Reign of Fire
Short description
In present-day London, a boy named Quinn wanders into a tunnel excavation where his mother works and inadvertently rouses a gigantic dragon that has slept underground for centuries. The creature and its offspring spread across the planet, wiping out most of humanity. Twenty years later, Quinn, now grown, leads a small surviving community as its fire chief, keeping the dragons at bay while the world's ruins smoulder around them. Their situation shifts with the arrival of Denton Van Zan, an American soldier who claims to know a way to kill the beasts, and who pushes for a hunt rather than continued hiding.
Rob Bowman directed the film, his third feature after Airborne and The X-Files, working from a screenplay by Matt Greenberg and Gregg Chabot. Christian Bale plays Quinn, with Matthew McConaughey as Van Zan, Izabella Scorupco as Alex Jensen and Gerard Butler as Creedy. The production, a British, Irish and American co-financing effort, carried a budget of about 60 million dollars and took roughly 82 million dollars worldwide.
On IMDb the film holds 6.2 out of 10 from around 152,000 votes, and on TMDB it also stands at 6.2 from roughly 2,500 votes. A critics' score of 5.4 from 172 reviews puts it slightly below those audience figures, indicating a mixed professional response alongside moderate viewer approval.
What's left behind the scenes
- The method by which the dragons breathe fire was borrowed from two animals: the spitting cobra and the bombardier beetle.
- Filming period: February 19 – July 2001.
- A significant portion of the film was shot in the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland, near Dublin. Since this area is part of a national park and is popular with tourists, the filmmakers were allowed to work under strict conditions, ensuring that everything would be cleaned up and returned to its original state without any damage to the natural landscape after filming.
- Initially, Christian Bale intended to lose weight for the role of Quinn, believing that thinness and exhaustion would be logical and natural for a post-apocalyptic world where sustenance was scarce. However, on set, he noticed Matthew McConaughey's (who played Van Zan) strong physique, changed his mind about losing weight, and instead began actively working out at the gym. Considering the upcoming filming of a fight scene with McConaughey, the actor decided that the fight would look more realistic if the physiques of the participants were more or less the same.
- The first outbreak in almost 40 years of enteroviral vesicular stomatitis (an acute infectious disease) in Ireland in 2001 meant that filmmakers needed to obtain special permission to shoot in some counties. During that period, local residents were only allowed to go outside for a short time and only in cases of extreme necessity. It was recommended to refrain from traveling even within the country.
- Some of the blows that Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey delivered to each other in the fight scene were genuine (such as the headbutt that McConaughey delivered to Bale).
- The film’s broadcast, scheduled for July 7, 2005, on British television channel ABC, was canceled due to the terrorist attacks that took place in London on that day. Channel management believed that the spectacle of London ravaged by dragons would remind viewers of the tragedy that had occurred, and replaced "Reign of Fire" in the schedule with the family comedy "Big Fat Liar" (2002).
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
