12 Angry Men
Life is in their hands. Death is on their minds.
Country
Production
Genre
Budget
$340 000
Box office
$9 629
Director
Actors
Scenario
Producer
Camera operator
Boris Kaufman
Composer
Kenyon Hopkins
Artist
Audition
Editing
Short description
The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father. What begins as an open and shut case soon becomes a mini-drama of each of the jurors' prejudices and preconceptions about the trial, the accused, and each other.
What's left behind the scenes
- When the jurors try to determine how many seconds it would have taken the old man to reach the door, Juror No. 2 states that Juror No. 8 reached it in 40 seconds. In reality, 30 seconds had passed.
- The teenager suspect's ethnicity was not specified intentionally. The filmmakers wanted to show only that he was not of European descent, and that the bias (and lack thereof) of some jurors was a significant part of the entire process.
- At the beginning of the film, all cameras are positioned above eye level, and wide-angle lenses are used during filming to visually increase the distance between the characters. As the plot develops, the cameras are lowered to eye level during filming. By the end of the film, almost all filming is done with cameras positioned below eye level, and sometimes close-ups are used with telephoto lenses to enhance the feeling of claustrophobia.
- Henry Fonda disliked watching himself on screen, so he didn’t stay until the end of the screening room showing of the film. Before leaving, he quietly whispered to the director: “Sidney, it’s magnificent.”
- Rehearsals took 2 weeks, so the entire filming process had to be completed in 21 days.
- Director Sidney Lumet (1924-2012) kept the actors in a room for several hours, made them learn their lines, but didn't start filming; he wanted them to understand what it was like to spend a long time in a room with the same people.
- The film did not perform well at the box office, and Henry Fonda did not receive the promised fee for it, but he still considered "Twelve Angry Men" one of his three best films, alongside the dramatic road movie "The Grapes of Wrath" (John Ford, 1940) and the Western "The Ox-Bow Incident" (William A. Wellman, 1942).
- Producer Henry Fonda (1905-1982) chose Lumet as the director because he already had experience working in television, and because he always met deadlines and stayed within budget.
- Due to budget constraints, the lighting was set up in such a way that filming could only be done from one specific angle, so all scenes from that angle had to be filmed in one go. Therefore, scenes of conversations where characters are shown to the viewer from different angles had to be filmed not simultaneously, but in several takes, with a time difference of up to several days. Moreover, the actors were often filmed completely alone, after which other characters were added to the frame during editing.
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Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
