Trailer
Plot summary
Pete Sandich drops water and fire retardant on forest fires from low altitude, and Dorinda Durston, a pilot who also runs the radio for the crews, is afraid he will be killed. His friend Al Yackey shares the worry and suggests a training post at a flight school in Flat Rock, Colorado. Pete refuses the post until Dorinda tells him she cannot live with the fear. He agrees, then flies one last run over the fire, and his aircraft explodes. Pete finds himself in a burned-out forest, where Hap tells him his new purpose is to guide other pilots. Unseen by the living, he watches a trainee, Ted Baker, and the woman he left behind.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Always (1989)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Always was Audrey Hepburn's last film role, and much of her salary of more than one million dollars was donated to UNICEF, her favorite cause.
- Dreyfuss had seen the 1943 melodrama at least 35 times, and Spielberg, who recalled watching it as a child late at night, said it was one of the films that inspired him to become a movie director.
- The film spent a protracted ten-year gestation, during which Tom Cruise was reputedly considered for the role of Ted Baker and Dustin Hoffman was offered a role but turned it down.
- Production took place in northwestern Montana in the Kootenai National Forest, with some scenes filmed in and around Libby, where some 500 residents were recruited as extras to act as wildland firefighters.
- The wheat field scene with Pete and Hap was filmed at Sprague, southwest of Spokane, over two weeks in June, and footage of Yellowstone National Park's real 1988 fires was used for the fire sequences.
- Several critics have since considered Always the progenitor of a new crop of "ghost" genre films that followed it, including Ghost in 1990.
