On The Room’s second day of filming, Tommy Wiseau needed 32 takes and 3 hours to get through a rooftop doorway while remembering his dialogue, co-star Greg Sestero recalled in his 2013 memoir, The Disaster Artist. The finished entrance lasted 7 seconds.
The line was: “I did not hit her, it’s not true! It’s bullsh-t! I did not hit her! I did not…. Oh hi, Mark.”
Wiseau wrote, directed, produced and starred in the 2003 film, playing Johnny opposite Sestero’s Mark. The script originally called for Johnny to open the door. Wiseau added a denial that Johnny had hit his fiancée, intending to establish that the character couldn’t be abusive.
Then he struggled to perform his own addition. “Tommy couldn’t remember his lines. He couldn’t hit his mark,” Sestero wrote.
The rooftop doorway was a small outhouse set with 2 steps. Sestero described spending 30 minutes getting Wiseau to descend them without watching his feet, followed by another 30 minutes combining the movement with the dialogue.
Script supervisor Sandy Schklair also had to coach the greeting at the end: “Now you need to look up when you say hi to Mark.” Schklair and Sestero eventually gave Wiseau a sequence to remember: “I did not, mad, mad, mad, throw the water bottle, stop, notice me, look up.”
For the bottle throw, Sestero handed Wiseau a water bottle, and Wiseau removed its label. During that take, Wiseau struck his head against the doorjamb. Production paused for 20 minutes while the bump was iced and covered with makeup.
Wiseau acknowledged the injury in a 2017 interview: “I hit myself in the head.” He also said the dialogue “didn’t come out the way I wanted,” but “after I threw the bottle, it actually came out much better and much stronger.”
