Burn After Reading (2008) on Netflix
A CIA analyst's memoir lands in the hands of two gym employees who mistake it for classified files. Linda needs cash for cosmetic surgery, and she and Chad hope to profit.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb7.0/10380,349 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes78%
Trailer
Plot summary
Osborne Cox, a CIA analyst, is told he faces a demotion over his drinking, so he quits and starts writing a memoir. His wife Katie is seeing Harry Pfarrer, a married U.S. Marshal, and moves to divorce Osborne in secret. A disc of his personal files, with a draft of the memoir on it, is copied for her lawyer and turns up in the locker room of Hardbodies, a gym in Georgetown. Linda Litzke, a trainer there, and her co-worker Chad Feldheimer take it for secret government material. Linda needs money for the cosmetic surgery she is planning, so the two try to sell the disc back to Osborne, who refuses to pay.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Burn After Reading (2008)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- John Malkovich's first scene was a phone call in which he screams obscenities at Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand's characters, but he was rehearsing a play and phoned the lines in from his Paris flat. "It was really late at night and I was screaming at the top of my lungs," he said.
- Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the parts for George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and Richard Jenkins before anyone was cast, and Ethan said Pitt's character grew partly out of a botched hair-coloring job from a commercial Pitt had made. Tilda Swinton was the one major player whose role was not written for her.
- Shown the script, Brad Pitt told the Coen brothers he had no idea how to play a man that stupid. As he remembered it: "There was a pause, and then Joel goes...'You'll be fine'."
- Joel Coen said the sex machine George Clooney's character builds came from two real objects: a contraption he had once watched a key grip put together, and another machine he saw at the Museum of Sex in New York City.
- Carter Burwell and the Coens settled early on a drum-heavy score, taking their cue from the all-drum music for the thriller Seven Days in May. Joel Coen asked for something "big and bombastic,... important sounding but absolutely meaningless", and the finished score leaned on Japanese taiko drums.
