Havana
A gambler who trusted no one. A woman who risked everything. And a passion that brought them together in the most dangerous city in the world.
Country
Production
Budget
$40 000 000
Box office
$9 243 140
Director
Actors
Scenario
Producer
Richard A. Roth, Sydney Pollack, Ronald L. Schwary
Camera operator
Composer
Artist
Audition
Editing
William Steinkamp, Fredric Steinkamp
Whole Team (33)
Whole Team (33)
Short description
An American professional gambler named Jack Weil decides to visit Havana, Cuba to gamble. On the boat to Havana, he meets Roberta Duran, the wife of a revolutionary, Arturo. Shortly after their arrival, Arturo is taken away by the secret police, and Roberta is captured and tortured. Jack frees her, but she continues to support the revolution.
What's left behind the scenes
- Approximately one hundred American cars and buses from the 1950s were used in the filming.
- The main filming location was a street section lined with facades of casinos, restaurants, and hotels. Interior scenes were shot in recreated interiors of casino gambling halls, hotel rooms, and cafes. Havana’s Prado Boulevard was recreated on the grounds of a former US Air Force base in the Dominican Republic. Around 300 people worked on this. Over 80 neon signs were made in the US and delivered to the Dominican Republic. It took 20 weeks to build the main filming location.
- Many of the extras were political emigrants from Cuba, residing in the Dominican Republic during the film's production. According to director Sydney Pollack, the atmosphere on set was quite emotional, as the extras reminisced about the homeland they had left three decades prior.
- Around 2,000 extras and supporting actors were involved in the film, requiring between 8,000 and 10,000 costumes, as many of them changed outfits during the shooting of various scenes.
- The central plotline, featuring three main characters and a woman forced to choose between her husband and his rival – with the latter ultimately saving the couple out of simple human kindness – was borrowed from Michael Curtiz’s melodrama “Casablanca” (1942).
- The original screenplay for the film was written by Judith Rascoe in the mid-1970s. At that time, Jack Nicholson and Jane Fonda were slated to star in the film, but they left the project due to delays in the start of filming.
- Initially, Sydney Pollack wanted to film directly in Havana, but this proved impossible for several reasons. At that time, it was illegal for US citizens to legally visit Cuba. According to then-current US law, producers were not allowed to invest money in filming in Cuba. Official relations between Cuba and the United States were extremely strained in 1989-1990. Therefore, filming was organized in another Caribbean country – the Dominican Republic. The vegetation there was similar, and there was some resemblance in the architecture. The final scene was filmed in Key West, Florida.
- Raúl Juliá appeared in a supporting, but important role for the plot of the film. This actor received an 'Oscar' for Best Actor for his work in Héctor Babenco's drama 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' (1985), but he wasn't even mentioned in the credits of 'Havana'. The actor himself wanted his name to appear in the credits immediately after Robert Redford's, but for contractual reasons this was impossible, and then Juliá asked that his name not be included in the credits at all. That is why Lena Olin's name followed Redford's in the credits, followed by Alan Arkin's.
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Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
