Patriot Games
Short description
Jack Ryan, a former CIA analyst now working as a naval academy professor, is in London when he stumbles into an attack on a member of the British royal family. He intervenes and stops the assassination, killing one of the attackers in the process. That act earns him the lasting hostility of the dead man's brother, Sean Miller, who escapes custody and pursues Ryan to the United States. When the threat reaches Ryan's wife and daughter, he is drawn back into the world he had left behind in order to protect his family.
Phillip Noyce directed the film, the fourth of the sixteen features he has made to date, following Dead Calm and preceding Sliver. Harrison Ford plays Jack Ryan, with Anne Archer as his wife Cathy and Thora Birch as their daughter Sally; Sean Bean appears as Sean Miller, alongside Patrick Bergin and Polly Walker. W. Peter Iliff and Donald Stewart wrote the screenplay, and Mace Neufeld and Robert Rehme produced. The film runs 117 minutes.
Released in June 1992, the production carried a budget of 45 million USD and returned roughly 178 million USD worldwide, a strong multiple of its cost. On IMDb it holds 6.8/10 from over 118,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.7/10 from a much smaller base of about 1,900 votes, so audience opinion is consistent across both. A critics' rating of 6.8/10 from 103 reviews sits level with the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Scenes at the CIA were filmed at the organization's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. This was the last time the CIA granted permission to film on the complex's grounds.
- The attack on members of the royal family in London is based on real events. On March 20, 1974, an attempt was made to kidnap Princess Anne. The perpetrator shot her bodyguard and driver, but was disarmed by a passerby.
- After reading the first draft of the script, the author of the novel on which the film is based, Tom Clancy (1947-2013), refused to participate in the project due to too many plot discrepancies between the original source and the future adaptation.
- Alec Baldwin was replaced by Harrison Ford in the role of the main character, so Jack Ryan's age was "adjusted" from 35 to 50.
- James Earl Jones became the only member of the cast of the thriller "The Hunt for Red October" (John McTiernan, 1990) to play the same character in this film.
- Richard Harris (1930-2002) was cast as IRA operative Paddy O'Neill after ten hours of continuous auditions.
- The buzzing sound heard when zooming in and out of the image was produced by opening and closing the disk drive on the computer's system unit.
- In the novel's finale, Jack Ryan and Sean Miller fight on a small island being engulfed by waves, and Miller ultimately drowns. A preview screening convinced its authors that the public disliked this ending, so it was changed to a fight on a motorboat.
- While freeing Sean Bean's character from imprisonment, Patrick Bergin's character says a phrase in Irish – which translates to "How are you?"
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
