Red Corner
Short description
Jack Moore, an American attorney, is in Beijing to close a satellite television deal when he spends the night with a young Chinese woman. He wakes to Chinese police breaking into his hotel room and finds her dead, making him the prime suspect. Unable to communicate with his interrogators and abandoned by his own embassy, he finds his only hope in Shen Yuelin, the court-appointed defense lawyer assigned to his case, who must weigh the evidence against her own assumptions about his guilt.
Jon Avnet directed the film, his fourth feature after Fried Green Tomatoes, The War and Up Close & Personal. Robert King wrote the screenplay, and Richard Gere stars as Jack Moore, with Bai Ling as Shen Yuelin, alongside Bradley Whitford, Byron Mann, Peter Donat and Robert Stanton. The film was released on October 30, 1997, and runs 122 minutes.
Costing around 48 million dollars, the film returned roughly 22 million at the worldwide box office, a modest result against its budget. On IMDb it holds 6.3 out of 10 from over 18,000 votes, and on TMDB it also scores 6.3, from a much smaller base of 419 votes. A critics' rating of 5.1 out of 10 from 22 reviews places it below the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- To make the film more realistic, director John Evnet, co-producer Martin Haberty, and actress Bai Ling spent a week filming in Beijing in a guerrilla style (without the knowledge or permission of local authorities). As a result, this city was captured on 35mm film for the first time in history specifically for a Hollywood production.
- During the filming of the scene where Richard Gere's character is intimidated by the showing of a recorded execution on videotape, actual video footage illegally smuggled out of China was used.
- The film's production designer, Richard Sylbert, traveled to China twice, where he took 1500 photographs, which helped him create the sets.
- Most of the outdoor scenes were filmed near Los Angeles International Airport, where an area of seven acres was used to recreate a district of Beijing. Specifically for this purpose, 300 bicycles, 15 cars, and a thousand various items (from stoves to manhole covers) were brought in from China.
Similar movies
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
