Serendipity
Short description
Jonathan Trager and Sara Thomas meet by chance while Christmas shopping in New York City, both reaching for the same pair of gloves. They spend the evening wandering Manhattan together and feel an immediate connection, even though each is already involved with someone else. When Jonathan suggests exchanging phone numbers, Sara instead proposes leaving things to fate: she writes her name inside a book that she sells to a secondhand shop, and he writes his number on a banknote that they spend. If they are meant to find each other, she believes, they will. Years pass, and both are preparing to marry other people, yet neither has forgotten that night.
Peter Chelsom directed the film, the fourth in the chronological list of his features after Hear My Song, Funny Bones and The Mighty. Marc Klein wrote the screenplay, and Peter Abrams and Simon Fields produced it. John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale lead the cast as Jonathan and Sara, with Molly Shannon, Jeremy Piven, John Corbett and Bridget Moynahan in supporting roles. The production cost about 28 million dollars and took roughly 78 million worldwide, a solid return.
On IMDb, viewers rate it 6.8 out of 10 from around 131,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7 out of 10 from a much smaller base of just over two thousand. A critics' rating of 5.9 out of 10 from 138 reviews puts professional opinion below the general audience response.
What's left behind the scenes
- Initially, there was supposed to be a 12-15 year gap between Jonathan and Sarah's first and second meetings, so their characters were originally conceived as being in their 20s. However, it was subsequently decided that neither Beckinsale nor Cusack would be able to convincingly play twenty-year-olds. Furthermore, it became clear that the audience would have difficulty determining that the first meeting took place in the late 1980s based on the footage. Some things had to be cut and remounted, so only 7 years passed between the first meeting of the main characters and their reunion.
- A reference to the book "Love in the Time of Cholera" also appears in another film starring John Cusack: "High Fidelity" (2000).
- Jonathan tells Sara that he sees the Cassiopeia constellation in the freckles on her arm. In the 1985 film "Say Anything...", the character played by John Cusack shows his beloved girl this constellation in the sky.
- The film "Intuition" directly or indirectly references the following films: Stuart Rosenberg's "Cool Hand Luke" (1967), Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" (Parts 1 and 2) (1972 and 1974), Victor Fleming's "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), and Disney's "Peter Pan" (1953).
- Following the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, images of the towers on the horizon were digitally removed from the film.
- In the film, the characters played by Beckinsale and Cusack are engaged, and their fiancés are played by John Corbett and Bridget Moynahan, respectively. These same actors play the "deceived and abandoned" in "Sex and the City." Corbett's character is engaged to Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, and Moynahan's character is married to Mr. Big, played by Chris Noth. Carrie and Mr. Big leave their fiancés and spouse and begin living together. The same fate awaits the characters played by Corbett and Moynahan in "Intuition." Incidentally, in "Sex and the City," it turns out that Mr. Big's first name is also John.
- The friends of the main characters, played by Jeremy Piven and Molly Shannon, utter the same phrase ("You'd need to invent pills for that"), although they never meet in the plot.
- During filming in New York, the following notice was attached to a mobile television station: "Yes, a movie is being filmed here. The film will be called 'Intuition.' John Cusack and a British actress are starring. Don't ask her name, you won't know it anyway. We will be filming for half the day. Please do not distract the crew or actors with questions. Even when they appear free, they are thinking about filming."
- Kate Beckinsale and Molly Shannon refused stunt doubles and performed all their own stunts.
- Just like their characters, who see each other for a very short time in the plot, John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale spent only a few days together on set.
- At "Serendipity 3" restaurant, Jonathan and Sara order and drink chilled cocoa. After the film's release, the table they occupied during filming was nicknamed the "Stars' Table" at the restaurant.
- Peter Chelsom intended to offer one of the roles to actress Dawn French, but the studio management did not support this idea.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
