Eureka (1983)

Interesting facts

• Budget: $11M

Eureka is a 1983 epic psychological drama thriller film directed by Nicolas Roeg, and starring Gene Hackman, Rutger Hauer, Theresa Russell, Mickey Rourke, and Joe Pesci. It follows the life of a gold prospector who becomes one of the world's wealthiest men after striking gold in 1925, but, 20 years on, fears that he is being preyed upon by his daughter and her social-climbing husband, as well as a mobster attempting to usurp the Caribbean island he owns. The screenplay is loosely based on the unsolved murder of Sir Harry Oakes in the Bahamas in 1943, and partly adapted from the nonfiction book Who Killed Harry Oakes? by Marshall Houts.

Production

Director Nicolas Roeg was inspired to make a film about the 1943 murder of Sir Harry Oakes after reading the nonfiction book Who Killed Harry Oakes? by Marshall Houts. Roeg pitched the project to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)/United Artists executive David Begelman, and approached screenwriter Paul Mayersberg to write a screenplay adaptation of Houts's book.

Over a two year period, Roeg and Mayersberg collaborated on a screenplay that at one point ran up to approximately 1,800 pages. The original draft used the real names of the individuals involved, which was cleared by MGM's legal department, despite the fact that Oakes's daughter, Edith Nancy Lewis, was still alive at the time.

The film's original working title was Murder, Mystery. The title was eventually changed to Eureka, inspired by the 1894 essay of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe about the mysteries of the universe. In a 1983 interview, Roeg stated that he aspired to make a film that defied genre expectations: "I wanted to make a film about ecstasy, the many forms of ecstasy. Ecstasy in individual people, and ecstasy as the mystic sense of life.

Gene Hackman was cast in the lead role of Jack McCann in early December 1981. Hackman was drawn to the project partly due to his appreciation of Roeg's previous films, as well as the challenge of portraying a character in two different points in his life decades apart. Theresa Russell, who had previously starred in Roeg's Bad Timing (1980), was cast opposite Hackman portraying McCann's daughter, Tracy.

Rutger Hauer was concurrently cast as Claude Maillot Van Horn, the social-climbing husband of Tracy, while Joe Pesci was cast in the role of Mayakofsky, a crime boss seeking to usurp McCann's island and his lavish estate to build a casino. The Mayakofsky character was loosely based on Jewish mob member Meyer Lansky. In the respective roles of Mayakofsky's henchmen Aurelio D'Amato and Pete, Mickey Rourke and Joe Spinell were cast.

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