Deep Impact
Short description
A high school student spots an unknown object in the night sky and reports it to his astronomy teacher. The discovery turns out to be a comet on a collision course with Earth, and the news eventually reaches the public: the world has roughly a year before impact. The American president announces a plan to send an international crew, led by a veteran astronaut, to land on the comet and deflect it with nuclear charges. At the same time, a television reporter pursues the story of her career, while people on the ground react in different ways to the approaching threat.
Mimi Leder directed the film, the third of six features she has made, following The Peacemaker and preceding Pay It Forward. Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin wrote the screenplay, and Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown produced. Robert Duvall plays the astronaut Spurgeon Tanner, Téa Leoni plays the journalist Jenny Lerner, Elijah Wood plays the student Leo Biederman, and Morgan Freeman appears as President Tom Beck, with Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell also in the cast.
Released in May 1998, the film cost about 75 million dollars and took in some 349 million dollars worldwide, a clear return on its budget. On IMDb it holds 6.3 out of 10 from around 204,000 votes, and on TMDB the average is also 6.3 from about 3,500 votes, putting audience opinion in modest territory. The critics' score of 5.8 out of 10 from 98 reviews is close to those audience figures.
What's left behind the scenes
- That same year, a similar film about the threat of Earth being bombarded by an asteroid, 'Armageddon,' was released.
- The role of one of NASA’s officials in the film was played by Gerry Griffin, who previously headed 12 Apollo flights and later became director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
- Following Tea Leoni's role in this film, an asteroid (8299) Tealoni was named in her honor.
- In the film, after the discovery of a comet, one of the astronomers dies in a car accident. This reflects the real-life event of the death of astronomer Eugene Shoemaker, one of the co-discoverers of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, on July 18, 1997, in Australia when he was struck by a car.
- While Bruce Joel Rubin was finalizing the screenplay, he gained access to some highly classified rooms in the White House and the Pentagon. He later attributed such luck to the name of Steven Spielberg, as Spielberg was originally intended to be the director of the film.
- This was the last work of operator Dietrich Lohmann, who died a year before the film's premiere. The film is dedicated to his memory.
- The film depicts a giant wave hitting New York, and at the end of the scene, only the tops of the World Trade Center buildings are visible above the water's surface. Following the September 11th attacks, these shots of the WTC buildings were sometimes cut from television broadcasts of the film. Furthermore, the film shows the tidal wave coming from the west, from New Jersey, rather than from the Atlantic to the south.
- It all started when producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown offered Steven Spielberg (with whom they worked on the horror film "Jaws" in 1975) to make a remake of Rudolf Maté's science fiction action film "When Worlds Collide" (1951). Spielberg preferred to work on Arthur C. Clarke's 1993 novel "The Hammer of God" (about an asteroid heading towards Earth and humanity's attempts to avoid a collision). Eventually, it was decided to combine these two ideas into one. The overall message remained the same, but the film's script was significantly changed, so Clarke was not mentioned on screen.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
