Finding Forrester
All team (27)
Short description
Jamal Wallace is a Black teenager from the Bronx with a gift for basketball and a private interest in books. After a dare leads him into the apartment of a recluse the neighbourhood treats as a local legend, he leaves his backpack behind and gets it back with his writing marked up in the margins. The recluse turns out to be William Forrester, who published one celebrated novel decades ago and has been withdrawn from the world ever since. The two begin meeting in secret, with Forrester coaching the boy on his prose while Jamal draws him back into contact with life outside his rooms. Jamal's ability wins him a place at a Manhattan private school, where a teacher resents him and he finds himself pulled between an athletic future and a literary one.
Gus Van Sant directed the film, the sixth of the eighteen features listed for him in release order; it followed his 1998 Psycho and preceded Gerry in 2002. Mike Rich wrote the screenplay, and Sean Connery, who plays Forrester, produced alongside Laurence Mark and Rhonda Tollefson. Rob Brown appears as Jamal, with F. Murray Abraham, Anna Paquin, Damany Mathis and Busta Rhymes among a credited cast of fifty. Made for 43 million dollars, it took about 80 million worldwide.
On IMDb the film is rated [not enough facts], while on TMDB it holds 7.1 out of 10 from 1,262 votes.
What's left behind the scenes
- Film director Gus Van Sant appears in the film in a cameo role. He plays a library assistant in the scene where Jamal tries to borrow Forrester's book 'Avalon Landing' from the library.
- According to the film's plot, William Forrester (Sean Connery) was supposed to be a skilled typist. However, Connery struggled with this. The hands typing in the film do not belong to Connery.
- Sixteen-year-old Rob Brown, acting alongside Sean Connery, had never acted in a film before, nor had he performed in school plays. However, he impressed Van Sant at an open casting call, who said: "He can memorize a page in less than half a minute."
- The film mentions that William Forrester (the fictional writer) received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for his novel 'Avalon Landing' in 1954. The date was chosen deliberately: in reality, no prize was awarded in the 'Fiction' category that year.
- The character of William Forrester is partially based on the famous American recluse writer J. D. Salinger, author of "The Catcher in the Rye".
- The title of the film's subtitle, “A Season of Faith's Perfection,” has no analogue in American literature, but a song with that title exists by the band “Stratovarius,” relating to William Forrester’s story “The Best Year of Baseball.”
- When William Forrester goes to school to defend Jamal, Charles Bernstein (Dr. Simon) is present in the background. Dr. Bernstein is a genuine poet and a professor of poetics at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
- The image of William Forrester is based not only on the famous American recluse writer J.D. Salinger. To an equal extent, Forrester can be likened to another famous recluse—postmodernist Thomas Pynchon (author of the novels 'V', 'The Crying of Lot 49', 'Gravity's Rainbow', etc.), as well as John Kennedy Toole—author of the only completed novel 'A Confederacy of Dunces', published by his mother Thelma after the author's suicide and awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
- The scenes from the film that take place at Mailor-Callow School were filmed at Regis High School in Manhattan.
- The character of Robert Crawford is based on a real person – Robert Crawford, who teaches history at Phillips Academy Andover, near Boston.
- A portrait of the fictional writer William Forrester hangs in a literature class between images of real writers—T.S. Eliot (1888—1965) (on the left) and R.L. Stevenson (1850—1894) (on the right).
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