Conspiracy Theory
All actors and roles (10)
All team (120)
Short description
Jerry Fletcher is a New York taxi driver who fills his fares with elaborate theories about hidden forces controlling world events. Everyone he meets treats him as a harmless crank, and one person he keeps pestering is Alice Sutton, a young Justice Department lawyer who has lived quietly since her father was killed. Then Jerry's talk stops being harmless: men who appear to be government agents seize and interrogate him, and a theory he has been repeating turns out to be dangerously close to the truth. He has to work out which of his many ideas has made him a target, while Alice, the only person he trusts, has to decide whether to believe him.
Richard Donner directed the film, the fourteenth of the eighteen features he made, following Assassins and preceding Lethal Weapon 4. Brian Helgeland wrote the screenplay, and Donner produced alongside Joel Silver. Mel Gibson plays Jerry, Julia Roberts plays Alice, and Patrick Stewart appears as Dr. Jonas, with Cylk Cozart, Steve Kahan and Terry Alexander among the credited cast of thirty-six.
Made for about 75 million dollars, the film took roughly 137 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.7 out of 10 from around 114,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.6 out of 10 from a much smaller number of votes. A critics' rating of 6.3 out of 10 from 44 reviews places it close to those audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- It was released in Russia under the title "The Mystery of the Conspiracy".
- The secret CIA program codenamed MK-ULTRA did indeed exist. It was carried out between 1953 and 1973, when the then-Director of the CIA ordered the program to be shut down and all documentation destroyed. Part of the documentation (around 20,000 items) survived and was made public in 1977.
- The scene in which his character – a taxi driver – tells his passengers about a conspiracy theory was conceived by Mel Gibson himself.
- Richard Donner (1930-2021) met the screenwriter Brian Helgeland at the gates of Warner Brothers studio, where he was holding a one-man picket with a sign that read “Ready to write scripts for money.” Donner asked what this meant, heard in response that Helgeland wrote scripts but was currently unemployed, and decided to take a chance and give him an opportunity.
- Filming took place from October 14, 1996, to February 7, 1997.
- The film features a scene where the protagonist, while escaping pursuit, finds himself in a movie theater showing another film by Richard Donner, “Lady Hawk” (1985): the scene includes Rutger Hauer.
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