MouseHunt
All actors and roles (10)
All team (134)
Short description
After their father dies, brothers Ernie and Lars Smuntz inherit a run-down string factory and a dilapidated country mansion. The brothers are struggling financially until they learn the house was designed by a famous nineteenth-century architect, making it worth a fortune. There is one obstacle to selling it: a single mouse has taken up residence, and it proves remarkably clever and resilient. What begins as an attempt to remove the pest escalates into an all-out battle, drawing in an exterminator as the brothers' efforts repeatedly backfire.
Gore Verbinski directed the film, his first feature, from a screenplay by Adam Rifkin. Nathan Lane plays Ernie and Lee Evans plays Lars, with Vicki Lewis, Maury Chaykin, Eric Christmas and Michael Jeter in supporting roles. The production, from DreamWorks Pictures, combined trained animals, animatronics and computer animation to create the mouse. Made for a budget of 38 million US dollars, it took in about 122 million worldwide.
On IMDb it holds 6.5 out of 10 from around 65,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.6 from roughly 1,400 votes, indicating generally favourable audience reactions. A critics' rating of 5.6 from 36 reviews is lower than those audience scores. Verbinski went on to direct The Mexican, The Ring and the first Pirates of the Caribbean film in the years that followed.
What's left behind the scenes
- Ernie Schmuntz says the phrase 'Hakuna Matata' in one of the scenes. The same phrase appears in the animated film 'The Lion King' (1994).
- Eric Christmas's last film.
- In several scenes featuring a close-up of a mouse in the walls, the filmmakers used rats as "body doubles".
- The film was released in Denmark under the title "Mouse in the House".
- The working title of the film was "Mouse Trap".
- Ernie Schmuntz's hair length changes between shots.
- The scenes with mousetraps were filmed without any computer technology. Over 800 mousetraps were installed under the floor. The scenes were shot in several takes, and after each one, all the mousetraps had to be removed, re-baited, and reset.
- William Hickey (who played Rudolph) was feeling unwell during filming and died closer to the end of the shooting period. This happened after all the scenes with his character had been filmed, so it was not necessary to cast another actor in the role, nor to make changes to the script.
- Close-ups were taken of animatronic rodents, and computer graphics were used in some scenes, but for the most part, the film featured real field mice (there were 60 of them), trained by Boone Narr. The rodents were overtrained in all the tricks, from running and climbing to going to sleep in a tin can and being covered with a blanket made of toilet paper.
- After filming wrapped, Paul Mehias took home a trained mouse that had appeared in the movie. The rodent lived with Mehias for another two years before passing away. Mehias and the rest of the film's creative team buried it on the lawn in front of the studio building.
- Close-ups of mice displaying human emotions and gestures were the result of the work of Stan Winston Studio, whose employees took a break from working on dinosaurs and cyborgs to focus on the animatronic mouse. This task seemed simple, but it was not. According to Stan Winston himself, when working on dinosaurs, his employees had free rein because no one had ever seen a dinosaur, so they could take certain liberties with the reptiles’ appearance. The situation with the mice was completely different, so the degree of realism that needed to be achieved was many times higher.
- On a special soundstage at Raleigh Studios, the animatronic mouse was operated by six employees of Stan Winston Studio.
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