The Lost City of Z - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of The Lost City of Z or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to The Lost City of Z

[lynn]

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a close friend of Percy Fawcett, modeled the character of Professor Challenger in The Lost World on him. Fawcett disappeared in 1925, but his legend endured in fictional form.

[cassandra]

Brad Pitt's Plan B production company and Paramount Pictures optioned David Grann's The Lost City of Z. James Gray is directing the film, which stars Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett.

[frances]

Although reports have never been officially confirmed, the publishers of the Indiana Jones children's book series did seek to make a seemingly self-referential connection between the two adventurers. In the 1991 book Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils, published after the release of Spielberg's Indiana Jones original trilogy, the bullwhip-wielding archaeologist travels to the Amazon after he discovers secret writings by Fawcett recounting his quest for a lost city.

[tamara]

Holland went swimming with the largest predators in the Amazon basin - inadvertently. "I got in the river one day with the local kids and had the best day ever, but I didn't realize the water was filled with black caimans, which are like giant alligators," he says. "The next day we were filming on the boat when I saw this big crocodile-looking thing in the river. Apparently they are very docile and don't really attack people, but to me this thing looked as mean as could be."

[albert]

Filming included so many gunshots and big explosions that it scared local farmers, who complained to local newspapers and tv stations.

[victoria]

According to director James Gray, the boat trip was believed to be eight weeks long, filled with violent pick-pockets and knife fights.

[jeffrey]

To capture the dramatically varied settings of the Amazon rainforest, proper English life, and horrific World War I battles, Gray asked cinematographer Khondji to shoot on film stock. "I wanted the movie to be almost like a throwback visually to the complexity of characterization you might see in the 'New Hollywood' films of the 1970s," he says. "I wanted to couple that with the epic sense of adventure David Lean brought to his films in the early '60s. Of course, I should be so lucky, but that was the ambition."

[nicholas]

According to James Gray, the story is more about the characters than the adventure. Percy Fawcett's father was a gambling addict who squandered two family fortunes. Percy spent most of his adult life trying to answer for his father's misdeeds.

[morris]

First feature length film for Ian McDiarmid since Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005).

[riley]

The role of Percy Fawcett was originally supposed to be played by Brad Pitt. However after discussions, both Brad and the director felt the role should be played by a British actor. This allowed Brad Pitt the opportunity to take the lead role in World War Z while they went on to sign Benedict Cumberbatch. Benedict was all set to go when his wife became pregnant and preferred not to give birth in the middle of the Amazon. This eventually led them to sign on with Charlie Hunnam.

[dustin]

If shooting on 35mm film made perfect sense aesthetically, it posed significant logistical challenges in the middle of the Colombian jungle. "It was an act of absolute hubris to shoot this picture on film," says Gray, who set up an elaborate routine in order to ship, process and review the film during production. "First, we had to teach a young guy from Bogota how to load the film, because nobody really knows how to do that anymore," Gray recalls. "Then, every day after we finished our shoot, they'd put this film into a torn-up crappy cardboard box and load it onto a single-engine crop duster that would take off from this little runway." After a series of plane changes, the film canisters eventually made their way to London. "You're talking three flights every day just to get your film processed," Gray says. "The next morning, there was always this sense of dread when the satellite phone rang and you'd be thinking: 'I really hope the film arrived.'"

[charlie]

In 2017, explorer John Hemming criticized the publicity for the movie The Lost City of Z for claiming that Fawcett was one of Britain's greatest explorers, arguing that this was an insult to the many true explorers, and that Fawcett was a racist, a "nutter", and a dangerous incompetent who "never discovered anything", but caused the loss of many lives.

[nora]

Charlie Hunnam plays the father of Tom Holland. In reality, Hunnam is 17 years older than Holland.