Deliverance

Deliverance (1972)

Timing: 1:49 (109 min)

7.32/10
1509

7.238/10
7096

7.6/10
128000

All about film

Video 6

Photo 42

Actors and characters

Release date

1972-08-18

Country

United States

Production

Warner Bros. Pictures, Elmer Enterprises

Genre

Drama, Adventure, Thriller

Budget

$2 000 000

Revenue

$46 126 889

Website

http://www.warnerbros.com/deliverance

Director

John Boorman

Actors

Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox, Ed Ramey, Billy Redden, Seamon Glass, Randall Deal, Bill McKinney, Herbert 'Cowboy' Coward
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Producer

John Boorman

Operator

Vilmos Zsigmond

Composer

Artist

Audition

Lynn Stalmaster

Editing

Tom Priestley, Wallace Worsley Jr.
All team (30)

• For budgetary reasons, it was decided not to contact insurance companies. The actors performed all their own stunts. John Voight, in particular, actually climbed the rock face.
• While navigating the rapids, the canoe carrying Burt Reynolds capsized, and the actor fractured his coccyx. Initially, a mannequin was used in this scene, but it looked too unnatural.
• Within a year of the film's release, over 30 people drowned attempting to recreate the adventures of its heroes on the Chattahoochee River.
• Local residents were genuinely cast as the inhabitants of the backwoods – again, for financial reasons.
• Billy Redden didn't know how to play the banjo. During filming, he simply strummed the strings while a person who could play the instrument fretted the chords.
• The river appeared so bright and saturated in the footage that the color had to be slightly muted in post-production.
• His character looks very awkward, however, Ned Beatty was the only one of the four actor-friends who had previously gone canoeing down rivers.
• Donald Sutherland read the script, found it contained too much violence, and declined the role of Ed. The actor later admitted he deeply regretted this decision.
• The scene in which John Voight's character climbs the cliff was filmed during the day and then darkened in post-production. Filming night scenes during the day was widely practiced in cinema until the end of the 1970s due to the technical limitations of filming equipment. In particular, anamorphic lenses required a lot of light – unlike the spherical lenses that replaced them.
• The film was primarily shot on the Chattooga River, which divides South Carolina and Georgia. Some scenes were filmed on the Tallulah River in Georgia, in Salem (South Carolina) and Sylva (North Carolina), as well as in Monaca (Pennsylvania).