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American Gangster (2007)
American Gangster is a 2007 American biographical crime drama film directed and produced by Ridley Scott and written by Steven Zaillian. The film is loosely based on the criminal career of Frank Lucas, a gangster from La Grange, North Carolina who smuggled heroin into the United States on American service planes returning from the Vietnam War, before being detained by a task force led by Newark Detective Richie…
Directed by Ridley Scott · Shot by Haris Savides · Cut by Pietro Scalia · Music by Marc Streitenfeld · 158 min
How it was made
- The production shot in more than 180 different locations across New York City over about four months, setting a record for the most filming locations used on a single movie, with fifty to sixty of them in Harlem alone.
- Production designer Arthur Max carried out exhaustive scouting to find parts of New York that still resembled the early 1970s, filming Frank Lucas's headquarters twenty blocks north of the real address, on 136th Street.
- Crews were issued gas masks on some Harlem locations because of health and sanitary hazards in buildings that had gone untouched since the 1940s.
- Ridley Scott made extensive use of hand-held cameras to achieve a 'guerrilla filmmaking' style.
- Denzel Washington went through 64 costume changes over the course of the shoot.
- Producer Branko Lustig arranged filming in Chiang Mai, Thailand, by consulting directly with the country's tourism minister to set up locations.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Ridley Scott
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