Inside Man (2006) | Presenting Hitchcock Podcast

Gooooood evening. In this month’s episode of Presenting Hitchcock, Cory and Aaron are very concise and well planned as they discuss Inside Man.

Written by: Russell Gewirtz

Starring: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Directed by: Spike Lee

Trailer:

Our Favourite Trivia:

Hitchcock comparisons:

• Dial M for Murder
• To Catch a Thief
• Rope
• The Wrong Man
• Stage Fright
• The Paradine Case

Imagine Entertainment co-founder Ron Howard was attached to direct the film, but turned it down after being asked by Russell Crowe to helm Cinderella Man (2005). Producer Brian Grazer brought the script to Spike Lee.

The underground scenes of the bank were filmed on a movie set in Brooklyn, New York, whereas location scouting revealed a former Wall Street bank at 20 Exchange Place had been closed down and repurposed as a cigar bar.The building stood in for the fictional Manhattan Trust Bank branch, where the bank heist occurs. When Detective Frazier is given the location of the robbery, it is the actual address of the bank.

Marcia Jean Kurtz played a similar role as a hostage in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Lionel Pina, who delivered pizza to the hostages here, also performed the same task in the earlier film. Dog Day Afternoon is also referenced in the film, as is Serpico and The Godfather, all of which starred Al Pacino.

The pizza that the police give to the robbers has the name “Sal’s”, a reference to one of Spike Lee’s earlier films, Do the Right Thing (1989).

At the beginning of the movie, the slogan on the thieves’ stolen van offers a clue to the method of the heist: “We don’t leave until the job is done!”

The scene in which the boy shows Dalton the video game he is playing on his PSP was not in the original script. Director Spike Lee added it to “make a comment on gangster rap’s infatuation with violence.” The game is not real, but was created by an animation house. Lee asked them to come up with animation for “the most violent game ever”.

The Cartier diamond ring is the real thing. The movie borrowed it from Cartier for three days, and it is valued at $1.5 million.

During the interrogation scenes, and when the hostages are being placed on police buses to be taken to headquarters for questioning, the audience learns the real names of Dalton’s robber accomplices. ‘Steve’ is Kenneth Damerjian, ‘Stevie’ is Valerie Keepsake, and ‘Steve-O’ is Darius Peltz.

A sequel was in the works and set to film in the summer of 2009, with returning director Spike Lee and cast Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster and Chiwetel Ejiofor. However by 2011, Lee confirmed it was not going to happen, despite it being his most successful film. In 2019, a sequel titled Inside Man: Most Wanted was released direct-to-video and streaming on Netflix.

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Next up, we’ll be discussing Weekend at Bernie’s

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