fun Stuff # 3

28 Days Later
-For the scenes in London, poilce would close the roads at 4am and filming would begin immediately. It would last for one hour, and at that time the police would reopen the roads. As well as having to deal with traffic, the producers also had to ask clubbers to find alternative routes home. In terms of the traffic, the producers correctly predicted that asking drivers to either wait for up to an hour or find another way might cause some considerable consternation. As such, they employed several extremely attractive young women (one of whom was Danny Boyle's daughter) to make the necessary requests. This plan had the desired results, as the drivers responded quite amicably to the young girls.
-The hospital in the film is a real day hospital and is not open at weekends. The trust managers of the hospital hire out the building to filmmakers for weekends, and the productions pay the hospital directly, meaning the money from the filming goes directly to the trust fund of the hospital.
-For the scenes on the motorway, the production got permission to shoot on the MI on a Sunday morning between 7.00am and 9.00am. The police gradually slowed traffic in both directions, and using 10 cameras, the filmmakers managed to capture a total of one minute of usable footage.
-Horror novelist Stephen King bought out an entire showing of the film in New York City.
-The surnames of Jim, Selena, Mark, Frank, and Hannah are never revealed, either during the film or in the credits. Likewise, the names of Jim's parents are never revealed.
-While filming the mansion scenes, the crew's favorite place was The Wooden Spoon in Downton, Wiltshire. They liked it so much that they gave them one of the dead bodies from the execution pile. This can no longer be seen at the pub as it now has new owners.
-Athletes were cast as the Infected because of how important physicality is to them. Danny Boyle felt that generally, athletes can do things other people can't, and he thought this would be interesting when translated into the movements of the Infected.
-It cost £250,000 in total to blow up the petrol station.
28 Weeks Later
-The farm that Don and Alice hide out in the start of the film is the same farm that appears in Children of Men
-The boy who arrives at the cottage at the beginning of the film claims to be from Sandford. Sandford is the name of the 'fake' village that was used by British police to practice emergency preparedness drills. It's also the fictitious locale for the action comedy Hot Fuzz
The Blob
-All of the exteriors for the movie were shot in a small south Louisiana town called Abbeville. Abbeville is laid out almost exactly the same as Arbeville, Colorado, where the movie takes place. Abbeville was used because filming took place in late 1987 and Arbeville was covered in snow. It's just a weird coincedence that the names are so similar.
-Donovan Leitch, who plays Paul Taylor, had to have a full body cast made of himself for one of the more complicated scene where Paul underneath the blob. There were about 50 people running the unstrung Paul. However, 'Chuck Russell' did not tell Shawnee Smith it was really Donovan Leitch underneath the Blob for the first part of the scene. She believed it was going to be an unstrung person. This was so he could get more of a shock out of her. That is the take that is now seen in the movie when Meg screams out Paul's name upon discovering him.
-Shawnee Smith ("Meg Penny") was once asked whether or not the producers remembered to heat the sewer-water she plunged into while fleeing the Blob. Chuckling, she answered, "Well, they TRIED."
Arachnophobia
-The first film released under Disney's Hollywood Pictures label, which was also created so the studio could release more adult-oriented fare.
-Canaima is the name of the avenging spirit of the Guyana Indians. It's also the name the area in Venezuela where the beginning of the movie was filmed and home to the world's tallest waterfall, Angel Falls.
-The small spiders used in the film were Avondale spiders (Delena Cancerides), a harmless species from New Zealand that were provided by Landcare Research in Auckland. Despite their fierce appearance, this spider is docile member of the crab-spider family and are, in fact, harmless to humans. They were not allowed back in New Zealand for quarantine reasons. The giant "spider" used in the film was a species of a bird-eating tarantula, which attains an 8" legspan or more. Those types of tarantula are not easy to handle and can give a nasty bite.
Event Horizon
-The space suits worn by the actors weighed 65 pounds (30 kilograms) each. Laurence Fishburne nicknamed his "Doris."
-The Event Horizon was modeled on Notre Dame cathedral. Its interior is filled with cruciform shapes.
-The model of the Event Horizon includes a complete "X-Wing" from Star Wars as part of an antenna array. The model is visible on the lower portion of the Event Horizon during the first flyby by the Lewis & Clark.
-When the Lewis and Clark first docks with the Event Horizon, the number of the main airlock is briefly visible: 13
-Everyone's space suit has their country's flag. During production, Australia was considering changing its flag. Sam Neill's character is Australian, and his spacesuit's flag has the Aboriginal flag in place of the Union Jack.
-Dr. Weir shares his name with a historical figure, Johann Weyer, also known as Wier or Wierus. He was a Dutch physician, occultist, and demonologist.
-The rotational shot of the space station over earth took nearly a third of the film's budget.
-When Doctor Weir opens the blinds in his room during the opening sequence of the film, a whooshing sound effect can be heard. This sound effect is taken from the video game Doom, heard when the player opens a door.
-The script originally described the Gateway machine as a smooth and featureless black orb suspended in midair between large, rotating mechanical arms. It also was said to contain a stable black hole within it at all times (which the ship used as a power source), as opposed to briefly creating a temporary one.
The Mist
-In the opening shot of the film, David is painting in his room. The picture he's drawing is a design from Stephen King's Dark Tower series of the gunslinger Roland. Another design in the room is that of the poster of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). John Carpenter also wrote and directed The Fog (1980), which shares obvious themes with The Mist.
-During an action scene in the film, a man runs into a wire rotating-book shelf in the grocery store. If you look carefully, you can clearly see that all the books on the shelf are written by Stephen King
-Shot in 37 days.
-Stephen King says that he was genuinely frightened by this adaption of his novel; Frank Darabont described that as the happiest moment of his career.
-Norm is wearing a T-Shirt from WKIT Radio in Bangor, Maine. This is one of three radio stations owned by Stephen King
Silence of the Lambs
-The Tobacco horn worm moths used throughout the film were given celebrity treatment by the filmmakers. They were flown first class to the set (in a special carrier), had special living quarters (rooms with controlled humidity and heat) and were dressed in carefully designed costumes (body shields bearing a painted skull and crossbones)
-Buffalo Bill is the combination of three real life serial killers: Ed Gein, who skinned his victims; Ted Bundy, who used the cast on his hand as bait to make women get into his van; and Gary Heidnick, who kept women he kidnapped in a pit in his basement. Gein was only positively linked to two murders and suspected of two others. He gathered most of his materials not through murder, but grave-robbing. In the popular imagination, however, he remains a serial killer with uncounted victims.
-A 'Bon Appetit' magazine can be seen in Hannibal Lecter's temporary cell.
-Almost all the scenes in Hannibal's original cell have either a reflection of Hannibal or Clarice, depending on the camera's point of view.
-George A. Romero played the bearded man who accompanies Chilton and the two guards who forcibly remove Clarice Starling after her final meeting with Lecter.
-After Lecter was moved from Baltimore, he was originally to be dressed in a yellow or orange jumpsuit, but Anthony Hopkins was able to convince director Jonathan Demme and costume designer Colleen Atwood that it would make the character seem more clinical and unsettling if he was dressed in pure white. Hopkins has since said that this idea came from his fear of dentists.
-The first moth cocoon found in one of the victim's throats was made from a combination of "Tootsie-Rolls" and gummy bears, so that if she swallowed it, it would be edible.
-Clarice Starling was chosen by the American Film Institution as the sixth greatest film hero (out of fifty), the highest ranked female on the list; Hannibal Lecter was chosen as the #1 greatest film villain (also out of fifty).
-When Anthony Hopkins found out that he cast as Hannibal Lecter based on his performance as Dr. Frederick Treves in The Elephant Man (1980) he questioned Jonathan Demme and said "But Dr. Treves was a good man." To which Demme replied "So is Lecter, he is a good man too. Just trapped in an insane mind."
-According to Jonathan Demme, there were 300 applicants for the role of Clarice Starling.
-According to an old news article that Starling reads on microfilm, "Judge Detox" presided over Dr. Lecter's murder trial