Trivia / Air Force One

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The 1997 film:

• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Crossing over with The Cast Showoff: Harrison Ford is an aviator.
  • According to the information that appears when he checks in, Egor Korshunov's birthday is 21 March 1958, which is also Gary Oldman's birthday.
• All-Star Cast: Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman, Glenn Close, Wendy Crewson, William H. Macy, Paul Guilfoyle, Andrew Divoff, Xander Berkeley, Bill Smitrovich, Dean Stockwell, and Jürgen Prochnow.
• Backed by the Pentagon: Unusually, the film received the co-operation from all four branches of the U.S. military, who readily lent them equipment and advisers.
• Blooper:
  • When Gibbs kills the Secret Service agents guarding the armory, one of them already has blood from a Boom, Headshot! splattering the curtain behind him.
  • The pistol used by Agent Walters (Glenn Morshower) changes from a SIG-Sauer P226 to a Beretta 92 right before he is killed by Boris.
• California Doubling: The city of Cleveland, Ohio doubles for Kazakhstan; Radek's palace was shot in the Severance Hall and the Cuyahoga County Courthouse. Also, the prison where Radek was incarcerated was actually the Ohio State Reformatory.
• Creator Backlash: Not due to the film itself, but rather to external reasons. After the US invasion of Iraq, director Wolfgang Petersen stated "I would not make a movie like Air Force One now."
• Dueling Movies:
  • Came out within a month of another "Die Hard on a plane" movie, Con Air. Weirdly enough, both films were produced by Disney through Touchstone Pictures.
  • Also with Independence Day as an action movie involving an action hero president. Amusingly, Bill Pullman, who played the President in Independence Day, previously starred in Spaceballs as a parodic Expy of Harrison Ford's Han Solo.
• Fake Russian: Petrov, Radek, Korshunov, and Bazylev are all fake Russians. However, the terrorist mooks and Russian extras are played by emigrants from the Soviet Union.^note Bazylev is an interesting case as actor Andrew Divoff is Venezuelan, but (as can be intuited by his name) is of Russian descent through his Russian father.
• He Also Did: The film is written by Andrew W. Marlowe, the creator of Castle.
• One for the Money; One for the Art: Gary Oldman used his salary from this film to fund Nil By Mouth.
• The Other Marty: The movie originally had a score by Randy Newman. Yes, that Randy Newman. Ultimately it was thrown out, because the director thought it was too "cartoonish". Newman's score was replaced with Jerry Goldsmith - and Joel McNeely - who had only two weeks to write a new score.
• Shout-Out: Korshunov's henchmen Andrei Kolchak and Igor Nevsky are shoutouts to Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Alexander Nevsky, respectively.
• Recycled Set: The plane set built for this move got extensive use on The West Wing. The pilot episode of NCIS also used the set and had Gibbs explicitly say the plane looks exactly like it does in this film.
• The Red Stapler: Almost. Then US President Bill Clinton allegedly wanted to put an escape pod in the real Air Force One after seeing this movie.^note For those wondering why such a feature isn't onboard the real VC-25s, it's actually pretty simple: Any issue that could result in the destruction of the aircraft would actually happen too quickly for the president to be safely evacuated to such a pod. (For example, an attack by another plane, a surface-to-air missile attack, total hydraulic failure, accidental explosion, mid-air breakup, controlled flight into terrain, etc.) On top of that, even if there was an emergency where there was time to move the President into the pod (explosive decompression, fire on board, or other malfunction), the aircraft itself would be on the ground within a few minutes anyway, and safely evacuated. Also, even if the President was killed, the power would just shift to the Vice President anyway, meaning that the government would still be functional.
• Referenced by...: Plays a pivotal role in the NHL documentary Saving Sakic, as it was the profits from this movie that enabled the Colorado Avalanche to keep their star player Joe Sakic when the New York Rangers made him an offer the Avs initially couldn't match.
• Wag the Director: A positive example from Glenn Close: She revealed in an interview years later that there was a scene written of her character breaking down and crying, but she refused to do it, considering it a "cliché".
  "They had written a scene of her breaking down and crying. And I said, 'I will not do that.' Because I thought we'd be doing women a disfavor if we had that cliché moment where she breaks down."
• What Could Have Been:
  • Jerry Goldsmith wanted to work with his son Joel Goldsmith again following their collaboration in Star Trek: First Contact but another assignment from Joel prevented the father-son duo from happening.
  • There was originally going to be an explanation behind why Agent Gibbs betrayed Marshall — he was a former CIA agent who became disenchanted when the Cold War ended.
  • The lead role was written for Kevin Costner, but he was heavily committed to The Postman, and suggested Harrison Ford for the part. On the DVD Commentary, if Ford did not want to play the lead role, then Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keanu Reeves and Dennis Quaid would be the other choices to play the lead role. Others considered include Tom Hanks, John Malkovich and Tommy Lee Jones.
  • According to Gary Oldman, his character of Korshunov was originally written as a more sympathetic and fully dimensioned villain instead of a standard Smug Snake Evil Foreigner.
  • Melanie Mitchell's execution was originally supposed to happen on-camera. Wolfgang Peterson cut the shot as he felt it was "too intense"^note also, the character was based on an actual person who gave the crew a tour of the real Air Force One and everyone felt uncomfortable shooting the scene because they all remembered how nice she was and instead had the death happen offscreen.

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