Cellular, 2004, Chris Evans, Kim Basinger, Jason Statham
Cellular is a 2004 suspense thriller, directed by David R. Ellis and starring Kim Basinger and Chris Evans. The screenplay was written by Chris Morgan and Larry Cohen, the latter having also scripted Phone Booth, another movie that evolves from a phone call.
Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber did uncredited rewrites of the script.
On the 5 August 2004 edition of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Kim Basinger said that when she was talking on a cellular phone while standing outside a movie house bathroom waiting for a friend, she became very annoyed at the small, rude crowd that had gathered around to point and laugh at her. It was only after her friend exited the bathroom and pointed out that Basinger was standing directly in front of poster for Cellular that depicted her talking on a cellular phone did she understand why everyone was laughing at her.
Larry Cohen worked on the script while he tried to get his screenplay Phone Booth sold. In a New Yorker article he says he wrote the film with the intention that it would be the direct opposite to Phone Booth (Phone Booth is about a man trapped on a phone in a booth, while this movie is about a man who is still trapped on a phone but can go anywhere). However, his friends told him that he had written the same screenplay twice.
Several references to New Line Cinema (the financing studio) throughout the film:
New Line Chairman Robert Shaye has a cameo as the irate man in the police station.
Ricky's backpack displays the logo of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
At the kidnappers' house, the New Line Cinema movie Final Destination 2 is playing on the television (directed by Cellular's director, David R. Ellis).
Producer Dean Devlin has a cameo as the cab driver who drives Ryan.
When Ryan is at LAX airport, you can hear the boarding call for "Flight 180 to Paris". That is the same plane that blew up in Final Destination, also from New Line Cinema.
This film was set to be Dean Devlin's directorial debut, but he decided to produce instead.
The phone Ryan is using is a Nokia 6600.
Chris Evans performed his own car stunts. Before production began, he was trained for five weeks at a Los Angeles stunt school. Most of the other stunts are done by the actors themselves as well.
The tattoo on Ryan's right arm is the Japanese character for "loyalty" and "honor," the defining heroic trait of this otherwise completely ordinary boy.
The phone that Chris Evans used while filming did not actually function. However, he used an earpiece so he could hear Kim Basinger's lines during his scenes.
A remix of the song "Sinnerman" by singer and pianist Nina Simone was used on the soundtrack of this film.
Both Chris Evans and Eric Christian Olsen appear in Not Another Teen Movie.Wikipedia
