MouseHunt

MouseHunt (1997)

Timing: 1:38 (98 min)

6.54/10
1196

7.65/10
131214

6.5/10
65000

All about film

Video 3

Photo 26

Actors and characters

Release date

1997-12-19

Country

United States

Production

DreamWorks Pictures

Genre

Comedy, Family

Budget

$38 000 000

Revenue

$122 417 389

Website

Director

Gore Verbinski

Actors

Nathan Lane, Lee Evans, Vicki Lewis, Maury Chaykin, Eric Christmas, Michael Jeter, Debra Christofferson, Camilla Søeberg, Ian Abercrombie, Annabelle Gurwitch
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Producer

Bruce Cohen, Tony Ludwig, Alan Riche

Operator

Phedon Papamichael

Composer

Alan Silvestri

Artist

John R. Jensen, Sally Thornton

Audition

Denise Chamian

Editing

Craig Wood
All team (132)

• Ernie Schmuntz says the phrase 'Hakuna Matata' in one of the scenes. The same phrase appears in the animated film 'The Lion King' (1994).
• Eric Christmas's last film.
• In several scenes featuring a close-up of a mouse in the walls, the filmmakers used rats as "body doubles".
• The film was released in Denmark under the title "Mouse in the House".
• The working title of the film was "Mouse Trap".
• Ernie Schmuntz's hair length changes between shots.
• The scenes with mousetraps were filmed without any computer technology. Over 800 mousetraps were installed under the floor. The scenes were shot in several takes, and after each one, all the mousetraps had to be removed, re-baited, and reset.
• William Hickey (who played Rudolph) was feeling unwell during filming and died closer to the end of the shooting period. This happened after all the scenes with his character had been filmed, so it was not necessary to cast another actor in the role, nor to make changes to the script.
• Close-ups were taken of animatronic rodents, and computer graphics were used in some scenes, but for the most part, the film featured real field mice (there were 60 of them), trained by Boone Narr. The rodents were overtrained in all the tricks, from running and climbing to going to sleep in a tin can and being covered with a blanket made of toilet paper.
• After filming wrapped, Paul Mehias took home a trained mouse that had appeared in the movie. The rodent lived with Mehias for another two years before passing away. Mehias and the rest of the film's creative team buried it on the lawn in front of the studio building.
• Close-ups of mice displaying human emotions and gestures were the result of the work of Stan Winston Studio, whose employees took a break from working on dinosaurs and cyborgs to focus on the animatronic mouse. This task seemed simple, but it was not. According to Stan Winston himself, when working on dinosaurs, his employees had free rein because no one had ever seen a dinosaur, so they could take certain liberties with the reptiles’ appearance. The situation with the mice was completely different, so the degree of realism that needed to be achieved was many times higher.
• On a special soundstage at Raleigh Studios, the animatronic mouse was operated by six employees of Stan Winston Studio.