Trivia for
Rescue Dawn (2006) More at IMDbPro »

• Based on Werner Herzog's documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997).
  
  
• Steve Zahn lost 40 pounds for his role.
  
  
• Jeremy Davies lost 33 pounds for his role.
  
  
• Christian Bale lost 55 pounds for his role.
  
  
• Stuntman Chris Carnel burnt his face in a scene depicting Dengler's plane crash.
  
  
• The plane crash scene is the only scene where Christian Bale was doubled by a stuntman.
  
  
• According to Steve Zahn, there were no trailers for the cast and crew on set.
  
  
• In a show of solidarity, as many of his actors lost weight for their roles, the director lost almost 30 pounds.
  
  
• Based on the true story of Dieter Dengler, a US Navy pilot shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War.
  
  
• There is an aircraft decal of a boy flying using a umbrella on the outside of Dieter's cockpit. This is a reference to a German children book story of a flying Robert who, in spite of the advice of his parents dared to go out into the storm. The storm carries him away and they never find him again.
  
  
• Dieter Dengler was captured not once but twice in real life. The scene where he was captured while drinking from a river is based on his second capture.
  
  
• In the POW camp where Dieter Dengler was held, there were altogether 7 POWs. For story-telling purposes, this was cut down to 6. This is explained by Werner Herzog in his commentary.
  
  
• All the guards in the POW camp were based on true characters from Dieter Dengler's story except for 'Walkie Talkie' who is a fictional creation of the director.
  
  
• At nearly $5.5 million dollars in the United States, this is the highest grossing film to date (March 2008) for Werner Herzog (his films have generally played in art-houses in the US).
  
  
• When Dieter (Christian Bale) is asked about how he became a pilot, he describes an awesome experience of seeing a fighter plane flying by very close when he was a child in wartime Germany. The experience described is strikingly similar to what Bale's character Jim had nineteen years before in Empire of the Sun (1987).
  
  
• To prepare for his role, Jeremy Davies read the book "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor who wrote about the psychological reactions experienced by prisoners.
  
  
• The film was shot in reverse continuity so Christian Bale, having worked hard to lose weight for the role, would appear the gauntest at the end, and then could simply gain the pounds back over the course of filming, working backwards through time so that when Bale returned to his average weight he would be filming his scenes as Dengler prior to being taken prisoner.
  
  
• Those are real worms Christian Bale is eating.
  
  

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