Trivia / The Devil's Own

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $90 million. Box office, $42,868,348 (domestic), $140,807,547 (worldwide).
• Creator Killer: This served as the final film for Alan J. Pakula, as he was killed in a car accident the next year after its release.
• Deleted Role: William Atherton had a small role that was cut from the finished project. However, his name is present on the trailers for the film.
• Fake Irish: Brad Pitt as IRA terrorist Frankie McGuire. His love interest Megan is played by Natascha McElhone, who's English, and his cohort Martin is played by Scottish actor David O'Hara; though the two do have Irish ancestry.
• Hostility on the Set: It was reported that Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt didn't get along, and their personal conflicts stemmed from who would have gotten top billing and the script being rewritten throughout film, see Old Shame below.
• Missing Trailer Scene: A bunch of scenes shown in trailer are cut out of the film, including:
  • Burke checking the stingers in some rocky outdoors.
  • Someone going down the stairs and stepping on the tripwire and exploding a grenade.
  • A love scene between Frankie and Megan and then, Frankie pointing his gun at someone while he is in bed with Megan.
  • More dialogue between Tom and Megan when he is speaking to her about Frankie:
    Megan: "I love him. You love him too, don't you? He'll die if we don't do something."
  • Most especially, there is a long passage where O'Meara details his sympathy for Frankie the Angel, including his father's murder in front of him when he was a boy and him being targeted by a British agent who has hunted down and killed all of Frankie's IRA cohorts, and then says he wants to bring Frankie into custody unharmed. None of O'Meara's statements appear in the final film.
• Old Shame: Brad Pitt revealed his dislike for the film, calling it the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking that he's ever seen. He even tried to walk out on the project when the film's script became incoherent. Additionally, he originally liked the original script he was given, which is why he doesn't think highly of the movie.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original script for the film was much darker than the version used for the final film. Frankie slaughters all of the inhabitants inside a crackhouse and crooning Irish music at a local pub. O'Meara was described as being a "hair bag cop" who got that unflattering nickname because he's been a uniformed officer for so long. There was also an entire scene consisted of O'Meara and his partner throwing vile insults at each other. This draft was the one that Brad Pitt read before deciding to sign onto the project.
  • Sean Connery and Gene Hackman were considered for Tom O'Meara.
  • Bryan Singer was asked to direct.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: According to Brad Pitt, the film was made this way:
  To have to make something up as you go along — Jesus, what pressure. It was ridiculous...I don't know why anyone would want to continue making that movie. We had nothing. The movie was the complete victim of this drowning studio head [Mark Canton] who said, "I don't care. We're making it. I don't care what you have. Shoot something". I tried to [quit] when there was a week before shooting and we had 20 pages of dogshit. And this script that I had loved was gone.

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