Black Hawk Down - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Black Hawk Down or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Black Hawk Down

[cameron]

The set was constantly bothered by stray dogs running into shots. Ridley Scott kept them in because he liked the authentic feel of their presence. Eight dogs were adopted by various members of the production and were eventually brought back to the US with them.

[nicholas]

None of the film was made in Somalia but in the similar looking cities of Rabat and Sale in Morocco. No Somali actors are included in the cast. Somalia was at the time, as it is today, a dangerous and unstable country.

[miriam]

While Ridley Scott was wrapping up post-production on Hannibal (2001), pre-production and location scouting were already underway for this film.

[toni]

The mission code word "Irene" is from the Greek word for "peace".

[duane]

On the last day of their week-long Army Ranger orientation at Fort Benning, the actors who played the Rangers received a letter that had been anonymously slipped under their door. The letter thanked them for all their hard work, and asked them to "tell our story true", signed with the names of the Rangers who died in the Mogadishu firefight.

[aaron]

There was no effort made to cast actors who looked like their real-life counterparts.

[fred]

Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the powerful Somali warlord who was the raid's main target, died on 2 August 1996. Major General William Garrison retired from the army the next day.

[steve]

The nickname given to the Somalis by the Rangers, "Skinnies," does not actually refer to the famine and rampant malnutrition in Somalia. It is the nickname given to an alien race in Robert A. Heinlein's novel "Starship Troopers", which was a popular book passed around the battalion, and is on the required reading list at West Point. The Rangers felt that Somali culture was so strange that they seemed to be from another planet. The "Skinnies" do not appear in the film version of Starship Troopers (1997).

[oscar]

When Orlando Bloom auditioned for the role, he informed the casting directors that he knew what it was like to break his back (as he had done so only a couple of years before when climbing out on a drain pipe from a friend's flat). His character in this movie breaks his back after falling from the helicopter.

[dustin]

Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart were the first two men since the Vietnam war to posthumously receive the Medal of Honor.

[nicholas]

Michael Madsen was offered the role of Danny McKnight but was forced to turn the role down because of scheduling conflicts with Big Apple (2001).

[janice]

Captain Steele requests a panicked soldier to give anyone who comes through a door "two in the chest and one in the head". This is commonly referred to as a triple tap or Mozambique drill. Mozambique was, during the 1960s and 1970s, a war- and famine-ravaged country much like Somalia. The reason for this is that there have been cases when enemy combatants have worn bullet-proof vests. While two in the chest might knock the wind out of someone wearing a vest and immobilize them for a minute or so, after which they might shoot back, the head shot makes certain that they do not get up.

[norma]

Soldiers of the Royal Moroccan Army played Somali militiamen.

[darrell]

The photo of a wife and child that one of the soldiers is looking at is actually a photo of Eric Bana's wife and child. The props department forgot to take a photo of a wife and child with them, so asked Bana's wife and child who were traveling with him if they could use a photo of them in the movie.

[maureen]

A large number of the actors who played American soldiers are actually from different countries. The list includes: Ewan McGregor (Scottish), Eric Bana (Australian), Kim Coates (Canadian), Ioan Gruffudd (Welsh), Ewen Bremner (Scottish), Jason Isaacs (English), Zeljko Ivanek (Slovenian), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Danish), Tom Hardy (English), Matthew Marsden (English), Orlando Bloom (English) and Hugh Dancy (English).