I’ll make you a huge dish you can’t refuse! Why do we like to believe that cinema’s best lines were improvised? | Film industry

FFact: In the history of cinema, there has never been a single screenplay. There’s a widespread myth that filmmaking requires “scripts” – in fact, most scenes are composed on the spot. The performers simply do whatever comes to mind and hope the camera is perfectly placed to capture it; They slap their colleagues or start wild dancing on a whim. Did you know that many actors don’t even act? The shock on their faces is real, because they usually have no idea what will happen next.

This is the world according to YouTube shorts, X posts, and Instagram memes. Online, content creators are falsely claiming that some of cinema’s most iconic scenes were improvised. Al Pacino gives John Cazale the kiss of death in The Godfather II? Made up instantly. Heath Ledger frustrated with hospital explosion delay in The Dark Knight? His real reaction! And that fight between mother and daughter in Mermaids? Winona Ryder “delivered a roast so deadly that Cher had to improvise the slap.”

The Internet has always been home to misinformation, but these movie myths have been on the rise in the past year. X users have noticed, at least. “Hey, did you know the actor didn’t actually mean to do that and the director didn’t actually plan it,” begins one sarcastic tweet posted in January that has garnered 37,000 likes. “The movie was actually real, and it all really happened.”

In the improvised words of each character actor in the action movie: what is going on? Why does this flavor of lying spread so quickly across the Internet? And should we start planning our outfits for a media literacy funeral?

Accounts that lie about impromptu movie scenes tend to have a lot in common — the word “date” often appears in their X handles, while Instagram users prefer the typical captions about how the actors “turned a mistake into a special moment.” On YouTube, “unscripted” movie clips regularly feature a male creator bloated at the bottom, silently watching you. TikTokers use eerie narration and music, telling their audience things like: “This scene totally confused the cast, but they decided to go along with it!” And: “It was so random that they decided to keep it!”

Unfortunately, none of the creators who make these videos on a regular basis have responded to an interview request — perhaps because that request amounts to: “Hey, why are you lying on the Internet?” However, although we cannot hear their motives directly, it is not difficult to guess.

When Elon Musk renamed Twitter to Meanwhile, a YouTuber who regularly creates videos about improvised films, Stone Face Memes, became the most viewed content creator in the US in April 2025. Two months later, a similar account known as Eggdar Memes stole the crown. Data analysis site the Measure noted that these accounts rely on familiar movies to “get people watching quickly,” adding that the “minimal production time” needed to create videos like these allows creators to produce large amounts of content for money.

Even when commenters are smart enough to point out that a dance routine has been clearly rehearsed or that there is some nudity that seems spontaneous in the original book, they are still helping the creators make a profit. And commentators are often more gullible than you think. Under one TikTok video of a man watching a Friends scene in which Ross accidentally says the wrong name at the altar, a commenter wrote: “He wasn’t even planned to say that. Davis [sic] Schwimmer kept accidentally saying the wrong name.

It has become common to hear people online bemoaning that “media literacy is dead” – and such comments seem to drive more nails into the coffin. After all, how was this Friends episode — the show’s Season 4 finale — supposed to end? Did the writers decide that the episode could go away? Why did no one intervene to prevent Davis from repeating the wrong name over and over again?

But there is a kernel of truth in the comment. The Friends writers came up with the idea for the wrong name in the finale after Schwimmer accidentally said the wrong name in a different scene. As much as we want to blame the Internet, movie insiders have been spreading half-truths about spontaneous scenes for decades. “When we made Superbad, Jonah [Hill] “We insisted it was very improvised,” director Judd Apatow said in 2010. “Finally, we said: Let’s look at the script and highlight every improvised line in the movie.” “He was so young, it was crazy.”

It’s not just filmmakers, we can’t let journalists get away with it. “Barry Keoghan reveals the sex scene in Saltburn Grave was completely improvised,” read the headline of an NME publication in January 2024. In this context, “completely improvised” means that director Emerald Fennell had a conversation with the actor about a new idea the morning before filming the scene.

In an environment where such distorted stories spread so easily, it’s possible that some online content creators aren’t intentionally lying — so much so that they don’t know when they’re spreading lies. I’ve encountered this myself. In a short YouTube clip posted in October 2025, a creator claims that Jim Carrey forgot his lines while filming Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Instead of stopping filming – as the video claims – Carrey stayed in character and shouted: “Wait! Let me do it again, give me the line again,” thus “turning the mistake into a special moment.”

I felt a great deal of frustration reading this – Carrey’s character in the movie was a wannabe actor and his bewildered behavior in this scene was a core part of his character. But when I tried to refute this claim, I couldn’t. The first source is a piece of IMDb trivia, but the original script is not available online, and director Brad Silberling said in the film’s DVD commentary that “about 80% of Jim’s material in the picture” resulted from early improvisation sessions. (Silberling did not respond to an interview request.) Then I found out that this year, the same scene and a similar comment were posted on the official Paramount TikTok account. Whatever the truth, it clearly does not matter to many.

It’s clear that audiences crave these stories – but why? Wouldn’t a movie be more impressive if it was so well rehearsed that it looked real? Wouldn’t it be better if the actor’s agonized scream seemed real because he was an elite professional, not because he stubbed his toe?

Perhaps it all stems from the myth of improvisation that grew up around French filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard in the mid-twentieth century: while some critics saw improvisation as neglectful and even insulting to audiences, others began to value it. Marion Froger, a professor of art and film history at McGill University in Canada, writes that exploring improvisation can allow audiences to “come to an intimate relationship” with actors and directors, enabling us to “nourish our imaginative connection with them.” In other words: We feel closer to Paul Rudd knowing he actually farted in This Is 40.

It’s nice, as a viewer, to feel involved in the production, to know a behind-the-scenes secret, or to be able to discover something that others can’t. But – if you like, and I’m sure many do – you can see this as a symptom of growing anti-intellectualism, where the public values ​​rule-breaking class clowns over meticulous, obsessive craftsmen. Neither idea tells the whole story. Although this is a simple problem, it resists simple explanation. Sure, online monetization models encourage the spread of bullshit, but mythmaking and filmmaking have always gone hand in hand.