The Truman Show (1998) on Netflix
Truman Burbank sells insurance on Seahaven Island, a seaside town where friends and neighbors are actors. His whole life is broadcast to the world, and he does not know it.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb8.2/101,406,627 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
Truman Burbank was adopted by a television studio at birth, after an unwanted pregnancy, and grew up on Seahaven Island as the unsuspecting star of The Truman Show. The town around him sits inside a vast soundstage in Los Angeles, and the program is filmed with hidden cameras and broadcast worldwide, around the clock. Christof, the show's creator and executive producer, controls nearly every part of Truman's life, and the actors and crew who serve as his community keep him from finding out the truth. Truman works for an insurance company, and he dreams of traveling to Fiji.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Truman Show (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Scott Rudin bought Andrew Niccol's spec script for a little over $1 million in autumn 1993 on a deal that would have let Niccol direct it himself, but Paramount thought an estimated $80 million budget too much for a first-timer and paid him extra money to step aside.
- Peter Weir found Niccol's script too dark and pushed it lighter; Niccol wrote sixteen drafts before Weir judged it ready. When Jim Carrey signed but was tied up on The Cable Guy and Liar Liar, Weir chose to wait a year rather than recast the part.
- Robin Williams was considered for Truman and Gary Oldman shot test footage, but Weir cast Jim Carrey after Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, saying the performance reminded him of Charlie Chaplin. Carrey, then paid $20 million a film, took $12 million and said it was the fastest he ever accepted a role.
- Truman's speech to the bathroom mirror about this planet Trumania of the Burbank galaxy was Jim Carrey's own invention rather than something in the script.
- Dennis Hopper began the film as the show's creator Christof and left within days of the April 1997 start, over what was called creative differences; Hopper said Weir and producer Scott Rudin had agreed in advance to replace him if either was unhappy. Ed Harris stepped in after others said no, and his idea of playing Christof as a hunchback was rejected.
- Weir had scouted eastern Florida without finding a landscape he liked, and Universal sound stages were already booked for Seahaven, when his wife Wendy Stites pointed him to Seaside, a master-planned community in the Florida Panhandle. Offices opened there at once and most of the film was shot in the town.
- The shoot fell in 1997, the year effects houses were scrambling to switch to computer imagery, which made the work awkward. Effects supervisor Craig Barron said the digital upper halves of the downtown buildings needed less detail and weathering than usual because the whole town was meant to look artificial, though they copied small blemishes from the real buildings.
- The film gave psychiatry a name for a delusion. Joel Gold of Bellevue Hospital Center had met five patients by 2008 who believed their lives were reality television shows, and called it the Truman Show delusion; one traveled to New York to check whether the World Trade Center had really fallen.
