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THE MOVIE: The Bucket List

THE STARS:
Jack Nicholson • Morgan Freeman
DIRECTOR: Rob Reiner

THE CONCEPT:
In Carter Chamber’s (Freeman) freshman year, his philosophy professor suggested that his students compose a ‘bucket list,’ a collection of all the things they wanted to do, see and experience in life before they kick the bucket. Forty-six years later he is terminally ill and sharing a hospital room with corporate billionaire Edward Cole who has been too busy making money to live his life – against the doctor’s order, the two virtual strangers check themselves out of the hospital and hit the road together for the adventure of a lifetime.

U.S. RELEASE: December 28 2007, Nationwide
• Rated: PG-13

THE COMMENTS:

MORGAN FREEMAN:
“I got a call from Rob Reiner who said, ‘I’ve got this great script and I want to do it with you.’ I read it and called him up and I said, ‘There’s a caveat here; you need to get one actor, Jack Nicholson.’ Rob said, ‘Jack? Alright, let’s try it.’”

JACK NICHOLSON:
“I’d worked with Rob [A Few Good Men] and I liked working with him. Morgan and I have known one another at a distance for a long time and had always known we wanted to work together, and that’s pretty much all it took for me. Rob found the tone for this fairly early on. To deal with this subject in a comic manner is a creative puzzle. It has sentiment, but if you get sentimental you’re going to lose the audience. Rob did a really good job.”

FREEMAN:
“I don’t think your Bucket List is one you write down, but it’s written somewhere on you, in your heart. There are things you check off as you go through life, doing the things you want to do, if you get to do the things you want to do.”

NICHOLSON:
“That’s the thing; if you get to do them. I wanted to see the pyramids, which was kind of in my silent list. Pavarotti was going to do Aida at the pyramids, and I signed up for that a year and a half early and, of course, he didn’t, God rest his soul. So winding up on a rooftop in the middle of Los Angeles [to shoot the pyramid scene] was a mild disappointment to me. I still want to see the pyramids.”

FREEMAN:
“Jack has been on my Bucket List for years. I knew he was a great actor, but I didn’t know he was a writer. He came up to me and said, ‘I’m probably going to drive you crazy because I’m up nights angst-ing over little things in the script. I will be doing that and talking to you the next day.’ I said, ‘Fine, my joy is you.’”

NICHOLSON:
“I’m a worrier, he’s not. But I wrote some good scenes.”

FREEMAN:
“I think a lot of senior citizenship is a mental thing. I don’t feel senior. Of course when I look at a mirror in the morning, there it all is. I don’t know what it feels like to be 70, except to feel the way I feel which isn’t 70.”

NICHOLSON:
“When I look in the mirror in the morning I can’t see myself! When I turned 70 it was actually the first time since [I was] 50 that I felt young for my age!”

Written by Judy Sloane. Back to top

Visit the official The Bucket List site
Images above © MGM/ The Weinstein Company
Feature © 2007 Visual Imagination Limited.
Not for reproduction.

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