Trailer
Plot summary
Six people crew the medical ship Nightingale 229, on search and rescue patrol in deep space during the early 22nd century: captain and pilot A.J. Marley, co-pilot Nick Vanzant, medical officer Kaela Evers, medical technician Yerzy Penalosa, paramedic Danika Lund and computer technician Benjamin Sotomejor. A distress signal comes from an ice mining operation on Titan 37, over 3,000 light-years distant. The crew dimension-jumps to answer it and comes out in the path of the moon's debris cloud, which damages the ship and costs most of its maneuvering fuel. Titan 37 orbits a blue giant whose gravity will pull the Nightingale in before its jump drive can recharge, leaving an eleven-minute window to escape. The survivor they bring aboard carries an alien artifact the ship's computer identifies as nine-dimensional matter.
Cast
- Knox Whiteas Troy Larson (as Knox Grantham White)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Supernova (2000)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Walter Hill took his name off the picture, but the usual disguise was no longer usable. The credited "Thomas Lee" was invented because the Alan Smithee pseudonym had become too widely recognized as a badge of a film disowned by its makers.
- Australian director Geoffrey Wright walked two months before shooting over creative differences, having wanted to film the whole thing in zero gravity, an idea MGM rejected. Vincent D'Onofrio, cast as the computer technician, walked out with him, and James Spader was brought in to lead.
- Lou Diamond Phillips turned down the role of Yerzy several times, and only accepted when Walter Hill was hired, phoned him and sent 40 pages of rewritten script. Hill was still rewriting once cameras rolled, with studio executives watching from the set.
- A planned partnership with effects house Digital Domain, which would have delivered the visual effects below market rate, collapsed, leaving the production to pay what producer Daniel Chuba called "the full spa treatment". About half of the planned effects shots were scrapped.
- The weightless love scene between Robin Tunney and Peter Facinelli was achieved with the actors strapped into seats mounted on a rotating pole, which was painted out digitally afterwards.
- Hill warned MGM that testing the film without its effects would be a disaster and asked to shoot more footage, which the studio refused at a further $1.5 million. The standoff turned absurd: Hill would not return to work until studio head Frank Mancuso Sr. met him, and Mancuso would not meet him until he returned.
- Francis Ford Coppola, then an MGM board member, was paid $1 million in August 1999 to re-cut the film at his American Zoetrope facility. He built a love scene for Angela Bassett and James Spader out of outtakes of the Tunney and Facinelli scene, grafting their faces onto the other actors' bodies and digitally darkening Tunney's skin tone.
SPOILER
In the version first shot, the villain Karl mutated into a full demonic monster in the closing stretch. After much work on the special make-up effects, MGM cut every frame of the creature because they "couldn't see the actor", and the scenes were re-shot with Karl only partly transformed.
