Trivia / Don't Look Now

• Completely Different Title: The Italian title is A Venezia... un Dicembre rosso shocking ("In Venice...a shocking red December!"). A lot of foreign titles went with this rather than the English one (e.g the Brazilian version, "Bloody Winter in Venice"). Or the German title: Wenn die Gondeln Trauer tragen ("When the gondolas are in mourning").
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Daphne du Maurier thought the film was superior to the novella.
• Descended Creator: Besides composing the score, Pino Donaggio played the piano on the soundtrack, and also played flute in the piece that accompanies the sex scene.
• Harpo Does Something Funny:
  • The screenplay only called for a Sexy Discretion Shot to indicate where John and Laura have sex. Nicolas Roeg conceived the entire elaborate sequence shortly before it was shot, without being sure if Sutherland and Christie would even agree to go along with it.
  • Similarly, the climactic montage after John gets stabbed isn't in the script and was created during editing.
• International Coproduction: The film was produced through London-based Casey Productions and Rome-based Eldorado Films.
• No Stunt Double: Donald Sutherland in the scaffold scene, because the insurance for the stunt man didn't get set up in time. The wire holding Sutherland up nearly broke.
• Production Posse: While this was the only time Roeg worked with Julie Christie as a director, he'd been the cinematographer on three of her films (Fahrenheit 451, Far from the Madding Crowd, Petulia), and was the original cinematographer on Doctor Zhivago as well.
• Star-Making Role: Composer Pino Donaggio was already a popular singer in his native Italy but had no prior experience in film scoring when Nicholas Roeg asked him to score the film. After the results were widely acclaimed, Donaggio became one of the most in-demand films composers of the 1970s with more than seventy credits to his name, including such genre efforts as Carrie (1976), Piranha, Tourist Trap, and Seed of Chucky.
• Never Work with Children or Animals: Shooting the drowning sequence was particularly problematic: Sharon Williams, who played Christine, became hysterical when submersed in the pond, despite the rehearsals at the swimming pool going well. A farmer on the neighbouring land volunteered his daughter who was an accomplished swimmer, but who refused to be submersed when it came to filming. In the end, the scene was filmed in a water tank using three girls.
• Real Life Writes the Hairstyle: Donald Sutherland wore a curly toupee in the film.
• Throw It In!:
  • The exchange when Laura and John stop at the church, where John says he doesn't like the church, was based on an actual exchange by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie between takes. Nicolas Roeg thought it reflected the relationship between the two characters better than the scripted dialogue.
  • Pino Donaggio barely played the piano at the time of filming, but this is considered to have been all for the better, since his playing is used to stand in for Christine's, and it achieves an uncertain, innocent sound that was a perfect fit for a little girl learning to play the instrument.
• What Could Have Been: Real life couple Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood were considered for the leads. This would have made the drowning scene Harsher in Hindsight.

---