Love and Death - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

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

[jesse]

Boris is in his cottage writing poetry. He reads, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas." He then promptly balls up the writing and throws it into the fire, calling it "too sentimental". The line is from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of 'J.Alfred Prufrock'".

[ronnie]

The philosophical "babble" between the characters (e.g. "subjectivity is objective") actually comes from the writing of Russian philosophers G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky, as does the title "Love and Death".

[kyle]

Woody Allen once said, "I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."

[ray]

On the shoot, Woody Allen hurt his back after tripping on some ice in front of the Eiffel Tower.

[harry]

Fr Krapotkin comes from a famous Russian writer and philosopher in the 19th century; Pyotr Krapotnik. His book "The Conquest of Bread Mutual Aid" is considered a classic of Russian literature; as well as a touchstone of modern philosophy; which are both cannons that Woody is spoofing in this movie. Making him a priest and town elder is a contrivance of the screenplay so that the character would have an excuse to hang around the other village characters and spew anarchist philosophy and 19th century addages. And the man did exist during this time period; and he did spew cliches and parables like this as he does in the movie; but he was not a priest. He was just an important writer-philosopher at the time.

[maureen]

Producer Charles H. Joffe got food poisoning during the production shoot and became inactive.

[duane]

Debut Woody Allen film cast by longtime friend and New York casting director Juliet Taylor who performed casting duties on every Allen film until her retirement in 2017.

[kristen]

When Boris' father visits him in his prison cell, near the end of the movie, he tells him about Raskolnikov killing two women and about getting told by the brothers Karamazov. Rodion Raskolnikov is the protagonist in Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic "Crime and Punishment", in which he murders two women and does not know how to deal with the moral consequences afterwards. "The Brothers Karamazov" is another epic book by the same Russian writer. The dialogue also evokes "The Possessed", "Raw Youth", "The Idiot", "The Insulted and Injured" (usually "The Insulted and Humiliated"), "The Gambler", "The Double", "Bobok", all of them novels by Dostoyevsky.

[kristina]

The film negative for the big banquet scenes got damaged and the whole sequence had to be re-shot.

[sophie]

This film's comic style paid homage to a number of classic comedians which included Bob Hope, Charles Chaplin and The Marx Brothers.

[sandra]

According to show business trade paper "Variety", the movie featured "about fifty-four supporting players."

[sophie]

The name of Woody Allen's character Boris Grushenko is the same as Alan Cumming's character in the later James Bond film GoldenEye (1995).

[sophie]

Woody Allen's sixth film as director.

[brent]

Actress Diane Keaton at one point got poked in the eye from a violin bow and suffered minor injuries.

[melinda]

This has the same plot as 1973s Sleeper; where Woody and Diane are trying to assassinate an evil dictator too.

[janice]

Sonja says that she has had an affair with Asimov. Woody Allen ran the ideas for his previous film Sleeper (1973) by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

[kim]

The film takes place from 1809 to 1812.