Steven Soderbergh has been quoted as saying that if viewers don't take to the first 10 minutes of the film, they may as well walk out.
George Clooney said that Steven Soderbergh had originally been considering a different actor for the lead, so Clooney wrote to him asking to be considered, believing a letter would be 'less personal' should Soderbergh wish to turn him down. Clooney added, "thank God the other actor turned it down." The other actor was Daniel Day-Lewis.
On Stanislaw Lem's personal website, not long before his death, he posted that he felt the adaptation had over-emphasised the human-relationship dilemma in his novel, whereas he had intended to set out what an encounter with something genuinely alien might be like. The planet Solaris is as far removed from any preconceptions of alien life as you can get, so identifying with Rhea's Phi-Creature misses the point that all the Phi-Creatures are Solaris.
The MPAA initially gave the film an R rating chiefly because two shots revealed George Clooney's naked backside. Steven Soderbergh lodged an appeal, arguing that comparable — and at times more explicit — material had already been broadcast on network television. His appeal succeeded and the film was subsequently reclassified as PG-13.
Gibarian's remark 'There are no answers, only choices' mirrors Nietzsche's aphorism 'There are no facts, only interpretations'.
Nietzsche maintained that we were fated to re-enact the past, dubbing the notion the 'Eternal Return'.
This edition is more than an hour shorter than the original 1972 version, Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972).
Soderbergh cast Jeremy Davies in the film after seeing a tape of Davies performing as Charles Manson. Davies had been preparing to portray Manson in an independent production. The tape circulated within the film industry and became a widely shared bootleg. Davies ultimately went on to play Manson in Helter Skelter (2004).
Ulrich Tukur's audition recording captured his dog listening intently as he delivered his lines.
James Cameron was considered to direct but ultimately chose to serve as a producer. Daniel Day-Lewis was under consideration to star.
The name Rhea is also borne by Saturn's ninth moon. (In Greek mythology; she is the daughter of Gaia and Uranus, the wife of Cronos and the mother of Zeus)
The DVD special features include a draft of the screenplay in which Rheya tells Kelvin, early in their relationship, that she feels she cannot be a mother; the Solaris crew have Rheya's Phi-Creature undergo a brain scan revealing it has been reproduced right down to the particulars that cause her medical condition; and in which Kelvin asks Snow whether Solaris is God, and Snow replies that Rheya would probably have been more likely to know. It also contains a scene where Kelvin talks with the station's AI about Solaris, and the computer notes that Solaris was discovered in 2015.
The lines recited by Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) are from a poem by Dylan Thomas entitled 'And Death Shall Have no Dominion'.
Gordon operates a gadget that generates Higgs bosons. These are elementary subatomic particles whose existence was predicted in 1964 by Peter Higgs together with five other physicists. The particle was not observed until 2012, and in 2013 Mr Higgs and one of his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for their theoretical contribution.
This is a remake of the 1972 Soviet film, which drew its inspiration from the same novel by Stanislaw Lem.
According to Insane Clown Posse, the band say they never received any royalties from the film's makers for the use of their song 'Riddle Box'.
It was one of just three films to receive an "F" CinemaScore from audiences on release in 2002, the others being Feardotcom (2002) and Darkness (2002).
One of the taglines suggested for this film was 'Love never dies'. However, that exact tagline had previously been used for Dracula (1992).
The names of two characters differ considerably across the various adaptations of the story. The female character is called "Rhea" in the English translation of the novel, "Rheya" in the film, and "Harey" in the original Polish. In the 1972 version she is listed as "Hari/Khari" in the subtitles and Russian dialogue, and as "Carrie" in the English dub. The Doctor is rendered as "Snow" in the English translation of the novel and in the 2002 film, but in Tarkovsky's version he appears as "Snaut" in the subtitles and Russian dialogue, and as "Stroud/Strowd" in the English dub.
The intimate scenes were shot on a closed set with just George Clooney, Natascha McElhone and Steven Soderbergh, who operated a hand-held camera. "Steven had the camera on his shoulder and would move around us while playing music, so it worked really well," McElhone explains. "We simply wanted it to feel as real and as believable as possible."
In Lem's novel the character Rheya appears under the name Harey, an anagram of Rheya. This likely alludes to the Titan "Rhea", mother of the gods in Greek mythology, and is also the name of a moon of Saturn. Rhea was married to Cronus/Saturn (the ruler of time) and was sister to Oceanus — fitting, since Solaris is an oceanic planet — and to Tethys, a sea goddess; she was also mother to Poseidon/Neptune, and her parents were Uranus (the sky god) and Gaia (the earth goddess).
Kelvin shares his name with William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, the celebrated physicist who was the first to establish a precise value for absolute zero. The related temperature scale bears his name in his honour.
In the final train sequence a platform sign for the Chicago 'L' (Merchandise Mart) is plainly visible, albeit out of focus. The footage of the sign appears to have been looped to make the station seem far longer than it actually is: on the side of the station exposed to backlight there are only two such signs fixed to metal balustrades roughly 25 feet apart, yet on screen the train seems to pass more than a dozen.
A plate on Athena's engines reads "Dals Ed Mitt i naturen". Dals Ed is a small town in western Sweden, close to the Norwegian border. The artist put it there as a reference to the notion that "Athena must have passed Dalsland at some point".
The début of Jennie Baek.
An Italian censorship visa, No. 96974, was granted on 18 March 2003.
