Trivia / The Driver

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Isabelle Adjani agreed to be in the film because she was an admirer of Walter Hill's Hard Times.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $4 million. Box office, $4.9 million.
• Creator Backlash/Star-Derailing Role: Isabelle Adjani later complained she felt the film hurt her career.
  "Afterwards the only American offers I got were bad ones," she said. "I did it, really because after The Story of Adèle H everyone urged me to make a Hollywood film. I turned down several, and felt I couldn't continue to do that. And I liked Walter Hill. Only later did I realize I'd made a terrible mistake."
• Deleted Role: Cheryl Smith had a sizable co-starring role in the original longer cut of the film, but the subplot involving her character wound up being excised and subsequently all of her scenes got cut out as well. Walter Hill regretted cutting these scenes and spoke favourably about Smith's acting skills.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The theatrical trailer shows some deleted and extended scenes; Player kissing the Driver, longer conversation between Detective and Driver in Driver's motel room and scene is also edited differently than in the movie, longer dialogue between Driver and Teeth in Driver's place where he asks Teeth "How you gonna get down stairs" before punching him like in the final version of the scene, and deleted dialogue scene in bar between Detective, Red Plainclothesman and bartender.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was meant to be a star "vehicle" for Steve McQueen (actor), but he passed on it because he didn't want to do yet another car film at that point in his career. It was then offered to Sylvester Stallone, but he was busy with F.I.S.T.. The studio wanted Charles Bronson for the lead as Walter Hill had previously worked with him on Hard Times. However, Bronson wasn't happy with how Hill had edited Jill Ireland's performance in Hard Times, and that was the end of that.
  • Julie Christie and Charlotte Rampling turned down the role of The Player.
  • The studio recommended Robert Mitchum for the role of the Detective. Hill liked the idea and met with Mitchum to discuss the part but the actor turned it down.

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