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Spoilers (1)
James Newton Howard was going to compose with Hans Zimmer, but when he was replaced, Zimmer bowed out as well. Philip Glass and Geoff Zanelli came into the project instead.
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The movie's premiere date was moved up a month to ride the coat-tails of Johnny Depp's success in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl which earned him a SAG award and an Oscar nomination.
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Johnny Depp's line, "This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. Anymore.", is taken from the Talking Heads' song "Once in a Lifetime".
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John Turturro decided to star in the movie because his son, a big fan of Stephen King, convinced him to.
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Mort looking head on into the mirror and seeing the reflection of the back of his head is a reference to the paintings of Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte, such as "La Reproduction Interdite" (English: "Reproduction Prohibited"). He often depicted a mysterious man in a bowler hat not unlike the hat that Shooter wears.
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When Johnny Depp's character drops the hat on his desk, a copy of Hunter S. Thompson's "The Rum Diary" is visible on the table. Depp is slated to play in the motion picture version of the book, The Rum Diary.
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Johnny Depp's character's name is Morton Rainey. Toward the end of the movie, this character puchases three items at the grocer's. One of the items is a box of MORTON's salt whose moto is: "When it rains it pours." Thus Morton Rainey.
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The DVD Audio Commentary with director David Koepp was recorded on 4 March 2004, before the cinema release.
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There are two Sweeney Todds in this film - Johnny Depp who played the murderous barber in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Len Cariou who originated the role on Broadway.
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In the scene where Johnny Depp bursts in on Maria Bello and Timothy Hutton in the Motel; David Koepp wanted Bello and Hutton to look shocked and scared - he made them both lie in the bed for 15 minutes before Depp rushed in. The production crew set up large speakers that blared static noise when the script called for them to be scared. The lights in the room were also rigged to go on when Johnny Depp opened the door, startling the actors further. No one knew exactly how to act.
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Mort explains to John Shooter, in his defense, that his story is the original and was published originally in the June 1995 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Ted Milner (Timothy Hutton) tells Mort that he's from a town called Shooters Bay, TN, adding doubt in Mort's mind about Ted's real intentions. Timothy Hutton's father, Jim Hutton, portrayed Ellery Queen in the 1975 TV series. Ellery Queen himself was the son of a police detective and the writer of mystery novels as well as an amateur detective.
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Spoilers
When Mort's conscience is revealing the real situation to him at the end of the movie, Mort begins to yell, "Rah! Rah! Rah!" Johnny Depp took this from his son, who was pre-verbal and expressed his confusion by saying "Rah!" Depp felt that Mort would be so confused at that point that he would not know what to say to convey what was happening that he would become pre-verbal again.
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