Big Fish (2003) on Netflix
PG-1320032h 5mAdventureDramaFantasy
Will Bloom brings his pregnant wife Joséphine from Paris to Ashton, Alabama when his father Edward, a traveling salesman, is dying of cancer. Edward's tall tales have kept them apart for years.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.9/10480,148 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes75%
Trailer
Plot summary
Will Bloom, a journalist for United Press International, and his wife Joséphine, a French photojournalist expecting their first child, leave Paris for Will's hometown of Ashton, Alabama. His father, Edward, has cancer and is being taken off chemotherapy. Will and Edward have barely spoken in three years, since Will's wedding, because Edward has spent a lifetime turning his past into tall tales that he tells to his son and to the world. Will believed the stories as a boy; now he wants to know the real man, and he is determined not to raise his own child the way Edward raised him. Edward's fables begin with a boyhood visit to a witch who showed him how he would die.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Big Fish (2003)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Spielberg courted Jack Nicholson for the role of the older Edward Bloom, but felt the script did not give Nicholson enough to do and asked August to write new sequences. He eventually left Big Fish for Catch Me If You Can, and DreamWorks backed out of the project too.
- Burton's girlfriend Helena Bonham Carter was cast in two roles, Jenny and the Witch. Her prosthetic makeup for the Witch took five hours to apply, and she was pregnant during filming, her morning sickness made worse by the fumes from the makeup.
- While filming in Alabama the crew tracked down Billy Redden, one of the banjo players from Deliverance, who was by then co-owner of a restaurant in Clayton, Georgia; he agreed to appear on a porch plucking a few notes of "Dueling Banjos" as Edward enters Spectre.
- Burton asked Pearl Jam to record an original song for the closing credits, and after viewing an early print of the film the group's vocalist Eddie Vedder wrote "Man of the Hour", completed a demo within a day and had the band record it four days later.
- Flooding on the set interrupted filming of the circus scenes for several weeks, but Burton still managed to deliver the film on budget and on schedule.
- Burton used the film to explore his emotions about the death of his father, saying: "My father had been ill for a while ... I tried to get in touch with him, to have, like in this film, some sort of resolution, but it was impossible."
Stills
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