Trivia for
Brokeback Mountain (2005)

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• During the filming of the Fourth of July scenes in Fort Macleod, the crew would get the extras pumped up by telling them to act like the Calgary Flames had just won the Stanley Cup.
  
  
• Heath Ledger has a nude scene in which he jumps into a lake. The director intended to edit any actual frontal nudity out of the film, but a paparazzo took photos of Ledger with a digital camera. The photos appeared on the Internet and in some press publications. The scene is included in the European version of the film. It features Ledger and a stunt double for Jake Gyllenhaal jumping into a lake from a rock.
  
  
• Some reports have it that director Ang Lee barred screenwriter Larry McMurtry from the set of the movie. A spokeswoman for Focus Features, which is producing it, commented: "Larry McMurtry rarely goes on sets because he has very severe allergies." Larry McMurtry was also in the midst of writing a novel when filming began and ended; no one barred him from the set. Diana Ossana, the co-writer of the screenplay and a producer, was on set during the entire filming.
  
  

• The script by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana was written in 1997.
  
  
• Diana Ossana, co-screenwriter and a producer on the film, first read the short story in the 13 October 1997 New Yorker magazine. When she first asked her writing partner, Larry McMurtry to read the story, he refused, stating he doesn't read short fiction, because he can't write it. She persisted, however, and he ultimately agreed.
  
  
• According to reports, Heath Ledger nearly broke co-star Jake Gyllenhaal's nose while filming a kissing scene.
  
  
• According to an interview that Heath Ledger gave to the Philadelphia Inquirer's Steven Rea, there was a sequence that was filmed for the movie in which Jack and Ennis help some hippies get their car out of a river. According to Ledger, the scene took three days to shoot and was disliked almost immediately by everyone involved. The scene was written by James Schamus as an attempt to show Jack and Ennis in a heroic situation, but it does not appear in 'E. Annie Proulx' 's original short story, the published screenplay, or the final cut of the movie.
  
  
• Gus Van Sant and Joel Schumacher were interested in directing the project.
  
  
• There were 75 visual effects shots created for the film by the Canadian house Buzz Image Group. Of these, 15 were of CGI sheep. The film called for about 2,500 sheep, but only 700 were on-set, necessitating the additional woolly creations. Also created for the film were sky replacements, set additions, erasures and the hail in the hailstorm.
  
  
• Ang Lee struggled continually with the sheep during the shoot. Apparently sheep don't drink from running water, only ponds and dams. Ang tried all day to get the sheep to drink from a stream, but they wouldn't oblige. He had to give up on the shot. Also, American sheep carry a bacteria/virus that Canadian sheep don't possess. The film's scene where two herds of sheep become mixed up had some nightmarish real-life parallels, as the Canadian government had expressly warned them of dire consequences if they caused any disease to spread to the local animals from the south-of-the-border variety.
  
  
• The football game on television that causes some family friction during Jack's Thanksgiving dinner is actually a 1970s Canadian Football League game between the Montreal Alouettes and Edmonton Eskimos.
  
  
• During its first weekend of release (playing in only five US theaters), this set a record for the highest per-screen gross of any non-animated movie in history.
  
  
• Afraid that Anne Hathaway's previous films The Princess Diaries (2001) and Ella Enchanted (2004) would work against her during auditions, the casting director introduced Anne to director Ang Lee as a New York Broadway actress. Ang Lee hadn't seen any of Anne's nor Michelle Williams's previous works before he auditioned and subsequently cast them in Brokeback.
  
  
• Cameo: [Rodrigo Prieto] the cinematographer appears as the Mexican prostitute whom Jack picks up.
  
  
• The original short story by Annie Proulx was published in the 13 October 1997 issue of The New Yorker, without the italicized prologue which was included in the later version published in "Close Range", her collection of short stories.
  
  
• In her book "The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay & Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film", Emma Thompson writes that after a particularly difficult day filming a sequence that involved a flock of sheep, Ang Lee swore that he would never again use the animals on a movie set. This movie, however, is about two young men who meet while sheep herding.
  
  
• According to producer James Schamus, the movie cost so little to make that it recouped its cost during its first week of limited release.
  
  
• The movie that Ennis and Alma are watching at the drive-in is Surf Party (1964).
  
  
• Banned in China because at the time of the movie's popularity, homosexuality was (and still is) considered a taboo subject.
  
  
• Over 90% of the footage was shot within 70 feet of a road.
  
  
• Sienna Miller auditioned for the role of Lureen Twist.
  
  
• The song Jack plays on his harmonica is "He Was a Friend of Mine", the same song Willie Nelson sings during the closing credits.
  
  
• Director Ang Lee gave Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal copies of the book, "Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest", by Will Fellows, a book that had been mentioned by both Annie Proulx and Diana Ossana as an excellent reference source, to help them understand their characters. Noting what he learned from his reading, Gyllenhaal said, "I don't think that these two characters even know what gay is."
  
  
• According to an interview in Premiere Magazine, Mark Wahlberg stated that at one point, he and Joaquin Phoenix were considered for the two lead roles. Although Wahlberg considered it due to his brother-like relationship with Phoenix, the script was ultimately too sexually graphic for him.
  
  
• The Guardian's November 2007 obituary for Costume Designer Marit Allen reported that she brought a book of Richard Avedon's 1950s and '60s photos of the American West with her to her first meeting about designing the clothes for Brokeback Mountain (2005), and she used that book to help decode what the obit called the men's "subtle dress codes". Interestingly, without having spoken to one another, several of the principle crew used the book as a reference. During production prep, the screenwriters had also suggested the book as a visual reference, and it was, in fact, used by the production design and makeup crews as well.
  
  
• Heath Ledger, uncertain about the role when he was first offered it, was encouraged by his then girlfriend, Naomi Watts, to take it, immediately after they both read the script. After reading the script, Ledger said he would have flown to Taiwan to meet with Ang Lee in order to be hired for the role.
  
  
• Writer Annie Proulx sent both Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger an original, autographed copy of her story. When she signed the copy to Jake she wrote "To Jake..." however when she signed the copy she had intended to give to Heath she signed it "To Ennis," After writing out her personal message she realized what she had done and decided to leave it be. In a private screening at Arclight in Hollywood, CA she reflected that Heath Ledger really was Ennis. She left the signed copy that way because she had felt Mr. Ledger has embodied Ennis in every way she had imagined him.
  
  

• SPOILER: Ang Lee recounted in several interviews that when Michelle Williams needed to film the scene in which her character is devastated to discover that her husband is involved with another man, she urged Heath Ledger (her off-screen, as well as on-screen, love interest) and Jake Gyllenhaal to intensify their kissing.
  
  
• SPOILER: When Ennis finds Jack's and his shirts hanging together in Jack's childhood closet, Jack has arranged them so that Jack's blue shirt is visible first and Ennis' light plaid shirt is tucked inside it. In the final scene in the film, after Ennis has taken both shirts home to hang them in his own closet, they are reversed, so that Jack's shirt is inside Ennis'. According to co-screenwriter Diana Ossana, switching the order of the shirts was Heath Ledger's idea.
  
  

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