Hackers

Top 10 Fun Facts

1. Angelina Jolie's role was originally offered to future Grey's Anatomy star Katherine Heigl - who had to turn down the part because she'd already committed herself to play Steven Seagal's niece in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.
2. Other contenders for the role of Kate "Acid Burn" Libby: Liv Tyler, Heather Graham, and future Oscar-winner Hilary Swank.
3. It's a good thing the part eventually went to Jolie - she fell in love with her co-star Jonny Lee Miller and the two were married in 1996 (fortunately for Brad Pitt, they were divorced in 1999).
4. Extra credit: many of the film's extras were real seniors at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the setting for "Stanton High School" in the movie.
5. Stuyvesant High is located across the street from the former site of the World Trade Center, and miraculously suffered very little damage during the 9/11 attacks. The school was actually used as the base of operations for rescue efforts.
6. A promotional website for the movie was (naturally) hacked by a group calling itself the "Internet Liberation Front." The movie studio opted to leave the hacked version of the site online - leading countless Internet nerds and conspiracy theorists to suspect an inside job.
7. The cyberspace sequences were created without the use of CGI. Director Iain Softley explained that he chose "more conventional methods of motion control, animation, models and rotoscoping to create a real, three-dimensional world."
8. The name game: Penn Jillette's character is named Hal, a reference to the mighty computer HAL9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
9. The name game, part 2: Matthew Lillard's character is named Emmanuel Goldstein, which is both a character in the George Orwell novel 1984 and a pseudonym used by famed hacker Eric Corley.
10. That's a thumbs up: Roger Ebert gave the film a positive review, explaining that you'd be entertained so long as you didn't take the computer stuff too seriously. Ebert said, "I took it approximately as seriously as the archeology in Indiana Jones." Wait, is he saying that real archaeologists don't run around with whips?

Cast

Crew