Breaking In

Breaking In (1989)

The last two guys you'd ever expect to get away with anything...are about to get away with it all.

Professional thief Ernie takes Mike on as an apprentice, but while Mike clearly has "larceny in his heart", it will take him a long time to get as good as Ernie.

Date of release
1989-10-13
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (33)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Action, Adventure, Comedy, Crime
Director
Bill Forsyth

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $5.5M

Breaking In is a 1989 American crime comedy film directed by Bill Forsyth, written by John Sayles, and starring Burt Reynolds, Casey Siemaszko and Lorraine Toussaint. The film follows professional small-time criminals as they live and practice their trades.

Production

The film was shot in Portland, Oregon. Forsyth envisioned John Mahoney for the lead role, but Act III Productions wanted a higher profile name. Jack Nicholson and Paul Newman were each offered the role, but declined. Prompted to have a star, Reynolds was eventually asked to do the film. It was Reynolds's first character role. "I've spent an entire career... making the characters me," he said.

Reynolds worked for SAG scale because he was an admirer of the script and of Forsyth. John Sayles normally directed his own scripts, but did not do this one because he did not feel that he had the sense of humor to bring it off.

Forsyth, too, normally directed his own scripts, but took on Breaking In in an attempt to make contact with a larger mainstream audience:

I can't get away with making $6- or $7-million movies (e.g., Local Hero and Housekeeping) with the kind of audience that my past movies have reached. I've just got to find an audience-or retreat. And I'm quite happy to retreat, I'm happy to go back to Scotland and make smaller movies like Gregory's Girl. But at the same time, Breaking In seemed a comfortable experiment for me.

He later described it as "an awkward little movie. It’s not an American film and it’s not a European film; it’s ungraspable what it is."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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