by Devante on Thu Sep 15, 2022 4:47 pm
Field of Dreams
The grass was painted green for Field of Dreams. Filmed on an actual cornfield-turned-baseball diamond in Dyersville, Iowa, a season-long drought led to the need for some cosmetic touch-ups. The dying grass was coated with some green vegetable dye and latex turf paint.
The filming schedule for Field of Dreams was based on the height of the corn. The corn had to be Kevin Costner's height (he's listed as 6'1") or taller when the voice first spoke to him. With a thumbs up from the state of Iowa, filmmakers dammed a nearby creek to make sure the corn had enough water. It worked almost too well; when Costner first hears "If you build it, he will come," he had to walk onto a foot-high platform. Just in case the creek damming failed, fake corn was on standby to be shipped in from Asia.
Field of Dreams star Ray Liotta has never seen the movie. Though Ray Liotta has been told that Field of Dreams is a great movie, he has yet to see it for himself. Liotta's mother was ill while they were filming the movie, which he mentally associates with the movie.
The Italian Job
This is a movie primarily about cars and driving. Sir Michael Caine could not drive at the time the movie was made, and in fact he is never seen driving a car. The only time Charlie Croker is assumed to be driving is the cut between when he picks up his Aston Martin at the garage and in the next shot, when we see it arrive outside the hotel. Caine gets out of a stationary Aston Martin after a further cut. Throughout the drive to Turin, and the entire heist, Croker is always a passenger.
Director Peter Collinson's wife, Lisa Shane, appeared in all of his movies "for luck". Here she appeared at the Mafioso's dinner, as the blonde wife of the visiting American. She was called in at the last minute because Collinson was being sent only tall, dark Italian models, and he wanted "a short, blonde scrubber".
It's a British movie in which the three Mini stunt drivers are French--Rémy Julienne's team--and the three vehicles are blue, red and white--the colors of the French and British flags.
Saving Private Ryan
Robin Williams helped Matt Damon land the part of Private Ryan. While he was developing Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg was busy shooting parts of Amistad in Boston. At the same time, Robin Williams was shooting Good Will Hunting in the same city, so he agreed to meet up with Spielberg while they were both in town, because they’d worked together on Hook and became friends on the set. Williams brought his young co-star Matt Damon along for what was supposed to be a meet-and-greet with one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers. Spielberg saw something in Damon, and two weeks after their meeting, he called him about the part of Private Ryan.
Steven Spielberg created a whole new role for then-unknown Vin Diesel. After Steven Spielberg saw Vin Diesel’s incredible, raw lead performance in the independent drama Strays, which the future Fast & Furious actor also directed, wrote, and produced, he had a whole new role written into Saving Private Ryan just to fit him into the movie. It’s hard to picture a world where Vin Diesel, one of the most universally recognized action movie stars, is completely unknown outside of the indie cinema scene, but that was the case in the mid-‘90s when he was just starting out. He caught the attention of Steven Spielberg and the rest, of course, is history.
The gunfire sound effects are authentic. To acquire the right sound effects for the guns used in the movie, Saving Private Ryan’s sound team went to a live machine gun firing range near Atlanta that was owned by a weapons manufacturer. There, they sourced all of the period-specific weaponry that was being used in the movie, that they needed to find the sounds for, and they just started firing them at the shooting range.
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