Finding Forrester

Finding Forrester (2000)

Timing: 2:16 (136 min)

7.113/10
1043

All about film

Video 1

Photo 17

Actors and characters

Release date

2000-12-21

Country

United States

Production

Columbia Pictures, Laurence Mark Productions, Fountainbridge Films

Genre

Drama

Budget

$43 000 000

Revenue

$80 100 000

Website

Director

Gus Van Sant

Actors

Sean Connery, Rob Brown, F. Murray Abraham, Anna Paquin, Damany Mathis, Busta Rhymes, April Grace, Michael Pitt, Michael Nouri, Richard Easton
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Mike Rich

Producer

Sean Connery, Laurence Mark, Rhonda Tollefson, Jonathan King, Dany Wolf

Operator

Harris Savides

Composer

Artist

Audition

Francine Maisler, Bernard Telsey, David Vaccari

Editing

Valdís Óskarsdóttir
All team (24)

• The character of Robert Crawford is based on a real person – Robert Crawford, who teaches history at Phillips Academy Andover, near Boston.
• The scenes from the film that take place at Mailor-Callow School were filmed at Regis High School in Manhattan.
• The character of William Forrester is partially based on the famous American recluse writer J. D. Salinger, author of "The Catcher in the Rye".
• Sixteen-year-old Rob Brown, acting alongside Sean Connery, had never acted in a film before, nor had he performed in school plays. However, he impressed Van Sant at an open casting call, who said: "He can memorize a page in less than half a minute."
• Film director Gus Van Sant appears in the film in a cameo role. He plays a library assistant in the scene where Jamal tries to borrow Forrester's book 'Avalon Landing' from the library.
• According to the film's plot, William Forrester (Sean Connery) was supposed to be a skilled typist. However, Connery struggled with this. The hands typing in the film do not belong to Connery.
• The image of William Forrester is based not only on the famous American recluse writer J.D. Salinger. To an equal extent, Forrester can be likened to another famous recluse—postmodernist Thomas Pynchon (author of the novels 'V', 'The Crying of Lot 49', 'Gravity's Rainbow', etc.), as well as John Kennedy Toole—author of the only completed novel 'A Confederacy of Dunces', published by his mother Thelma after the author's suicide and awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
• A portrait of the fictional writer William Forrester hangs in a literature class between images of real writers—T.S. Eliot (1888—1965) (on the left) and R.L. Stevenson (1850—1894) (on the right).
• The film mentions that William Forrester (the fictional writer) received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for his novel 'Avalon Landing' in 1954. The date was chosen deliberately: in reality, no prize was awarded in the 'Fiction' category that year.
• The title of the film's subtitle, “A Season of Faith's Perfection,” has no analogue in American literature, but a song with that title exists by the band “Stratovarius,” relating to William Forrester’s story “The Best Year of Baseball.”
• When William Forrester goes to school to defend Jamal, Charles Bernstein (Dr. Simon) is present in the background. Dr. Bernstein is a genuine poet and a professor of poetics at the State University of New York at Buffalo.