FILM 1997: LOLITA

FILM 1997: LOLITA

TRIVIA: Jeremy Irons originally turned down the role because he knew playing this character would hurt his career. After thinking it over and being convinced by Glenn Close that working with Adrian Lyne was an experience he should not missed, he agreed to play Humbert Humbert, not before securing a good paycheck anticipating a few years of possible unemployment.

As Dominique Swain was a minor at age 15 when the movie was filmed, an adult body double had to be used for most of the sex scenes.

Natalie Portman turned down the role of Lolita.

In the novel, Lolita is only 12 when Humbert first meets her. In the film, her age was changed to 14. The same thing happened in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962).

Charles Chaplin's relationship with his second wife Lita Grey was reportedly the inspiration of the novel "Lolita" as she was underage when they first started their relationship.

Melanie Griffith plays the mother of Lolita, but in real life it was a young Melanie who went off with an older man. When she was just fourteen she fell in love with her mother's co-star (Don Johnson) and the two pursued a relationship.

Over 2500 girls, including Christina Ricci and Melissa Joan Hart, tried out for the title role.

Ralph Fiennes was considered for the part of Humbert Humbert.

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FILM 1459: WILD STRAWBERRIES

TRIVIA: Ingmar Bergman has described in the interview how he came up with the idea while driving from Stockholm to Dalarna, stopping in Uppsala where he had been born and raised, and driving by outside his grandmother's old house, when he suddenly began to think about how it would be if he could open the door and inside it would be just as it had been during his childhood. "So it struck me - what if you could make a film about this; that you just walk up in a realistic way and open a door, and then you walk into your childhood, and then you open another door and come back to reality, and then you make a turn around a street corner and arrive in some other period of your existence, and everything goes on, lives. That was actually the idea behind Wild Strawberries (1957)"

Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer says that several scenes had to be shot indoors due to Victor Sjöström's poor health. "We had to make some very bad back-projection in the car because we never knew if Victor would come back alive the next day." Nevertheless, as long as Victor was home by 5:15 P.M. each day, "and had his whiskey punctually, all went well."

The dummy that Isak Borg mistakes for a pedestrian during the dream sequence was constructed from a balloon and a silk stocking.

FILM 1393: WILD AT HEART

TRIVIA: Nicolas Cage does his own singing.

The snakeskin jacket Sailor wears in the film was actually Nicolas Cage's own. Cage asked director David Lynch if he could wear the jacket in the film, as a tribute to Marlon Brando's role in The Fugitive Kind (1960). After filming was completed, Cage gave his jacket to Laura Dern. (On a side note, "The Fugitive Kind" was based on the play, "Orpheus Descending," by Laura Dern's cousin, Tennessee Williams. Laura Dern's parents, Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern, met while appearing in a 1961 stage production of "Orpheus Descending.")

"A prayer for the wild at heart, trapped in cages" was the subtitle to the play Stairs to the Roof by Tennessee Williams, who was cousin to cast members Laura Dern and Diane Ladd.

Before filming started, Laura Dern and Nic Cage went on a road trip to Las Vegas in order to bond and get a handle on their characters. It was Dern's idea with her stating, "We agreed Sailor and Lula had to be one person, one character, and we would share it".

Originally after Johnnie is killed by Juanna and her henchman, there was a sex scene involving Juanna and Reggie. Test audiences found the scene to be too disturbing and 50% of the audience walked out.

Several actors from this film had also appeared in at least one film directed by Martin Scorsese: Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton and Willem Dafoe. In addition to that, Isabella Rossellini was married to Scorsese.

FILM 1297: CHEF

TRIVIA: Jon Favreau did his own cooking by training with food truck chef Roy Choi. Choi sent Favreau to a week of intensive French culinary schooling, where Favreau sharpened his knife skills and learned how to make sauces. "I brought him into the kitchen, and he just kind of fit in," Choi recalls. "I threw him a couple tests, like a case of chives, or a case of onions, or peel two cases of avocados. Just to see where his mind and his situation and his abilities were and how interested he was in these things. He just attacked them. He really became a part of it."

The short scene with Carl and Percy in the cinema features the audio from Iron Man's repulsor rays, as a nod to Jon Favreau's previous work with the Iron Man films.

Promotional events centering on the fictional Cubano-serving El Jefe proved so popular that Favreau and L.A.-based chef Roy Choi who consulted on the film, have opened a series of pop-up restaurants and announced that they are thinking about making the track permanent.

Oliver Platt's brother is a prominent food critic in the New York metropolitan area and has invited Oliver on some of his restaurant visits.

Towards the end of the film, the El Jefe truck is seen at a nighttime food-truck event, along with many of L.A.'s most popular food trucks. This is an actual event in Venice called "First Fridays." For a brief moment, you can see Chef Roy Choi's Kogi truck, the food truck that started the whole gourmet-food-truck craze.