Production
The film was originally to have Tony Scott direct, but price became an issue and Elie Chouraqui replaced Scott, who would later go on to direct the 2004 version with Denzel Washington as Creasy.
The film had a French director, an Israeli producer, an Italian scriptwriter, a British cameraperson, and a cast from multiple countries. The primary actors were Americans.
Filming took place in Italy, notably Lombardy and Lazio. The screenplay underwent several revisions. It was released 9 October 1987.
At one point, when A. J. Quinnell read the film script, he inquired about a line that was different from the book's text. The writers of the script responded, "You mean, there's a book...?"
Desmond Ryan of The Philadelphia Inquirer said that the director "has invested a great deal of care in making Man on Fire visually interesting". John H. Richardson of the Los Angeles Daily News said "One thing you have to say for "Man on Fire": If they gave an Oscar for best location scouting, this film should win it. From a palazzo on Lake Como to a huge sun-lit industrial loft to a cavernous underground boat dock, this film has some of the best-looking backgrounds of the year." Caryn James of The New York Times said that the film "is so full of rain it looks like monsoon season on Lake Como, but that makes as much sense as anything else the director and co-writer Elie Chouraqui has imagined."
Ryan said that "he settings and camera-work owe much to Ridley Scott and his disciples, but Chouraqui has forgotten that what you hear matters as much as what you see." Ryan added that "he connections from scene to scene are always arbitrary and occasionally incomprehensible, giving Man on Fire the feel of a movie that was drastically edited".
Read more about this topic: Man On Fire (1987 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)