FILM · 1994 · USA
Speed
36 archived facts 4 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (36)
- #001
Sandra Bullock learned to drive a bus for the film and passed her test on the first attempt.
- #002
At the start of the bus chase, Keanu Reeves breaking the glass of the bus door was an accident, but director Jan de Bont liked the effect and kept it in the final cut.
- #003
The scene in which Annie (Sandra Bullock) pretends to take her gum out of her mouth and put it on her seat as an excuse to change seats and get away from the obnoxious Stephens was improvised by Bullock.
- #004
The film ran out of money before it was finished. When the film was first shown to audiences, the subway scenes were animated storyboards. The audience liked them so much that the studio found the money needed to shoot the scenes properly.
- #005
A 20th Century Fox producer realized they might have a hit when, during test screenings, he noticed that audience members walked backwards when they needed to go to the bathroom so they would miss as little as possible.
- #006
The subway train that finally crashes onto Hollywood Boulevard was actually a bus dressed up to look like a subway train.
- #007
Keanu Reeves performed about ninety percent of his own stunts.
- #008
Keanu Reeves was not very interested in starring in an action film, so Jan de Bont had to convince him it would be fun by telling Reeves he would be allowed to do as many of his own stunts as possible in Speed. The producer says the film's success depended on Reeves's willingness to do more stunts, because it is very clear that the cast is inside the action. "Of course you have to be very careful because then they want to do everything themselves and of course you can't let them do that," de Bont said.
- #009
A special bus was used for the bus jump scene. It was modified to reach seventy miles per hour and fitted with powerful shock absorbers. The driver's seat was moved fifteen feet back so that the driver would not be thrown from the bus if something went wrong. The seat itself was a suspension mechanism between the ceiling and the floor of the bus to prevent the driver from suffering spinal compression on impact.
- #010
The bus jump scene was shot twice because the bus landed too smoothly the first time. The bridge was actually there but was digitally removed.
- #011
Keanu Reeves and Jeff Daniels trained with real SWAT personnel to perfect their movements.
- #012
Jan de Bont cast Dennis Hopper because he did not want a typical villain. He wanted Payne to be an ordinary man who one day snaps.
- #013
Jan de Bont insisted that Keanu Reeves get a sensible haircut to suit a hardworking police officer. When 20th Century Fox executives saw the look he had adopted for the film, they were horrified and even threatened to postpone the film so that he could grow his hair back.
- #014
The opening title sequence descending down an elevator shaft was created with a fifteen-foot miniature laid horizontally.
- #015
Keanu Reeves initially turned down the lead role, thinking Graham Yost's original script was too similar to Die Hard (1988). He signed on after Jan de Bont brought in Joss Whedon to rewrite the script.
- #016
Ten buses were used in the making of the film. Each had two steering wheels: one for Sandra Bullock and one for the stunt driver, who was mostly on the roof of the bus.
- #017
Jan de Bont came up with the idea for the opening elevator scene while working as cinematographer on Die Hard (1988). While riding the elevator in the building used as the skyscraper in that film, the elevator got stuck on the fortieth floor and de Bont had to climb out through the escape hatch and jump to another elevator to get out.
- #018
Renny Harlin and Quentin Tarantino were offered the directing job but turned it down. Tarantino later named the film one of his twenty favorite films since 1992.
- #019
Los Angeles airport would not allow any explosion to take place for fear of scaring passengers. The explosion scene in which the bus collides with the plane was shot in Mojave, California.
- #020
Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock secretly fell in love with each other during filming and did not admit it decades later in separate episodes of the Ellen DeGeneres show.
- #021
A ramp was built for the bus-jump sequence. The bus was started about a mile back and accelerated toward the ramp. When it hit the ramp it had reached 61 miles per hour. It traveled 109 feet and its front wheels reached six meters off the ground, higher than anyone expected. Because of this the cameras could not be placed correctly, and when the bus reached the peak of its jump its upper front section went out of frame.
- #022
Keanu Reeves was actually strapped beneath the bus in some parts of one scene.
- #023
20th Century Fox executives were not convinced that Keanu Reeves had enough star power to headline the film and insisted that a famous actress appear alongside him. Jan de Bont refused. Only two weeks before filming began, Fox gave up on casting Sandra Bullock opposite Reeves.
- #024
The watch Jack wears, a Casio G-Shock DW-5600C, had been discontinued when filming began. Because the film's success created new demand, the company had to start making them again.
- #025
Joss Whedon rewrote the script without receiving an on-screen credit. According to the respected writer Graham Yost, Whedon wrote most of the dialogue.
- #026
The side of the plane that is torn apart by the exploding bus bears the logo "Pacific Courier Freight." The same name appears on the truck used by the terrorists in Die Hard (1988), a joke by production designer Jackson De Govia. Jan de Bont was the cinematographer on Die Hard.
- #027
The shot of the bus entering LAX with a plane taking off behind it took more than fifty takes.
- #028
The I-105 had recently been completed but had not opened during production. The filmmakers were given it whenever they needed to complete the freeway scenes, without the trouble of closing an active main freeway.
- #029
Sticking his fingers up his nose to remove Jeff Daniels was Dennis Hopper's idea, and although Jan de Bont worried it would look stupid, he agreed after trying it and discovering it was actually quite painful.
- #030
Jack's assistant Harry was initially going to be played by Ed Harris and would have turned out to be the mad bomber in that version. But when Harris chose to drop out and Jeff Daniels accepted, the producers felt audiences would not accept such an abrupt change in the character, so Harry was kept as a good man from the start and the mad bomber was written as a separate character. The idea of the hero's friend and assistant being the villain was later used in Broken Arrow (1996), also written by Graham Yost.
- #031
The film was released a week before O. J. Simpson led Los Angeles police on a chase in a white Bronco after becoming a murder suspect. After the Bronco chase, many viewers who saw the film in theaters noticed how closely scenes in it resembled the real-life Bronco chase, including the media coverage and the aerial shots of Los Angeles freeways.
- #032
Jan de Bont is a big Stanley Kubrick fan and tries to pay tribute to the director in all his films. Here there is a real reference while showing a re-release of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), during the crash in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
- #033
According to Joss Whedon, the character Stephens (Alan Ruck) was originally written as a grating lawyer who got his comeuppance in an unexpected death scene. Whedon rewrote him as the sympathetic, thick-headed tourist of the final version but kept the death scene in order to give it more emotional impact. The character changes were kept, but his death was written out and the character was kept alive.
- #034
In a deleted scene, Jack is seen shooting Howard Payne in the neck right after shooting his partner in the leg early in the film. Later in the film you can see the oval scar on Payne's neck from the gunshot wound.
- #035
In the scene where the wounded driver is taken off the bus and brought to the waiting police, Jan De Bont comments on a change he wanted to make. "One of the things I wish I had done in this particular scene is have everybody rush forward and try to get off, so that you really become more aware of the urgency."
- #036
In the early drafts of the script, the bus was supposed to circle the parking lot of Dodgers Stadium instead of LAX. However, the studio could not get permission to shoot there.
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