Trailer
Plot summary
Robert Beaumont backs a railway bridge in Tsavo, Kenya, and the work is running behind schedule, so he brings in Lt. Colonel John Henry Patterson, an Anglo-Irish engineer, to put it right. Patterson leaves England, telling his wife Helena that he will be back in London before their child is born. At the camp he meets the supervisor Angus Starling, the foreman Samuel and Doctor David Hawthorne, who tells him of a lion attack that has already struck the crew. That night Patterson shoots a lion as it comes toward the tents, and the laborers go back to work. Weeks later the foreman Mahina is pulled from his tent, and at dawn his body is found. Patterson hunts the animal at night while another worker is killed at the far side of the camp.
Cast
- Satchu Annamalaias Worker #1
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Stephen Hopkins later said of the shoot that they had snake bites, scorpion bites, tick bite fever, people getting hit by lightning, floods, torrential rains and lightning storms, hippos chasing people through the water, cars getting swept into the water, and several deaths of crew members, including two drownings.
- Patterson claimed the lions were responsible for up to 135 deaths, but a peer-reviewed paper states that about 28-31 killings can be verified; data from the lions' bones does not rule out a total as high as 72, an important caveat as Patterson's journal only counted Indian workers.
- The part of Remington was originally offered to Sean Connery and Anthony Hopkins but both declined, and the producers were considering asking Gérard Depardieu when Douglas decided to play the role himself, a choice Stephen Hopkins later said he was unhappy about.
- According to Goldman, Kevin Costner expressed interest in playing Patterson but Paramount wanted Tom Cruise, who ultimately declined, and work on the film slowed until Michael Douglas moved his producing unit with partner Steven Reuther, Constellation Films, to Paramount.
- While the real man-eaters were, like all lions from the Tsavo region, a more aggressive maneless variety, those used for filming were the least aggressive available, for both safety and aesthetic reasons: mostly Caesar and Bongo of Clarington, Ontario's Bowmanville Zoo, who also featured in George of the Jungle.
- The script fictionalizes Patterson's account by introducing an American big-game hunter called Charles Remington, a character based on the Anglo-Indian big-game hunter Charles H. Ryall, superintendent of the Railway Police.
