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Cast Away - Tuuliajolla (2000)
Trivia
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Spoilers (22)
To make himself look like an average out of shape middle aged man Tom Hanks didn't exercise and allowed himself to grow pudgy. Production was then halted for a year so he could lose fifty pounds and grow out his hair for his time spent on the deserted island. During this hiatus, Robert Zemeckis used the same crew to film Salaisuus pinnan alla (2000).
Actual lines of dialogue were written for Wilson the volleyball, to help Tom Hanks have a more natural interaction with the inanimate object.
Tom Hanks said he first got the idea for the film after reading an article about FedEx. "I realized that Boeing 747s filled with packages fly across the Pacific three times a day. What happens if one of those goes down?," he said. He took that idea and combined it with his interest in how to survive without the five required elements for living - food, water, shelter, fire, and companionship.
Some crew members were left on the island for a few days to survive and learn some skills. They used some of their survival techniques in the movie for the character of Chuck. They were: having trouble lighting a fire, opening a coconut, talking to a volleyball, collecting packages washed up on the beach, and catching fish.
Contrary to popular belief, FedEx did not pay the filmmakers anything for their presence in the movie. Robert Zemeckis has made it clear in several interviews. While FedEx was very concerned when they heard about the project, they had no objections to the finished script and offered support during filming. The company later said the movie was very good for FedEx, particularly in overseas markets.
Most of the nighttime scenes on the island (except the creation of fire scene) were shot during the daytime. The darkness and night sky effects were added in post-production.
Tom Hanks said that the hardest part of losing so much weight was not eating any French fries for a long time, and the thing that helped him the most in this process was drinking a great deal of coffee every morning.
Virtually all the sound, including dialogue, in the scenes on the island (about an hour and a half of screen time) had to be replaced in post-production. Sound man William B. Kaplan made a valiant attempt at getting usable sound on the island, but the nearby surf made it impossible since many of the scenes needed to be very quiet.
The scene in which Noland is talking with Stan by the fireplace of Stan's home was shot in one continuous take with the camera rotating slowly around Noland. The shot lasts 3 minutes and 46 seconds.
Almost fifteen years after the film's release, Tom Hanks jokingly "reunited" with Wilson the volleyball at a New York Rangers hockey game.
The production employed several local Fiji islanders in the surrounding archipelago, including the neighboring Mana Island about a mile away. The locals were allowed to keep some of the supplies and tools as tokens of their help.
Tom Hanks said one of the reasons he wanted to make the film was to reinvent the "stuck on a desert island" concept. He felt that up to that point, most people's association of the idea was limited to either "Robinson Crusoe" or Gilligan's Island (1964) and that there was room for a new take, one rooted in the modern day. And there was also room in this film for a rueful line Hanks delivers about some things Gilligan never told us about surviving on an island.
The flight number of the crashed aircraft, FedEx 88, at the time of filming was a real flight number. It operated from Memphis to Penang, Malaysia with stops in between.
Chuck Noland's name can be abbreviated as 'C. Noland' or "see no land" which is clearly fitting given the circumstances or plot of the movie.
Some of the 'desert island' footage was shot on the mainland, with a highway in the background that had to be removed digitally in post-production.
An early draft of the script had Chuck having two different personalities talking to each other, Good Chuck and Bad Chuck.
The handwriting on the birthday card that Chuck reads on the island is that of director Robert Zemeckis.
When Chuck Noland realizes a Russian FedEx van is stuck after being fitted with a parking boot, he immediately wrangles a crew of employees for a makeshift "sort" in the middle of Red Square. A FedEx sort is designed to separate packages into zones/trucks based on where in the country they'll be routed, once they reach the airport. The process is so ingrained in Noland's psyche that even when marooned on the island, he gathers several FedEx packages from the ocean that have floated ashore, checks their routing destinations and performs a "sort" right on the beach.
The paper that Chuck writes his note to Bettina Peterson is stationery from "Arrington Ranch" (a cattle ranch resort) that is the actual house where Chuck leaves the letter.
In the beginning of the movie, as the camera tilts down Chuck's fireplace, you can see the book "Sailing Alone Around the World" by Joshua Slocum.
Chuck Noland was Tom Hanks's last Oscar-nominated performance until his portrayal of Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019).
In this movie, Chuck draws a picture of Kelly on the wall of the cave. In Elämä on ihanaa (1997), Simon Bishop tells Carol Connelly 'You're why cavemen chiseled on walls'.
Early in the movie, Kelly gives Chuck a pocket watch for Christmas. She explains that her grandfather used the watch on the Southern Pacific (Railroad). This is a foreshadow to Chuck's later dilemma where he is stranded in the South Pacific.
The song Chuck sings after successfully creating the fire is "Light My Fire" by The Doors.
As a FedEx employee, Chuck has plenty of resources to perform his job but lacks an adequate amount of time to complete tasks and is always in a rush. Once he is stranded on the island, the circumstance is just the opposite as he has plenty of time but lacks proper resources to function and thus this challenges how versatile his character really is.
As Chuck attempts to paddle off the island the first time, he is wearing his Calvin Klein underwear on his head. Robert Zemeckis also directed Paluu tulevaisuuteen (1985) where Marty McFly's "Calvins" were a running gag.
With Kelly having said that Chuck's island was 600 miles South of the Cook Islands, the location of the island is therefore around 1600 miles away from where most of the island scenes were filmed.
Wilson is the manufacturer of the ball used in the movie. But, other Wilsons have played an important role in Tom Hanks life and career. Hanks' wife is actress Rita Wilson. And Hanks' first television role was Kip Wilson in Bosom Buddies (1980).
Musical group Phish aired a video clip from the film during their New Year's Eve show at Madison Square Garden in 2002. Special guest Steve McConnell, who is the brother of Phish's keyboard player Page, pretended to be Tom Hanks. The next song the band played was the appropriately titled "Wilson." Many major news sites reported the appearance believing that it was Tom Hanks.
American Humane Association monitored the animal action. No animals were harmed. Scenes appearing to place animals in jeopardy were simulated. (AHA 00042)
In the movie Sinulle on postia (1998) at approximately 21:15 Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) says to Annabelle Fox (Hallee Hirsh) and Matt Fox (Jeffrey Scaperrotta), "I know you, I know you," as they run on to the marina. Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) says the same to Wilson the volleyball as he is repairing Wilson's face at approximately 1:31:12.
When Chuck was talking to Kelly near the end, he mentioned them having a football team that was now in Nashville. They were referring to when the Houston Oilers originally moved to Tennessee before the 1997 NFL season. Not having an "NFL caliber" stadium in Nashville yet, they shunned the 41,000 seat Vanderbilt Stadium in Nashville (as it was deemed too small and lacked a liquor license) and the 100,000+ seat Neyland Stadium in Knoxville (as too big) and decided to play in the Liberty Bowl stadium near Memphis for the first two years. However, both residents of Memphis and Nashville rejected this idea due to, one, Memphis being only a temporary home, and two, the fact it was 200 miles away from Nashville and, while usually a three-hour drive, was a five-hour drive due to major reconstruction of I-40 east of Memphis at the time. They eventually moved to Vanderbilt Stadium after all for the 1998 season after their last home game at the Liberty Bowl being almost a sellout...but of mostly fans of the opposing team.
Tom Hanks also played Charlie Wilson in Charlie Wilsonin sota (2007).
The first of two movies Robert Zemeckis directed that involved the protagonist surviving an airplane crash. The other was Lento (2012), which starred Denzel Washington. Both Washington and Tom Hanks went on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for these films.
The corpse ("Albert") Tom Hanks finds in the water and drags to shore was not real and a dummy was used instead.
"Cast Away" starring Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt was released at about the same time as another film featuring Ms. Hunt, the comedy "What Women Want" starring Mel Gibson. Both films were reviewed on the same page of that week's edition of Variety. While Helen Hunt was correctly listed with second billing on the listed casts of the two films, the newspaper mistakenly listed Tom Hanks as the star of both films.
Spoilers
A FedEx commercial during the 2003 Super Bowl telecast featured the final scene of the film where Chuck returns the package to its sender. In this version the woman answers the door; when Chuck asks what was in the box, the woman replies, "Just a satellite phone, GPS locator, fishing rod, water purifier, and some seeds. Just silly stuff."
During his second appearance on "Inside The Actor's Studio", Tom Hanks was asked by James Lipton what he thought happened to Chuck after the film's ending. Hanks responded "He turned around. He went back and made babies with that lady".
Robert Zemeckis had the idea of Chuck's blood forming the face of Wilson the volleyball, to make it seem like Wilson was 'born' from Chuck.
When Chuck and Kelly are curled up on the couch just before Christmas, the camera pans down the fireplace mantle, and you briefly see a basic sailing certification diploma that Chuck had earned. This explains why Chuck knows how and when to use his raft and sail at the right time through the surf.
During a Q&A; session at USC, Robert Zemeckis was asked what was in the unopened package. He replied that it was a waterproof, solar-powered satellite phone.
Alan Silvestri wrote 24 minutes of score (including over seven minutes for the final credits) for a 143-minute film. Aside from the Russian chorus and the two Elvis Presley songs before the crash, there is not one single note of written musical score in the film until Noland leaves the island (1 hour and 43 minutes into the movie). Only then does the musical score come in: an oboe, piano and strings are all that Silvestri uses. Every musical cue is a variation on the same melody, which is heard in full at the end.
In the beginning of the film, a FedEx truck delivering a package to the ranch house, drives under a gateway arch that has the names "Dick" on the left and "Bettina" on the right incorporated into the arch. At the end of the film when Chuck goes out to return the package to the occupant of the ranch house, the portion of the arch containing the name "Dick" has been ripped out, presumably due to the divorce action being initiated during the beginning of the film.
The film's theatrical trailer controversially revealed Chuck's escape from the island and his reunion with Kelly. Robert Zemeckis's previous film Salaisuus pinnan alla (2000) was similarly criticized for revealing plot twists in the trailer. Zemeckis responded by saying "We know from studying the marketing of movies, people really want to know exactly every thing that they are going to see before they go see the movie. It's just one of those things. To me, being a movie lover and film student and a film scholar and a director, I don't. What I relate it to is McDonald's. The reason McDonald's is a tremendous success is that you don't have any surprises. You know exactly what it is going to taste like. Everybody knows the menu."
When Bettina explains where each road leads at the intersection, she points toward the direction of her ranch and says "you'll find a whole lot of nothing all the way to Canada". Arrington Ranch, where they filmed the ranch scenes, is located in Canadian, Texas.
At the end of the film, when Chuck Noland is delivering the unopened package to the artist who sent it, the song playing in his car is Elvis Presley's "Return To Sender".
The moment before Chuck removes his tooth in the cave, he tells Wilson his dentist in Memphis is called "Dr. James Spalding". In the German dub, the name is changed to "Dr. James Volley" because few Germans are familiar with the American label "Spalding". In the Hungarian version the dentist is called "Dr. James Speedo". His best friend on the island was Wilson the volleyball. Spalding and Wilson both make athletic equipment.
Chuck's fortune begins to turn the moment he "meets" Wilson. Immediately after he begins talking to Wilson, he succeeds in building a fire.
In the original theatrical and VHS version of the film, after three years on the island Chuck is ready to give up and decides to hang himself. He is aware of the dead tree on the mountain peak, which is shown from below early in his time on the island, so he uses some old rope, fashions a dummy out of a log and hangs the log to see if the dead tree would support his weight. The branch snaps, leaving the log dummy hanging. One year later, as he is building the raft and is short of rope, he agrees with Wilson about where he can find the extra thirty feet, which is attached to the log dummy. This is missing from the subsequent cut of the film in which, without any explanation, Chuck pulls up the log dummy and harvests the rope.
When Chuck is aboard the doomed FedEx flight, he has his shoes off and loses them in the crash. Much later in the movie when Chuck is on a plane returning to his homeland he is shown wearing shoes, one of the first signs of his lifestyle transformation.
As Chuck's "welcome home party" is ending a co-worker states that he has to "brief Chuck about his upcoming meetings". The actor that plays this co-worker is Geoffrey Blake, the same actor that plays Jenny's boyfriend at the "Black Panther party" in Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks' Forrest Gump (1994).
Tom Hank's character is offered a Dr. Pepper while on the plane heading back home after being rescued. Dr. Pepper is also what Tom Hank's character drinks in Forrest Gump (1994).
Near the end of the film when Chuck Noland is on the plane back to America after his rescue, two FedEx mugs are seen in the background. These two mugs are rearranged to spell the words Ex Fed, a nod to his leaving of the company.
The story line in Cast Away (Robert Zemeckis as Director) parallels that of the 2018-2020 Manifest (2018) television series on NBC (Robert Zemeckis as Executive Producer). Both revolve around the theme of the protagonist disappearing for several years and returning home only to learn that things have changed, including the fact that their fiancee has married someone else during their absence and adjustments will be needed to an entirely new life.
Lari White plays Bettina, who appears in the final scene with Tom Hanks, whose character name is Chuck. Hanks has speculated after the release that his character ended up with Bettina and had kids. In real life at the time, White's husband's name was also Chuck. The couple had three children.
Near the end, Lari White tells Chuck that one of the roads goes to I-40 east. While she talks about destinations for I-40 west, she did not do this for going east. I-40 east runs through Nashville, Tennessee, which is where White had lived since 1988. She passed away there 18 years later at age 52.
Although the roads Bettina identifies for Chuck at the end are fictitious, her descriptions of where they go essentially are real. The intersection is where FM 1268 meets FM 48 and County Road 5, about 10 miles northwest of Briscoe, Texas, in the northeastern panhandle. You can see clearly in the scene where the smoother, paved, state-maintained FM 48 becomes the dustier, gravelly CR 5 at that intersection. Chuck drove north on CR 5 to get to Bettina's ranch, and the last scene has him coming back southbound on CR 5 and parked at the intersection, facing south. Bettina comes in eastbound (from the west) and turns left (northbound) onto CR 5 where she stops and talks with Chuck. When she points out "83 South", while the real U.S. 83 runs about five miles east of this intersection, she really is pointing south at FM 48, from which U.S. 83 can be accessed within 10 minutes. Although it's unclear to where she's referring, when she says "and this road here will hook you up to I-40 East," since she's off camera, by process of elimination (she describes on camera the other three directions) she's likely pointing at eastbound FM 1268. Although in reality, I-40 runs about 25 miles south of this intersection, if you did go east the way Bettina suggested, I-40 does take a northeast turn towards Oklahoma, and you could eventually meet up with it after approximately eighty miles by going due east, so it's not altogether inaccurate. Bettina really did point west when talking about getting to "Amarillo, Flagstaff, and California", and indeed Chuck could have "turned right" and headed west on FM 1268 towards those locations. And finally, her "whole lot of nothin' all the way to Canada" is essentially true, as CR 5 runs north and eventually connects with one of several U.S. routes that go up the Great Plains, mostly through small towns, all the way to the Canadian border if desired. If Chuck made his trip now (2017), he would see several giant wind turbines on both sides of CR 5 at this intersection, which would tower over them in the frames of the last scene.
The music near the end when Tom Hanks is with Lari White sounds very similar to that used a year later in parts of Taistelutoverit (2001), in which Hanks was the executive producer and had a minor role.
