Trailer
Plot summary
The Gulf War is over, and the American soldiers still in Iraq have little to do but party at night. Sergeant First Class Troy Barlow, Private First Class Conrad Vig and their unit are disarming and searching an Iraqi officer when a map is found on him. Troy asks Staff Sergeant Chief Elgin to help read the document. Major Archie Gates, a Special Forces officer close to retirement, identifies it as a map of bunkers near Karbala where gold taken from Kuwait is kept. The four men decide to go after the gold.
Cast
- Christopher Lohras Teebaux
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Three Kings (1999)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The role of Major Archie Gates was originally written for Clint Eastwood, and director David O. Russell only rewrote it as a younger character afterward.
- George Clooney had to fight for the part of Archie Gates, sending David O. Russell a self-deprecating letter signed "George Clooney, TV actor" and showing up at his New York apartment to plead his case, but Russell cast Nicolas Cage instead; Clooney only got the role after Cage dropped out to make Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead.
- Spike Jonze had never acted in a film before Three Kings, but Russell wrote the role of Conrad Vig specifically for him and coached him on the character's Southern accent over the phone while Jonze was directing his own first feature, Being John Malkovich; Russell had to talk a wary Warner Bros. into casting him.
- The screenplay began as an experiment by former stand-up comic John Ridley, who wrote it in seven days under the title Spoils of War purely to see how fast he could sell a script, and Warner Bros. bought it just 18 days later.
- Writer John Ridley says David O. Russell shut him out of the production entirely, hearing nothing while it was shot and getting a final script a year later with his name missing; even after Warner Bros. gave him a "story by" credit, Ridley stayed angry enough to block Russell from publishing the Three Kings screenplay as a book.
- To mimic the odd color of Gulf War newspaper photos, Russell shot most of the film on Ektachrome transparency stock cross-processed in color-negative chemicals, a technique so unreliable that many labs refused to insure it, leaving Russell fearing he would have to reshoot scenes until a lab willing to develop it was finally found.
- Every explosion in the film was captured in a single unbroken shot from one camera instead of the usual multi-camera coverage, a deliberate choice by Russell, who felt that cutting between angles would make the destruction look like a routine action movie instead of something real.
- Warner Bros. cut Russell's requested 80-day shoot to 68 days and forced the budget down to $35 million, demanded the removal of scenes like an exploding cow, and made Russell sign a legal document requiring any references to pedophilia accusations against Michael Jackson to be cut from the film.
