Perhaps the most popular and widely used meme from the golden era-Hollywood is with Julie Andrews swirling on the fields singing ‘the hills are alive, with the sound of music.’
The iconic scene from Hollywood’s cult musical is perhaps the first thing that comes to your mind when you get to thinking about big-screen masterpiece.
But was it all as joyous and glorious shooting the peppy sequence as it appeared on celluloid?
Dame Julie Andrews sat down for an interview on The Tonight Show, to reminisce over what it was like behind the camera. “We had this monstrous helicopter that had a camera man very bravely strapped to the side where the door would be,” the legendary actress recalled the moment, in conversation with the show’s host, Jimmy Fallon. “He had a camera strapped to him, he was strapped into the copter, and he was over like this. And it started at one end of the field and I had started at the other and we walked together, and honestly this thing came at me sideways sort of like this giant sort of crab coming at me or a grasshopper or something, and then I’d come into view.”
Andrews further stated, “The downdraft from the engines just flung me into the grass, and so we did this about six or seven times and I was spitting dirt.”
The Academy award winning actress also recalled shooting in the constantly pouring weather of Austria. “Somebody forgot to mention that Austria has the world’s seventh-highest annual rainfall, and so we had a lot of rain while we were shooting.” She further stated, “lot of the time we actually shot with rain because you don’t see it that much on camera. It has to be an absolute downpour before it’s noticeable.”
The ever-so adorable on-screen enchantress, was nominated for her second Oscar for her performance in the Robert Wise-directed classic co-starring Christopher Plummer and Eleanor Parker.
Watch her full interview with Fallon below: