Trivia for
A Beautiful Mind (2001) More at IMDbPro »

• Robert Redford was considered as director, but withdrew due to scheduling conflicts.
  
  
• Tom Cruise was considered to play Nash.
  
  
• The Pentagon office scene was filmed in the basement of Keating Hall on Fordham University's Bronx campus (the same room was used in the filming of the Georgetown University language lab scene in The Exorcist (1973)).
  
  
• The Nobel Prize ceremony was filmed in Prudential Hall at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark, NJ. The filming for that one scene, including set up, make up, etc, took over 8 hours. However, the scene in the lobby afterwards was filmed at another location.
  
  
• In the scene on the veranda with Richard Sol, Nash is kidding about an imaginary person called "Harvey". This is a reference to Harvey (1950).
  
  
• When Nash first sees Parcher, he refers to him as "Big Brother", a reference to George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Later, we see that the room number of Nash's office is 101, another reference to the book. When Nash gets accepted into Wheeler, it's 1948, coincidentally the year Nineteen Eighty-Four was written. (Although technically it was published in 1949)
  
  
• One of John Nash's sons plays the orderly on the right in the scene where Nash is being dragged down the hall.
  
  
• The scene towards the end of the film where John Nash contemplates drinking tea is based on a true event when Russell Crowe met the real John Nash. He spent 15 minutes contemplating whether to drink tea or coffee.
  
  
• Nash's mutterings after he loses the board game (along the lines of "the game is flawed," "I had the first move, I should have won") are in reference to "Game Theory" - the economic theory that Nash is probably most famous for.
  
  
• Anthony Rapp and Adam Goldberg play Nash's assistants Sol and Bender, who are usually seen in the film together. The two actors also played rarely-separated best friends Tony and Mike in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993)
  
  
• John Nash visited the set, and Russell Crowe said later that he had been fascinated by the way he moved his hands, and he had tried to do the same thing in the movie.
  
  
• Salma Hayek was originally considered for the part of Alicia Larde because Alicia is from El Salvador.
  
  
• The Harvard scene is actually filmed at Manhattan College.
  
  
• After coming up with the idea for his revolutionary paper, John Nash goes and shows a manuscript of it to Helinger (Judd Hirsch). The manuscript is an actual copy of the original article, published in the specialized journal "Econometrica", under the title "The Bargaining Problem". (Figure 1 of the original paper, appears in the manuscript shown in the movie).
  
  
• Producer Brian Grazer won the rights to the project after John Nash and Alicia Nash chose him over competitor Scott Rudin; the Nashes had long resisted having a film made of their story.
  
  
• Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman had plenty of personal experience to draw on in developing the story; he had previously worked as a child care counselor and had developed a method for training mental health workers, and had also grown up in a house where his parents had established a group home for emotionally disturbed children.
  
  
• Barnard College professor Dave Bayer served as the math advisor on the film, and also was Russell Crowe's hand double for the scenes where he is writing equations on windows, etc.
  
  
• The film was shot in sequence in order to help Russell Crowe develop a consistently progressing manner of behavior.
  
  
• To create the "golden" look of the campus scenes early in the film, the filmmakers took a low-contrast stock (Fuji F-400 8582) and exposed it to an orange light before loading it into the camera for shooting.
  
  
• The problem that John Nash writes on the blackboard in his lecture is a real one (unlike in other movies, where math on boards is usually either too simple or fake). There is an important theorem in mathematical physics that directly says the answer to this is 1. Later, when he discusses the problem with Alicia, he makes additional restrictions for the solution, without which the problem is much harder, so he is pretty confident she didn't solve it.
  
  
• While this film is inspired by the life of John Nash, there were elements from his life that were deliberately omitted: a) he was married twice, both to the same woman; b) in the past, he had several affairs with both men and women; c) He fathered a child out-of-wedlock in his twenties; and d) he made numerous anti-Semitic comments during his period of extreme mental illness, most of which equated Jews with world Communism.
  
  
• According to a 2001 Entertainment Weekly article on this film, the filmmakers originally wanted to mention Nash's homosexuality, but they feared the film would make the wrong connection between homosexuality and schizophrenia, so they abandoned it. This connection, according to the article, was based on several now-discredited psychological studies that first appeared in the late 1950s.
  
  
• John Nash didn't receive the Nobel prize alone, but with colleague Reinhard Selten and Hungarian-born János Harsányi. "Game Theory" was initiated by Hungarian-born John von Neumann and Austrian-born Oskar Morgenstern in 1944.
  
  
• A love scene with Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly was cut from the film.
  
  
• When John Nash is shown in the car riding from The Pentagon to Wheeler Labs, the voice on the radio is that of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the infamous Communist hunter.
  
  
• The movie was named as one of "The 20 Most Overrated Movies Of All Time" by Premiere.
  
  
• Strictly speaking, John Nash didn't win the Nobel Prize because there isn't a prize for Economics or Mathematics. (Alfred Nobel who willed his estate to the Nobel foundation saw no need for a prize in mathematics.) In 1969 the Swedish Central Bank established the "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". This prize is presented in the same ceremony and is therefore often mistaken for a proper Nobel Prize. It is even often referred to as the "Nobel Prize in Economics" in daily conversation; the fictional character of President Jed Bartlet on "The West Wing" was also presented as a Nobel Prize winner (for economics) with the show also not making the real-world distinctions.
  
  
• Cameo: [Bryce Dallas Howard] midway through the movie, after the math lecture when John Nash (Russel Crowe) is sedated by Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer), looking into the car as it drives away.
  
  
• The Riemann Hypothesis mentioned throughout the movie is a real and famous problem in mathematics that has gone unsolved (it has not been proved yet) for nearly 150 years. Many other important theories have been proved on the condition that the Riemann Hypothesis holds, hence its importance. In the year 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts listed the Riemann Hypothesis as one of seven "Millennium Prize Problems" and offered a $1,000,000 reward to the person that proves it.
  
  

• SPOILER: In one scene, the imaginary roommate's niece runs through a field of birds. None of the birds move, proving she doesn't exist.
  
  

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