Jean Claude Van Damme was off his tits on coke during filming of Street Fighter!
There are a lot of shitty movies out there, but one movie inparticular is up there with the worst of them. A truly godawaful piece of shit. The movie I'm referring to is Street Fighter! For those who have never seen it, it's a 90's film starring the muscles from Brussels and is brimming with cheesy one-liners and crap fight scenes. I'd like to say it's in the 'so bad it's good' catagory but it's too shit even for that.
I don't know why he waited until now but the films director Steven de Souza has just come forward to reveal some of the problems they faced during filming, one of which being Jean Claude Van Damme's greedy nose. Apparently, Van Damme was hooning $1000-a-week worth of coke during production, which would regularly make him forget his lines, be late to set, or just not bother showing up at all. Here's what Souza had to say:
I couldn’t talk about it at the time, but I can now: Jean-Claude was coked out of his mind. The studio had hired a wrangler to take care of him, but unfortunately the wrangler himself was a bad influence.
Jean-Claude was calling in sick so much I had to keep looking through the script to find something else to film; I couldn’t just sit around for hours waiting for him. On two occasions, the producers allowed him to go to Hong Kong, and both occasions he came back late. On Monday's he just wasn’t there at all.
It turned out OK though - Jean Claude made two films that earned $100m: Timecop and this one. It was extremely profitable for the studio - it cost $33m and made $105m, so it was good for everybody. People say it’s so dimwitted it’s funny, but we knew it was funny. How can you see that movie and think it’s funny by accident?
Damme! He sounds like a freakin nightmare. I can just imagine Jean Claude and his wrangler just off doing lines together. At least the studio made profit though so maybe the Van Damme being off his tit on set wasn't such a bad thing
