Trivia / Random Hearts

• Backed by the Pentagon: Averted. During production planning for the film, the studio contacted American Airlines to request information about its "C.A.R.E. Team", the airline's response team in case of disasters, in order to portray the movie airline's response more accurately. However, American declined, seeing no upside in being associated with a movie about a plane crash.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $64 million. Box office, $31,502,583 (domestic), $74,608,570 (worldwide).
• Creator Killer: Downplayed. This film didn't kill director Sydney Pollack's career, but he waited six years to direct his next and final narrative film, The Interpreter in 2005,^* Not counting the 2006 documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry. when his films beforehand usually didn't have more of a three-year gap between them.^* The only exceptions being the five-year gap between Out of Africa (1985) and Havana (1990), and the four-year gap between Sabrina (1995) and this film.
• Fake American: British (settled in France for several years) Kristin Scott Thomas as an American Congresswoman.
• Saved from Development Hell: The movie languished in Development Hell for 15 years. In The '80s, Dustin Hoffman was attached to star in the film, but later withdrew as he did not like the earlier drafts of the script. By the early '90s, Kevin Costner was attached to star and James L. Brooks was attached to direct it, though this never came to fruition either. Eventually, Harrison Ford and producer and director Sydney Pollack showed interest in the project and it finally went into production.
• Those Two Actors: Kristin Scott Thomas and Peter Coyote (who briefly portrays her character's husband) had previously appeared together in Bitter Moon.
• What Could Have Been: In an odd inversion to the usual case of a film originally starring different actors, this film's starring duo were originally scheduled to star in a completely different film. In 1997, Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas were announced to star in Age of Aquarius, a romance set during the Bosnian War, directed by Phil Alden Robinson. Its studio Universal killed the project due to its inflating budget, and Ford and Scott Thomas starred in this film instead.

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