10 Things You Didn’t Know About Equilibrium
The 2002 film Equilibrium is one of those movies that tends to always land on lists of the most underrated movies. Whether it is some lack of understanding of the word “underrated” or just some thought that this moderately budgeted sci-fi/action film escaped the eyes of many people, some like to think they’re doing some sort of service to Equilibrium by calling it a “cult film”. I would disagree with that. It’s a well made, expertly crafted action film that takes very few risks with the story. No doubt, Christian Bale has become a film darling over the years and has made a number of great films but Equilibrium, to me, isn’t a great film. It’s just a great action film.
1- Director Kurt Wimmer and Producer Lucas Foster. It was Kurt Wimmer who created the “Gun Fu” that we see in the film.
2- The opening scene was filmed in an old army barracks in East Germany. They had some trouble filming the gun fight in the dark.
3- Fight choreographer Jim Ramos Vickers and director Kurt Wimmer had some disagreements as to how the Gunkata would look in the film. Wimmer wanted it to be a must smoother and slower style. Vickers was a practitioner of hard style karate and wanted the motions to be quicker and more violent looking. Vickers’ vision is used in the film for the fight scenes but there are a few moments where lines of dialogue present the original intent of Kurt Wimmer to have the Gunkata as a smooth style.
4- The film was never given a wide release because overseas sales caused it to already come into profit and Miramax didn’t want to risk losing money.
5- The cars driven by the Grammaton Clerics are Cadillac Sevilles with exteriors and interiors painted totally white. Taye Diggs can be seen driving them several times but he had to learn to drive for this movie as he grew up in New York City and had never had his drivers license.
6- John Preston kills 118 characters in this movie, which makes him responsible for exactly half of the total 236 deaths shown. As of 2009, he continues to hold the 3rd place record for most deaths in a movie caused by one character.
7- The final fight scene between Christian Bale and Taye Diggs was supposed to be much longer but Diggs’ schedule wouldn’t let him spend much time on set so they shortened the fight to what is seen on screen.
8- Wimmer based the Grammaton Clerics on a few different classes of warrior throughout history. The slave warrior mamluks, the Knights Templar, and the bushido following samurai.
9- Despite the look of some of the scenes in the film, no wires were used during any of the action sequences.
10- During post production, the film began to run out of money so some of the scenes did not have effects added to them. You can see this in a few scenes where men are shot with guns but no blood comes out. The practical effects just looks like dust comes from their bodies with the intent to add blood effects in post but those effects were never added.
