Trivia for
From Hell (2001)

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• The late Nigel Hawthorne was originally cast as Sir William Gull. Hawthorne was replaced by Ian Holm when his cancer prevented him from working.
  
  
• The Hughes Brothers originally wanted Daniel Day-Lewis to play the lead role. When that fell through, they interviewed Sean Connery, Jude Law, and Brad Pitt before settling on Johnny Depp.
  
  
• The crew built four blocks of Whitechapel on location in Prague, including half a church.
  
  

• The title refers to a letter sent to George Lusk, the president of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee from an unknown man who claimed to be the murderer. Instead of a sender's name and address "from hell" was written on top of the letter, and apparently a piece of victims kidney was enclosed.
  
  
• Great care was taken to accurately reproduce the actual sites of the "ripper" murders. Illustrations and actual photographs from 1888 were used. Similar care was used to reproduce the wounds inflicted upon the ripper's victims.
  
  
• Although both Sergeant Godley and Inspector Frederick Abberline were involved in the Ripper murders (Abberline being the lead Inspector), they never worked together, and probably never even met until the arrest of George Chapman, a Ripper suspect.
  
  
• Though there were many rumors (and speculations) as to whether the victims knew each other, there is no real evidence that they did.
  
  
• After the Ripper has killed his final victim, the police officer describes the scene so that it can be written down as evidence. Those lines are taken directly from the report of the actual crime scene.
  
  
• The first person who signed on to the film was composer Trevor Jones, who stuck with the project since its conception in 1998 and finally composed and recorded his score for the film in early 2001.
  
  
• The man who introduces "The Elephant Man" calls him Joseph Merrick until he is corrected and calls him John Merrick. This is ironic since Merrick's true name was Joseph, but he had erroneously been called John over the years, most notably in Sir Frederick Treves' accounts of his work with Merrick.
  
  
• Sergeant Peter Godley knows his Shakespeare: He quotes from "Hamlet" twice ("...I must be cruel only to be kind..." "Good night sweet prince...") from "Romeo and Juliet" ("...a rose by any other name...") and from "Henry V" ("Once more unto the breach, dear friends...").
  
  

• SPOILER: The murder of Mary Kelly's roommate Ada was the only one depicted in the film that didn't exactly follow the wound patterns found on the actual victim in 1888. The scene was toned down because that murder, Jack the Ripper's last, was so gruesome that the producers feared an NC-17 rating had they actually shown a likeness of the victim, whose was found with both breasts severed, every facial feature slashed and torn, and the belly cut open. There is a well-known photograph of this victim, still in her death pose, that is included in almost every book about the Ripper murders.
  
  

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