Trivia / Freejack

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Anthony Hopkins has stated that the only reason he took a role in Freejack was because he had always wanted to meet Mick Jagger. Coincidentally, many sources say the reverse; the only reason Jagger took a role was because the producers told him Hopkins was involved.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $30 million. Box office, $17,129,026. This Cyberpunk thriller was hit with Executive Meddling and extensive reshoots which led to a product which was trashed by critics and ignored by audiences.
• Creator Backlash: Anthony Hopkins called this a "terrible film" in a later interview.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The trailer features alternative takes, including one where Alex and Julie don't realize that Michelette's men are going to shoot them when their elevator arrives into the lobby.
• The Other Marty: Linda Fiorentino was originally going to play Julie, and had shot several scenes with Estevez, but dropped out and was replaced by Rene Russo.
• Release Date Change: Poor test screenings and subsequent re-shoots bumped it from its original fall 1991 release date.
• Romance on the Set: Rene Russo met her husband, co-writer Dan Gilroy, during production. They have been married since 1992.
• Troubled Production: To say that the making of this film was difficult would be an understatement, as detailed here on Good Bad Flicks:
  • In the decade between Alien and Total Recall, screenwriter Ron Shusett had secured the rights to Robert Sheckley's novel Immortality, Inc.. In the process of writing the script, he removed the novel's supernatural elements and put more emphasis on action sequences. Shusett then sold the script to the studio Morgan Creek.
  • Geoff Murphy, a New Zealand filmmaker who was helming his first American production with another Morgan Creek feature, Young Guns II, was given the task of directing Immortality, Inc., now retitled Freejack. Murphy had not dealt with much Executive Meddling during Young Guns II — not realizing that Morgan Creek was devoting its energies to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves — and agreed to helm Freejack on the assumption that he would continue to be given Auteur License.
  • It was on the issue of script rewrites that things started going wrong. Not wanting to make a film too similar to Total Recall, Murphy wanted to reincorporate the supernatural elements that had been excised by Shusett and make the film's tone more serious overall. Morgan Creek, however, wanted a blockbuster that was as action-packed as possible, disliking Murphy's rewrite despite previously agreeing to his suggested changes. This led to a battle of wills between the director and the studio.
  • Complicating matters was the original contract, which stipulated certain aspects of Shusett's script not be changed. Murphy, who had not heard of these stipulations before agreeing to direct, was left flummoxed why Morgan Creek allowed him to make rewrites that he was unknowingly forbidden from making. He considered getting out of his contract by suing the studio, only to be warned that his career would suffer even if he won the case. Thus, Murphy reluctantly agreed to continue as director.
  • Morgan Creek insisted on hiring Stuart Oken, who had mostly worked in theater and had no experience handling a sci-fi flick, as Murphy's line producer. Joe Alves, previously the director of Jaws 3-D, was taken aboard as production designer. Murphy immediately clashed with both men but the studio repeatedly took their side against him.
  • The shoot was where things went From Bad to Worse. Morgan Creek pressured Murphy to fire Linda Fiorentino, who had been cast as Julie, even though the director liked her performance and warned executives that replacing her would be both disruptive and expensive. The studio went so far as to set up a thirty-minute meeting between Murphy and Rene Russo, exploiting a Directors Guild rule to claim that he had been "consulted" about the recast. When Murphy asked studio head James Robinson why he was so dead set on getting rid of Fiorentino, Robinson replied, "She doesn't give me a hard-on!" Fiorentino was canned and Estevez was forced to reshoot her scenes with Russo, with whom he didn't share the same chemistry.
  • Murphy wanted to shoot the climax between Estevez and Anthony Hopkins with camera tricks and other practical effects. Morgan Creek insisted on incorporating computer-generated special effects that were just getting off the ground at this time, even though nobody really understood the technology. They fumbled with the footage and effects for several days before finally cobbling something together that pleased the studio.
  • After spending a couple of weeks vacationing at Mick Jagger's estate in the Virgin Islands, Murphy returned to the editing booth to make a rough cut. He quickly discovered that the movie was a complete mess no matter how many ways he tried to fix it, and wasn't able to produce a presentable cut in the ten weeks given to him by Directors Guild rules.
  • This cut of the film was not even viewed by the studio execs, but sent straight to a test screening which was a disaster. Morgan Creek panicked and ordered a second round of reshoots, but couldn't tell Murphy which scenes they wanted redone. Shusett was brought back to write fifteen new or reworked scenes, which Murphy was shocked to discover were all action sequences and insisted were "unshootable", to which the producer agreed. Dan Gilroy was then brought in to write more humorous scenes, which ironically made the film tonally similar to Total Recall — which Murphy had wanted to avoid in the first place!
  • Robinson, however, decided that the real problem was the film's score. He brought in Mark Isham to compose twenty minutes' worth of rock music, which put Isham at a loss as he didn't know what was going on or think a rock score was appropriate for a sci-fi film. Despite his misgivings, Isham composed the score as Robinson wanted — only for Robinson to hate the score and fire Isham. This prompted Murphy to unsuccessfully ask the producers to fire him; he would later ask that his possessory credit^note The "Directed by" or "A film by" notices that you sometimes see in a movie's marketing be removed. He would have gone full Alan Smithee, but that would have necessitated another legal battle with the studio, and Murphy just didn't care by this point.
  • Murphy finally completed the reshoots, only for Robinson to hate the new cut and decide he should take over the editing himself. This posed two problems: A.) the footage was scheduled to be sent to the negative cutter in just a few days and B.) Robinson wasn't an editor. To fix this, he brought in a large team of editors, working on different parts of the film in different editing booths, going from room to room to oversee their work. He then sent the film off to the negative cutters without bothering to view it.
  • Because of the constant reshoots and reedits, the film's release was pushed back from Fall 1991 to January 1992. It opened in fourth place and made only $17 million, less than half of its reported $36 million budget, thus cementing its status as a Box Office Bomb and an Old Shame for Hopkins. Murphy's Hollywood career languished and he returned to New Zealand, where he eventually became second unit director for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Linda Fiorentino was originally cast as Julie, but was unceremoniously fired during production (as detailed in "Troubled Production" above).
  • Vincent Schiavelli was slated to play an unscrupulous "insurance salesman", who sold life insurance policies to Freejacks.

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