A Hologram for the King
Short description
Alan Clay is an American businessman whose finances and marriage have fallen apart, and he needs money to pay for his daughter's education. He travels to Saudi Arabia hoping to sell a holographic teleconferencing system to the country's monarch, a deal that could rescue both his career and his family situation. Once there, he finds himself waiting for a meeting with a king who never seems to appear, negotiating endless bureaucracy, and passing the time with his driver and a local doctor. The trip gradually becomes less about closing the sale than about the people and culture he encounters.
Tom Tykwer directed and wrote the screenplay, working from Dave Eggers's novel. The film sits between Cloud Atlas and The Light in Tykwer's filmography and was produced by Stefan Arndt, Gary Goetzman and Uwe Schott. Tom Hanks leads the cast as Alan Clay, with Sarita Choudhury as Dr. Zahra Hakeem, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ben Whishaw, Tom Skerritt and Tracey Fairaway in supporting roles. It is a German, British, Mexican, American, French and Swiss co-production.
Made for a reported 30 million dollars, the film returned about 9 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.1 out of 10 from roughly 50,000 votes, and on TMDB 5.8 out of 10 from around 1,250 votes. A critics' rating of 6.2 out of 10 from 149 reviews places professional assessments slightly above the audience scores on both platforms.
What's left behind the scenes
- The German premiere took place at the famous Zoo Palast complex on Hardenbergstrasse in Berlin.
- Only a few individual buildings were filmed in Riyadh. The majority of the filming did not take place in Saudi Arabia, but in Morocco.
- In the role of Adam Clay, a businessman down on his luck, actor Tom Hanks depicts the filming of a music video for the Talking Heads song 'Once In a Lifetime'.
- The film is based on a novel by Dave Eggers, which Tom Hanks read and praised highly on Twitter in 2012. The actor had previously been a devoted fan of Eggers.
- This is the second joint project of Tom Hanks and Tom Tykwer. The first was the historical science fiction film 'Cloud Atlas' (2012).
- Ben Whishaw, who played Dave in 'A Hologram for the King' (2016), also worked with Tom Hanks and Tom Tykwer on 'Cloud Atlas' (2012).
- While hunting wolves, Alan is asked if he would have wanted to be a soldier in the US Army during World War II. “Yes,” Alan replies, “but not in the Pacific.” This is a reference to Tom Hanks’ work in 'Saving Private Ryan' (Steven Spielberg, 1998), as well as in the series 'Band of Brothers' (2001) and 'The Pacific' (2010), where he did not act but served as an executive producer. Both miniseries were created for HBO. In 'The Pacific,' a taxi driver tells a soldier just returned from combat in Japan: “I fought myself, but I was in Europe. You guys had it much harder in the Pacific!”
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
