5 Movies Filmed in Memphis

Cast Away (2000)

Cast Away was directed by Robert Zemeckis and stars Tom Hanks. Its plot follows Chuck Noland (no land -- ) who is stranded on a desert island and manages to survive. He "keeps" his sanity by talking to his friend Wilson who is a volleyball.

While there are no desert islands in Memphis, there is a large fedex facility in which part of this movie was filmed. Hence, almost every fedex employee who was employed at the time of filming in Memphis can claim having been an extra in this film.

A trivia note, the film was shot on either side of a yearlong break. During the break, Tom Hanks lost fifty pounds and grew a beard so that he could adequately portray a man who'd lived on an island for four years.

Walk the Line (2005)

Unlike Cast Away, you didn't have to be a fedex employee in order to have been an extra in this film. You could just know someone that lives within sixty miles of Memphis. If they weren't an extra in Walk the Line, they know someone who was. Eighty percent of Memphis claims they were in the background or in the crowd shots of this movie. Also, the pill man and Johnny Cash's daughter Rosanne are played by Memphis actors J. W. Williams and Hailey Anne Nelson.

Walk the Line centers around the life of Johnny Cash. It was filmed in parts of Arkansas as well as Memphis, TN. A section of downtown Memphis around Union Ave was blocked off for filming, and the historic cafe The Arcade (located on South Main St.) was shown in the film.

Black Snake Moan (2006)

Filmed in Memphis and Stanton, TN, this movie stared Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci, and Justin Timberlake. The plot revolves around a man named Lazarus who finds a young woman half beaten to death near his home in rural Mississippi. The girl, Rae (Christina Ricci) has issues, and Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) takes it upon himself to "cure" her in a non-traditional way. The chain Christina Ricci wears in the film is said to have weighed forty pounds.

The movie was written and directed by Craig Brewer (one of Memphis's few film gods). There are only a handful of professional filmmakers that the city of Memphis can claim. Craig Brewer is arguably the most successful of those, especially since he maintains ties to the city, giving talks at Indie Memphis and bringing projects to the city to film.


Elizabethtown (2005)

Late in the film, on the road trip home from his father's funeral, Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) takes a number of stops planned out for him by Claire (Kirsten Dunst). One of the stops is in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. The movie also features a nice shot of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge which connects Arkansas to Memphis over the Mississippi River.

Silence of the Lambs (1991)

While not actually filmed in Memphis, the movie does use stock footage of the city. In the story, Hannibal Lecter escapes from a holding facility in Memphis, TN.


Sources:

Imdb.com

Friends

For more movies that used a filming location in Memphis check out this list: http://www.imdb.com/search/title?locations=Memphis,%20Tennessee,%20USA



This is not an exhaustive list. Know of other movies filmed in Memphis that you're bursting to add to the list? Feel free to discuss in the comments.