It's not notorious because no one really knows or cares, but just imagine the fun that was had on the set of Little Odessa with...
A supremely neurotic director, straight out of film school, who went from the highest of ego highs to the lowest of lows when he realized that he was in way over his head....on approximately day one.
Vanessa Redgrave - just horrified and ready to bolt at any second.
Maximilian Schell - doing the Maximilian Schell thing.
Eddie Furlong - it was all downhill from here.
Tim Roth - poor Tim Roth.
The shoot was plagued with bad weather and it was shot in a horribly cramped apartment which the director insisted on keeping oppressively hot and dry. It also had to smell like death -- literally -- using a training aid for cadaver dogs. No one was supposed to feel comfortable breathing. Lips were cracking, noses were bleeding, itchy throats and dry coughs were the order of the day, and that was a good thing. This was just the beginning of the unusual methods meant to extract the desired performances.
Then there was the scene in which Maximilian Schell was kicking Tim Roth out of the house, shoving him while waving his belt. It looked too actory so the genius idea was to pull Maximilian Schell aside and tell him to hit Tim as hard as he could with the belt, and shhhhh, nobody tell Tim what's about to happen! The look on his face is going to be fucking awesome! That went as well as could be expected with Tim not speaking to anyone for the rest of the shoot, and beyond.
And then there was the execution scene in which the victim's tongue was cut out, outside, in the dark, in a very wide shot. The tongue was to be cut out and thrown, and given all of the above, what was happening wasn't decipherable at all. A tongue could not be seen....just some random black spot going through the air.
Of course the prosthetic tongue didn't look right (despite being impossible to see) so everything stopped while PAs were sent out to butchers the next day to find animal tongues that looked like human tongues; as if butcher shops are just teeming with exotic tongues. I think lamb was finally deemed acceptable, probably because it was between that and cow. In the end, the real tongue was just as invisible as the silicone one.
