Movie trivia from the most recent decade

The fantastical creatures in DreamWorks' "How to Train Your Dragon" may be computer-generated, but their voices aren't—they are derived from the noises made by real-life animals. Toothless, the film's lead dragon, is voiced through a mixture of sounds including cats, elephants, horses, tigers, and even humans. The smaller dragons known as Terrible Terrors, on the other hand, are brought to life by the sounds of a single chihuahua named Paco.

Writer and director Asghar Farhadi cast his own daughter in the acclaimed 2011 drama "A Separation." Sarina Farhadi stars as an 11-year-old whose parents are faced with an impossible decision: leave Tehran, Iran, to offer their child better opportunities or stay in order to care for one of their own ailing parents. This casting choice proved fruitful, as "A Separation" became the first Iranian film to receive an Academy Award, taking home Best Foreign Language Film of the Year in 2012.

While doing press for "Melancholia" at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, director Lars von Trier infamously made a series of antisemitic comments, even expressing sympathy for Hitler and the Nazis. As a result of these statements, the director was labeled "persona non grata" and banned from the event. Although Kirsten Dunst took home the prize for Best Actress, von Trier's behavior caused the film to lose out on the festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, which instead was awarded to Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life."

"Oslo, August 31st" follows a young man in the grips of addiction as he spends a day outside of his rehab facility reconnecting with old friends. One of the people he attempts to contact is an ex-girlfriend played by lead actor Anders Danielsen Lie's real wife, Iselin Steiro. Interestingly, while the audience hears Steiro's voice, she never appears on screen—Lie's character desperately leaves voice message after voice message for her with no response.

Co-writers Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon completed the first draft of their horror-comedy "The Cabin in the Woods" in an astonishing three days. Their previous experience writing together for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" surely helped them pull off such a feat. After preparing an outline and divvying up the work, the duo locked themselves down in a California hotel and did nothing but write for an entire weekend.

Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola incorporated personal experiences from childhood when writing "Moonrise Kingdom." Suzy, the film's young female lead, finds a pamphlet titled "Coping With a Troubled Child." This was inspired by Anderson discovering a similar booklet among his parents' belongings and assuming he was the troubled youth. Suzy's mother may seem over-the-top when using a bullhorn to yell at her family in the film, but Coppola reports his mother did the same thing when he was young.

Magic and illusions abound in the crime thriller "Now You See Me," including a few Easter eggs referencing other films. In one scene, Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) says, "These bars give a man time to think"—the same line the actor speaks nearly two decades earlier in "The Shawshank Redemption." In another scene, Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) calls J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) a "bit of a control freak," to which Atlas responds, "Have we met before?" This interaction is a nod to "Zombieland," another film in which Eisenberg and Harrelson co-starred.

Actresses Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos were outspoken against the conditions behind the scenes of their film "Blue is the Warmest Colour." Seydoux reported the demands of director Abdellatif Kechiche were excruciating, spending 10 hours and 100 takes to shoot a brief 20-second scene. She also described the movie's extensive sex scenes as humiliating, stating they made her feel "like a prostitute." Despite these concerns, the film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes on the same week that same-sex marriage was legalized in France in 2013.

In "Her," Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely man who falls in love with his artificially intelligent virtual assistant Samantha. Scarlett Johansson received much praise for voicing Samantha. However, she was not the original actress selected for this role. Samantha Morton completed the entire recording process, but it wasn't until postproduction that director Spike Jonze felt the film was missing something and decided to recast the part.

Sometimes movies inspire a resurgence of interest in their subject matter, as is the case with the biopic "Mr. Turner." The film portrays one of the so-called Old Masters, painter J.M.W. Turner, across the last 25 years of his life. Turner's 1835 painting "Rome, From Mount Aventine" sold for $47.4 million in December 2014, just over one month after the film's release.

Although director Abderrahmane Sissako wanted to film his war drama "Timbuktu" in the title city, it was actually filmed in the neighboring African country of Mauritania. After scouting the area and learning that Malian troops had taken over in 2013, Sissako determined it was too dangerous to film in Timbuktu. As a result, the movie ended up being the first Mauritanian film to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year in 2015.

Director László Nemes was quite particular about how he wanted "Son of Saul" to look, in order to convey the harrowing experiences of a Hungarian prisoner in a World War II concentration camp. Nemes, along with the movie's cinematographer and production designer, agreed to a set of guidelines for filming—including stipulations that it could not look beautiful but also could not come across as a horror film. Directions were given to focus only on what Saul, the protagonist, could see or hear, an effect achieved by using a particular aspect ratio to narrow down what was captured on screen.

Channing Tatum has made it no secret that his "Magic Mike" franchise was inspired by his own stint as a male entertainer before becoming an actor. Tatum dropped out of college in West Virginia at 18 and danced in a local club under the pseudonym Chan Crawford. However, fans may not know that the second film in the trilogy, "Magic Mike XXL," isn't just a storyline that was fabricated as an excuse to make a second movie. The idea for the plot was drawn from Tatum's personal experiences taking road trips to stripper conventions like the one depicted in the film.

It was a heavy lift for director Hou Hsiao-Hsien to bring "The Assassin" to the big screen. Although the film wasn't released in China until August 2015, filming began as early as 2010. Shooting for such a long period created more than 500,000 feet of film that Hou was forced to edit down into a 105-minute finished product. Hou also sought out isolated filming locations to fit the movie's eighth-century China setting, which created difficult work for the crew tasked with hauling equipment high up into the mountains.

"Creed" resurrected the "Rocky" movie franchise with a super-fit Michael B. Jordan in the lead role. To play the role of boxer Adonis Johnson, the son of Rocky's former opponent Apollo Creed, Jordan was forced to adopt a strict diet and training regimen. He reported working out two to three times daily, six days per week while eating a basic diet of grilled chicken, broccoli, brown rice, and water to keep his body fueled. To keep a tradition alive, Sylvester Stallone asked that Jordan wear the red, white, and blue U.S. flag-inspired trunks Creed wore in the original "Rocky" film and that Stallone wore as Rocky in the next two films.

In "Moonlight," Naomie Harris plays a mother to a young Black man navigating issues of identity and sexuality as he comes of age. Taking on the role of a single parent fighting drug addiction across a 15-year time period in the movie is difficult enough, but an issue with Harris' visa allowed her only three days in the United States to film all of her scenes. The British actress pulled it off with flying colors, receiving a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the 2017 Academy Awards.

Disney directors Ron Clements and John Musker have a pattern of creatively sneaking themselves into their animated films. The duo was drawn into an "Aladdin" scene standing on either side of the title character and also showed up in "Hercules" as a pair of handsome, buff men. In "Moana," they influenced the development of two beloved animals: the adorable pig Pua and the zany rooster Hei-Hei.

Ryan Gosling didn't just pretend to play the piano or use shots of a double playing in the musical drama "La La Land"—he actually learned to play the instrument himself. The actor practiced two hours daily, six days per week for a solid three months in order to nail the film's performances. Co-star and professional musician John Legend, who began playing piano at 4, was even impressed by how quickly Gosling picked it up.

Prior to becoming the first Black filmmaker to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Jordan Peele was known as half of the comedic duo Key and Peele. The writer and director drew on his comedic roots, finding inspiration for his first film, "Get Out," in an unexpected place: one of Eddie Murphy's classic comedy routines. In the standup special "Eddie Murphy: Delirious," the comedian jokes that white people in movies don't leave the house when ghosts appear. Peele took Murphy's admonishment to "get out" of the house in a different direction and the rest is horror movie history.

Christopher Nolan's epic "Dunkirk," which depicts the evacuation of more than 338,000 Allied troops from the French port in 1940, is actually one of his shorter films. Nolan originally did not want to use a script for the movie, planning instead to let actors improvise their lines as the action unfolded on camera. In the end, he generated a 76-page script—much shorter than the 120-page average—leading the war drama to clock in at under two hours.

Chloé Zhao's western "The Rider" blends real life with big-screen storytelling in unique ways. Brady Jandreau stars as a cowboy recovering from a devastating head injury—the type of life-altering injury the real-life horse trainer experienced himself just a year before filming began. The cast is rounded out with a slate of others who are not formally trained as actors, including Jandreau's father and sister in the corresponding roles of his fictional family members.

It's no surprise filmmaker Lee Chang-dong was drawn to the idea of adapting Haruki Murakami's short story "Barn Burning'' into a full-length movie. Lee was a high school teacher and novelist before transitioning into the film world. He approaches the creation of films in much the same way he approached novels, writing for one specific audience that he believes will connect with and understand his work. The result—an artful expansion of Murakami's 20-page story into the nearly 2 1/2 hour-long masterpiece "Burning."

Comic book legend Stan Lee is responsible for creating some of the most iconic superheroes of all time, including Spider-Man, and can often be spotted making cameos in Marvel films. In "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," viewers will recognize him as the shop owner who sells Miles Morales a Spider-Man costume, but that's not all. Each of the 180 animators who worked on the film wanted the opportunity to draw Lee, so they snuck him into nearly every subway train scene throughout the film.

Writer and director Bong Joon-ho originally imagined "Parasite" as a stage production, not a feature film. In 2013, Bong was toying with a new story idea based on his personal experience as a tutor for a wealthy family. Around this time a theater friend also encouraged him to try his hand at playwriting. The decision to develop his idea for the big screen instead was wise, as the film earned Bong Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay at the 2020 Academy Awards.

When the sequel to "The Shining" was made nearly 40 years later, it took an incredible amount of work to recreate the Overlook Hotel as it appears in Stanley Kubrick's classic 1980 film. The sets for "Doctor Sleep" were genuine physical structures, using computer effects only to fill in the ceilings. The infamous red, orange, and brown hexagon carpet lining the hotel's hallways was reproduced, with the colors adjusted in postproduction to ensure a perfect match to the original. Kubrick's estate even allowed filmmakers access to the original blueprints so they could most accurately recreate the sets for the 2019 sequel.