Anna Kendrick Confesses Her Love-Hate Relationship With Pitch Perfect

As she revealed in an interview, filming of Pitch Perfect was "so crazy and disorganised" and "for all three movies it got worse as it went along." (via)

While the films became major commercial successes, that clearly did not happen because their filming process was well-organized. And even though one could expect the production crew to learn its lessons and sort things out after the first movie, the opposite happened in reality, perhaps because each of the three movies had a different director.

Producers, however, remained the same (Paul Brooks, Max Handelman and Elizabeth Banks), but apparently they have learned nothing from the problems on the first movie's sets, if they noticed those problems at all. So instead of a "well-oiled machine" one could hope for during making of the sequels, there was an ever increasing mess of poor planning, last-second changes and overall mismanagement.

"The second movie was crazier and weirder and things kept changing, like the music kept changing, which meant the choreography kept changing," Anna explained. But things just kept getting worse: "And then the third one was a total free for all."

Sometimes the actors had to learn and memorize choreography at the last moment, such as on a weekend before actually filming a scene, as happened with the second movie's finale. And overall the filming schedule could be described as chaotic at best.

As Anna Kendrik summarized, "I'm having PTSD flashbacks just talking about it."

One has to applaud the actors who managed to produce great performances despite all of that. Plots of Pitch Perfect films were generally decried as formulaic, with critics noting, for example, that rivalry between two cappella groups is an overused staple of musicals.

Most of the reviewers agreed that the films were carried by quality acting and good musical numbers – and as it happens, the cast had to work much harder than they deserved to deliver both of those.