Mortal Thoughts

Mortal Thoughts (1991)

Something terrible happened that night. Something everyone wanted to talk about. Something no one was telling the truth about.

A loathsome man ends up dead, but it's not clear who's to blame. If ever a person got what he deserved, it's James Urbanksi, an abusive drunk who steals from his wife, Joyce, and promises her close friend Cynthia Kellogg that she'll be the next target of his rage. At a group outing, James bleeds to death after someone cuts his throat. But because he's such a terrible human being, police aren't sure which of his acquaintances decided to kill him.

Date of release
1991-04-19
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (209)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Mystery, Thriller
Director
Alan Rudolph

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: New Jersey

Mortal Thoughts is a 1991 American neo-noir psychological thriller film directed by Alan Rudolph and starring Demi Moore, Glenne Headly, Bruce Willis, John Pankow, and Harvey Keitel. Told in narrative flashbacks set in a police interrogation, the film centers on a woman implicated in the violent murder of her friend's abusive, drug-addicted husband. Its title is derived from a quote in William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Production

The film's title is derived from a quote in William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth by Lady Macbeth, in which she says: "Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty."

The script was written by William Reilly and Claude Kerven. Kerven, who had won an Oscar for Best Short, was the original director. The project was set up at New Visions, the company of Taylor Hackford. Hackford attracted the interest of Demi Moore, who agreed to come on as star and co-producer. New Visions sold the film to Columbia prior to filming.

Demi Moore, who had recently starred in Ghost (1990), was drawn to the project as she felt playing a character with a New Jersey dialect was a challenge. "I’d never done a dialect before, like theater actresses such as Meryl Streep and Glenn Close, and the child in me was excited to try it. Another appeal was the intense loyalty between the two women, the love and trust that made it OK to live in marriages that didn’t work.

Principal photography of Mortal Thoughts occurred in February 1990 and lasted 32 days. Filming took place entirely in New Jersey, in Bayonne, Jersey City, Little Ferry, and Scotch Plains. The film's carnival sequences were shot on location at Scotch Plains's Bowcraft Amusement Park. Claude Kerven, who co-wrote the screenplay, was originally hired to direct the project, but was fired after completing only one week of shooting.

The job of directing was offered to Alan Rudolph who said "I was hired at the last minute because there was a movie in trouble, and nobody would touch it... I wasn’t offered a lot of things, so it was movies that couldn’t get a director or a director dropped out. I just tried to make them work and get some of the people I’d been working with paid."

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