodman’s ill-natured Howard is keeping his prisoners captive, via masterful use of audience manipulation worthy of Hitchcock himself.
Randall Miller’s tragic, doomed musical biopic
Midnight Rider was supposed to be the film that put the indie film-maker Randall Miller on the map, but it ended up landing him in jail. While shooting a dream sequence of the musical biopic on an active railroad trestle bridge high over the Altamaha river in Wayne County, Georgia, Miller and his crew, who had not obtained proper permits, realised that a train was hurtling towards them. The actor William Hurt, who was filming his role as the southern rocker Gregg Allman, escaped unhurt along with other members of cast and crew. But a camera assistant, Sarah Jones, was knocked beneath the train and killed. Her death later galvanised safety campaigners in Hollywood, while Miller became the first film-maker to be jailed for an on-set fatality in the US after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter. The film, shot in 2014, has never been released.
