FILM · 1994 · FRANCE
Stargate
28 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Nov 2026
28 Interesting Facts About Stargate
Interesting Facts (22)
- #001
Jaye Davidson was not a professional actor but a fashion designer when he was discovered at a party in London, which led to his casting in The Crying Game (1992) and his Oscar nomination. His dislike of the attention he received after that film made him reluctant to take the role of Ra in this film. Not wanting to turn the offer down outright, he asked for $1 million, expecting it to be unacceptable. It was accepted and he appeared, but after this performance he nearly quit acting (apart from one TV film and one short film) and returned to fashion assisting.
- #002
Most of the background extras in the opening Egyptian scene and the Abydos mine scene were actually mannequins and scarecrows, because they were cheaper than extras. Each scarecrow consisted of two wooden beams placed in a box filled with concrete and covered with fabric. For scenes requiring large numbers of people to move, 1,200 extras were used. During one day of shooting the desert heat rose so high (126° F, or 52° C) that most did not return to work the next day.
- #003
In a magazine interview, James Spader said he found the original script "awful" but that it was also so bad it actually interested him. He later met Roland Emmerich, was inspired by the director's passion for the project and decided to make the film because he felt the energy and craziness of making such a film would turn into an exciting final movie. He also admitted he did the film for the money: "Acting is a passion for me, but it's also a job and I've always approached it that way. I have a certain journeyman's view of acting. Making a film isn't something to be ashamed of because you need a little money."
- #004
According to the DVD commentary, the group of scantily clad youths around Ra was included deliberately to create discomfort in the audience.
- #005
Dr. Daniel Jackson, played by James Spader, expresses contempt for the methodology of military translators, observing that they clearly rely on Budge and questioning why his work is constantly reprinted. The reference targets the English Egyptologist Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (1857–1934), who served as Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924. Budge produced extensive translations of Egyptian funerary literature, hieroglyphic dictionaries and grammatical studies, and these achieved widespread popular distribution through accessible publishers, notably the Book of the Dead and the 1895 edition of his 1920 Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary. Modern Egyptological scholarship has largely superseded Budge's methodologies, particularly his transliteration rules and grammatical interpretations, yet his works remain in print because of their constant availability through cheap reprints rather than current academic accuracy. The dialogue establishes Jackson's identity as a researcher working at the cutting edge of contemporary Egyptology, in contrast to the military team's reliance on outdated reference material.
- #006
James Brown's scream in "I Feel Good" was used as a sound effect in the scene showing the alien taking control of the young boy's body.
- #007
Exterior scenes were shot mostly in the desert around Yuma, Arizona, in the scorching month of July to avoid the heavy dune-buggy season. To escape the heat, exterior sets were built overnight and in the early morning. Interior scenes were shot in a converted 135,000-square-foot aircraft hangar in Long Beach, California, which once housed Howard Hughes's 'Spruce Goose' aircraft; at 500 ft wide and 50 ft high, it was the largest hangar in the world, allowing some of the most enormous film sets ever created to be built.
- #008
High school teacher Omar Zuhdi claimed in a 1995 copyright infringement lawsuit that nearly the entire film was stolen from a draft he began writing as a university student. Zuhdi even secured a endorsement from a former professor of Egyptology at Johns Hopkins University. Contrary to popular belief, Zuhdi never personally presented his draft directly to Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin; he claims he submitted it only once, to 20th Century Fox, which rejected it in 1984, five years before Emmerich and Devlin met. The lawsuit alleged that StudioCanal eventually obtained a copy of the draft and, several years later, hired Emmerich and Devlin to make Stargate using Zuhdi's ideas. Emmerich, however, claimed the idea came to him while he was at film school in Munich, after watching the documentary Chariots of the Gods (1970), in which Erich von Däniken argues that all great civilizations were created by aliens; he later developed the idea after working with Devlin on Moon 44 (1990). Zuhdi filed a $140 million lawsuit against Emmerich, Devlin, the film's other producers, StudioCanal and MGM. In 1997 the case was settled out of court for $50,000. In 2013 Zuhdi published a novel titled "Egyptscape" based on the draft he says he submitted to Fox.
- #009
The wardrobe and cinematography departments had to work around Jaye Davidson's nipple rings; he refused to remove them.
- #010
The mountain entrance where the stargate is held on Earth (at about 10 minutes in) is the same entrance used to get into NORAD in the film WarGames (1983).
- #011
Although the planet visited through the Stargate is never named in the film, its spin-off series Stargate SG-1 (1997) would later reveal the planet's name to be Abydos. In the film the planet is said to be in the Kaliam Galaxy, while in the television series its location is retroactively changed to within the Milky Way, where traveling to another galaxy requires a combination of eight glyphs instead of seven.
- #012
According to Alexis Cruz, he only realized he had gotten the role when Dean Devlin began enthusiastically showing him prototypes of the action figures for his character and the others.
- #013
The Stargate was originally black but was painted silver at the last minute because it looked like a giant rubber tire. According to actress Kelly Vint Castro (young Catherine), the prop was so heavy that the excavation scene really did require the number of people seen on screen to lift it.
- #014
(At about the 9-minute mark) As the scene opens, Colonel O'Neil is sitting on his son's bed. As the Air Force officers walk toward the bedroom, he pushes the pistol under a pillow bearing Egyptian hieroglyphs.
- #015
The city that appears so enormous was a miniature placed on a sand dune, and each row of buildings was only about one and a half meters tall.
- #016
Because MGM studio had little confidence in the film, producer Dean Devlin began setting up booths at every science fiction convention in the United States six months before the film's release to promote it. He also created one of the first promotional websites on the then-new Internet to draw fans' attention to the film (although the producers of Star Trek: Generations (1994), which premiered on the same date, made the same claim). Devlin said that until he started explaining that the film would be about aliens and ancient Egyptian culture, many science fiction fans initially thought the 'Star' in the title meant it was a copy of 'Star Wars'.
- #017
The species of Ra's original host was never determined throughout the film. Although the series Stargate SG-1 (1997) would later define Ra's being as a Goa'uld, the identity of his original host was still never determined. It bears such a strong resemblance to the Aesir (Thor's race) that the Stargate SG-1 Roleplaying Game identifies Ra's original host as an Áss known as "Famrir".
- #018
(At about 1 hour 50 minutes) According to the credits, Kurt Russell's character is "Jack O'Neil". However, in Stargate SG-1 (1997), Richard Dean Anderson plays the same character but with the spelling "O'Neill", and in several episodes he jokes, "… that's O'Neill… with two 'Ls'!"
- #019
(At about 2 minutes) The face on the death mask in the opening sequence is distinctly long and horse-shaped and is clearly based on statues of Akhenaten (also known as Echnaton), the father of King Tutankhamun. It is worth noting that Akhenaten temporarily set aside the traditional polytheistic religion and replaced it with a single god. In a sense, that is who Ra is in this film: instead of a pantheon of equal gods, an alien posing as a single god with powerful servants.
- #020
Amazon's Stargate series for Prime Video has officially begun its search for a writer. This development comes after Martin Gero's reboot project was cancelled in June.
- #021
According to the source, the production has focused on finding a new writer following Gero's departure. After the project's cancellation, Amazon is said to be looking for a writer to bring the Stargate series back to life.
- #022
Arka Evren Note: According to Alexis Cruz, he only realized he had gotten the role when Dean Devlin enthusiastically began showing him the action figure prototypes of his character and the others. More about Stargate
Production Story (1)
- #023
Pre-release test screenings of the film were disastrous. The percentage of viewers who liked it dropped to the mid-30s, and executive producer Mario Kassar felt the core problem was that the plot made zero sense. Producer Dean Devlin stated that Jaye Davidson's struggle with drug and alcohol addiction hurt his performance as Ra, to the point that audiences did not believe he was a genuine threat. The solution: turn Ra into an alien inhabiting a human body, change his dialogue and make him a subordinate element of a clearer story. Once these changes were made, subsequent test screenings drew largely positive reactions, turning the film into one of the surprise hits of autumn 1994. In 1997, a Stargate television adaptation (Stargate SG1) based on the film's core alien storyline was further developed and explored.
Behind the Scenes (2)
- #024
Jaye Davidson hated the costumes he wore so much that on the last day of shooting his scenes, after hearing the final "cut," he stripped completely naked on set before heading to his trailer. Moreover, Davidson retired from acting after completing this film. Since Stargate he has appeared only in the 1994 TV film Jiggery Pokery and in The Borghilde Project (2009), a 17-minute film.
- #025
A combination of animatronics and a Clydesdale horse was used to portray the camel-like desert animals called Mastadges behind the scenes. Small dogs were used in shots where the creatures appear at a distance.
Characters & Cast (1)
- #026
Casting Jaye Davidson as Ra was the idea of executive producer Mario Kassar, who oversaw the film's foreign sales and thought Davidson's recent Oscar nomination would be a good selling point. Although he helped finance the film, Davidson was not how producer Dean Devlin and director Roland Emmerich had envisioned the character of Ra; they had initially considered Sir John Gielgud for the role. Moreover, Davidson turned out to be "a handful" on set: he was struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, which made it difficult for him to remember his lines; giant cue cards were made for him, but he had trouble even reading those. On the second day of shooting, Davidson went into hysterics when his personal assistant stole his phone, his money, his methadone and "then it got really bad." After sobering up and appearing at the gala, however, he thanked Devlin for not removing him from the film.
Deeper Meaning (2)
- #027
Studio Canal+, Carolco Pictures' Mario Kassar and Centropolis Film's Dean Devlin financed the production as an independent venture. Creators Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich designed the story as the opening chapter of a theatrical trilogy. Major Hollywood studios initially refused to distribute the film, citing the early-1990s perception that big-budget science fiction had no viability in the market. MGM eventually secured distribution rights, primarily to fill a gap in its release schedule. Financial instability later forced Carolco to sell its stake in the property to MGM in order to raise capital for the production of Cutthroat Island (1995). The studio then prioritized the development of the Stargate SG-1 (1997) television series over theatrical sequels, preventing the original creators from realizing the trilogy they had planned. The proposed sequel plans involved Daniel Jackson returning to Earth twelve years after his first mission and discovering a second Stargate. This storyline abandoned the first film's Egyptian setting to explore a different ancient mythology.
- #028
(At about 17 minutes in) Jackson explains to the US Air Force personnel that seven symbols are needed to mark coordinates for any space travel. Six of these indicate the destination by pointing to stars or constellations to locate the place to be traveled to. The seventh and final symbol indicates the point of origin from which the journey will begin. In the television series, an extra glyph showing the target galaxy was added, though it is not needed unless traveling to a different galaxy.
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- IMDb
Information from external sources is independently selected, consolidated and edited by Arka Evren. Sources are listed for verification and further reading. Encyclopedia text is used under its licence (CC BY-SA). How we work