AMERICAN BEAUTY: SOME INTERESTING FACTS
About roles and actors…
— Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening were both the first choices of Sam Mendes for the roles of Lester and Carolyn although the role of Lester Burnham was originally offered to Chevy Chase and Tom Hanks (who later starred in Mendes’s follow-up project Road to Perdition (2002))
— Thora Birch was only 17, so filming her brief nude scene required permission from her parents, who were both on the set during the filming along with child labor representatives
— The role of Angela Hayes was offered to Kirsten Dunst, who turned it down
About characters…
— Sam Mendes designed the two girls’ look to change over the course of the film, with Thora Birch gradually using less makeup and Mena Suvari gradually using more, to emphasize his view of their shifting perceptions of themselves.
About parallels…
— The last name of Mena Suvari’s character, Angela Hayes, is probably a reference to the last name of Lolita Haze, from the Vladimir Nabokov novel “Lolita”
—- Also I have mention that the name Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey’s character) is the anagram of the phrase “Humbert learns”
— Like his earlier film, The Usual Suspects (1995), this film ends with a ‘Kevin Spacey’ voice-over, with the screen fading to black before he speaks the final words. (”You will someday” in this film; “He’s gone” in The Usual Suspects (1995)).
— The self-help tapes that Carolyn listens to are made by a “Dr. Alan Ball.” Alan Ball is the film’s screenwriter.
— In Lester’s cubicle we see a small movie poster for The Usual Suspects (1995).
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Yours sincerely,
AlexSandra
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According to http://imdb.com/
