Trivia
The computer-code listing shown on the laptop during the hacking scenes is from Fyodor's Nmap, a popular network auditing-hacking tool.
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Kiriyama, the film's main villain, does not utter one word throughout the entire film. He does, however, make a noise through a megaphone at one point.
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The magazine containing bomb-making instructions that is used by Shinji Mimura and his gang is titled "Hara Hara Tokei" ("The Ticking Clock"). This magazine is a real bomb-making magazine published by an anti-Japanese-Government activist group called Higashi Ajia Hannichi Buso Sensen (East Asia Anti-Japanese Armed Front) from the 1970s.
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Ai Iwamura, the actress who played Mai, the smiling winner, only appears for about five seconds as her character. She was then asked to do some stand-ins for some of the girls in the class briefing scene. In that scene, she appeared as following characters: Noriko Nakagawa, Haruka Tanizawa, Hirono Shimizu, and Izumi Kanai. The total time of her appearances as a stand-in exceeds the time of her appearances as her actual character.
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The movie was shot in different locations all over Japan. The one location that was actually a small island was Hachijô-Kojima, an uninhabited island in the Izu chain hundreds of miles south of Tôkyô - it is used in many scenes where the students are seen by the seashore, as well as the shot of the island at the end.
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The director offered the role of Yoshitoki Kuninobu to popular rock vocalist 'Kyô' (from Dir en Grey), but Kyo's management forbade him to take it.
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Contrary to popular belief, this film was never banned in the United States. There are however, several conflicting, if plausible explanations as to why it wasn't initially released:
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- Toei refused to license the movie for North American distribution and rejected offers from several American companies.
- Toei's licensing fee was unusually high for this kind of film, so smaller independent distributors could not afford it and larger distributors that could refused to pay.
- After the Columbine High School shootings, no distributor was willing to pick the film up, due to the plot line involving high school students killing each other.
Although this movie is filled with lots of shooting rampages, only two cast members in two scenes were shot using squibs (small fake blood packs to simulate bullet piercing): Takayo Mimura, who played Kayoko Kotohiki, and Takeshi Kitano, who played Kitano-sensei.
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Many members of the Japanese Parliament tried to get the novel banned, but to no avail. When the film was released, they attempted to ban it also. Both efforts resulted in the novel and film becoming even more successful as people bought the book and went to the movie to see what the fuss was all about.
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Director Kinji Fukasaku has said that he based this movie on his experiences in World War II Japan, where he worked in a factory that was regularly bombed by Allied aircraft and many of his fellow workers were killed on their first or second day on the job and he never got to know any of them.
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Weapons provided include: Uzi submachine guns, handguns, kama (the scythe-like weapon), Spas 12 shotgun, nunchaku, Taser, knife, handaxe, crossbow, wakizashi (a sword), potassium cyanide (poison). Non-weapons provided include: megaphone, electronic collar tracer, paper fan, saucepan lid, binoculars.
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The characters from the anime/manga series Slam Dunk appear as icons used by the hackers.
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Although the film played sporadically in the US festival circuit since it's release, most American audiences became familiar with it through bootleg or "region-free" international copies. In 2011, American home video distributor Anchor Bay managed to come to a licensing agreement with Toei, and the film began streaming on the American video rental service Netflix. Later that year, Battle Royale had it's first general North American theatrical run at the Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles, CA, on December 24, 11 years after it's Japanese theatrical release. On March 20, 2012, Anchor Bay gave the film and it's sequel, Battle Royale II, their first official DVD/Blu-ray release in the US.
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Mitsuko Souma (Girl #11), Satomi Noda (Girl #17), Yoshio Akamatsu (Boy #1), Toshinori Oda (Boy #4), Hiroki Sugimura (Boy #11), Yutaka Seto (Boy #12), and Shinji Mimura (Boy #19) are the only characters to have the same designated weapon in the novel, manga, and film of Battle Royale.
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Six months were spent in pre-production on script readings and physical tests with the cast.
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