Released in June 1996, The Rock (1996) put Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris on Alcatraz with a stockpile of VX nerve gas and a director determined to shoot the whole thing as loudly as possible. It was the final production from Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the most successful producing partnership of the era, and it arrived in cinemas after a development process involving at least seven writers, a public credit dispute and one very tired camera crew. The film went on to gross more than $335 million worldwide and set the template for the Bay style that would dominate the next decade of blockbusters. Here are 40 facts about how it was made.

1. The original writers had an unusual way of working

Long before anyone had thought of Michael Bay or Sean Connery, The Rock was a spec script (written without a commission) by David Weisberg and Douglas S. Cook. The pair had been classmates at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire boarding school, and wrote every project together on two keyboards hooked up to a single computer. Weisberg had come from directing theatre in New York, Cook from Harvard, and their only produced credits were the 1991 Showtime TV movie Payoff and Holy Matrimony (1994), a comedy directed by Star Trek’s Mr Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy. Their pitch was essentially Die Hard (1988) on Alcatraz: rogue Marines seize the island, threaten San Francisco with VX nerve gas, and the FBI pairs an anxious chemist with the only man ever to escape the prison. Disney bought it for Caravan Pictures, the label run by producer Joe Roth, and that premise and its 48-hour structure survived every rewrite that followed.

2. The director said no before he said yes

Caravan never moved the project forward, and in early 1995 it migrated to Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the producing duo behind Top Gun (1986), at Disney’s Hollywood Pictures. Tony Scott, who had just made Crimson Tide (1995) for the pair, passed in favour of The Fan (1996), and Michael Bay, with only Bad Boys (1995) to his name, turned it down too: “The story just wasn’t serious enough for me.” Simpson and Bruckheimer’s first paid rewrite went to television veteran Mark Rosner, who delivered a technical, procedural thriller in the house style of Crimson Tide. When the offer came round again six months later, Bay accepted, only to find the script had now swung too far the other way. On his DVD commentary he said Rosner’s draft reminded him too much of Crimson Tide.

3. The next writer through the door did the heavy lifting

Bay’s answer was Jonathan Hensleigh, who arrived fresh from writing Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) and Jumanji (1995) and spent roughly nine months working alongside the director. His brief was simple: turn it into a Bay and Bruckheimer movie. Hensleigh restructured the story, rebuilt the interrogation scene, developed the double act between the two leads and layered in the military procedural texture, from the raid on the weapons bunker to the coded cards and the Marines’ uniform swap. His revised draft, dated October 10, 1995, bears the cover line “THE ROCK by Jonathan Hensleigh” and contains the film’s opening, with the graveside scene and the theft of the VX rockets, more or less as it was shot.

4. A current affairs show helped create the villain

According to Hensleigh, the film’s antagonist, decorated Marine general Francis X. Hummel, who seizes Alcatraz to force the government to compensate the families of men lost on covert missions, was Don Simpson’s invention. Simpson had watched a 1993 60 Minutes segment on the US government’s refusal to acknowledge soldiers who died during covert operations overseas. He then read the memoirs of Colonel David H. Hackworth, the highly decorated Vietnam veteran who became a fierce critic of American planning in that war, and folded the two into a single character. Hensleigh dramatised the idea, and summed up the result as “a really compelling villain: a soldier with a noble end but, unfortunately, psychotic means.”

5. The leading man came with conditions

Sean Connery, the original screen James Bond, felt John Mason, the British former intelligence agent who once escaped Alcatraz and has been locked away without trial ever since, sounded far too American. He made his involvement conditional on Disney hiring Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the British comedy writers behind The Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, who had rewritten his dialogue without credit on his unofficial Bond return Never Say Never Again (1983). They were told to make Mason more British and funnier and to leave the action alone, which suited them fine. “Nothing is more boring than writing a car chase,” they wrote in their 2017 memoir More Than Likely. They ended up altering much of the film’s dialogue regardless.

Connery reshaped Mason’s past too. In the original spec, Mason had no intelligence background at all. During work sessions in London with Bruckheimer and Hensleigh, Connery came up with the microfilm Mason stole from J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s long-serving founding director, supposedly revealing the truth about the JFK assassination and Roswell, and the reason he has been kept behind bars for decades.

6. Some big names polished the dialogue

In the final stretch of pre-production, Aaron Sorkin, the writer of A Few Good Men (1992), was hired for what he later called a “production polish”, a two-week dialogue pass. “Basically, they just wanted some snappy dialogue for Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage,” he said in 2010. Quentin Tarantino, fresh from Pulp Fiction (1994), is widely believed to have done an uncredited pass in the same window, though he has never confirmed it on the record. Authorship of individual lines is hard to pin down. When Goodspeed introduces himself with “Well, I’m Stanley Goodspeed!”, Mason’s reply, “But of course you are,” is often credited to Sorkin, but it is also a knowing callback to a line Connery delivered as Bond in Diamonds Are Forever (1971).

7. An action superstar walked away from the lead

Fans often assume Arnold Schwarzenegger was up for Mason, but the role he was offered was FBI chemical weapons specialist Stanley Goodspeed. Simpson brought him the script while it was still being rewritten, and Schwarzenegger was unimpressed. As he later recalled in a Reddit AMA, it was “only 80 pages with a lot of handwriting and scribbles, and it didn’t seem fully baked.” He passed, and has since said he regrets it. The Goodspeed of that draft was very much an Arnie archetype, a frustrated desk agent itching for field action, and once the part went elsewhere the character was rebuilt from scratch.

8. The producers were on their farewell tour

By mid-1995, Simpson and Bruckheimer were in the middle of an unlikely comeback. They had been forced out of Paramount in 1991 when their $300 million production deal collapsed over the overspending on Days of Thunder (1990), and Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, allies from their Paramount days, had lured them to Disney. After three years without a release, they came back with three hits in 1995: Bad Boys ($141 million), Crimson Tide ($91 million) and Dangerous Minds ($85 million). The Rock was meant to be their crowning achievement.

It became their last. On December 19, 1995, the pair formally dissolved their company, largely because Bruckheimer could no longer work around Simpson’s drug use. Daily Variety broke the story the next day under the headline “‘TOP GUN’ PRODUCERS GO SEPARATE WAYS”, and The Rock was agreed to be the final film they would make together.

9. The Oscar winner wanted to prove a point

Simpson and Bruckheimer went directly to Nicolas Cage, whose Best Actor win for Leaving Las Vegas (1995) arrived during production. Cage had spent years playing eccentrics and felt shut out of big studio films. “I had been doing pictures in Hollywood where I was wearing a snakeskin jacket and had a wooden hand… and nobody would give me an opportunity to act in the [action] world until Jerry,” he said in 2004, nodding to Wild at Heart (1990) and Moonstruck (1987). Bruckheimer’s logic was just as simple: “He can win an Academy Award then walk into ‘The Rock’ and become a big audience pleaser.” Cage has said he took the role partly because someone in Hollywood told him he was too “quirky” to be an action star, and partly to use blockbuster leverage to get the more experimental work he had promised in his Oscar speech made. His fee was reportedly around $4 million.

10. Goodspeed’s vocabulary was a deliberate choice

It was Cage’s idea that his character would not swear. Instead, Goodspeed reaches for “gee whiz”, “gosh” and “a-hole”, and much of his dialogue was ad-libbed, including “Zeus’s butthole!”, which Bay wanted to cut and Cage insisted on keeping. The rule makes his single outburst hit harder. During the climax, having finally got the better of one of Hummel’s last remaining men, he snarls, “Eat that, you f*ck!” In the script, the line was “Did I ever tell you I was gonna be a dad?” Cage hated it but tried it at Bruckheimer’s request, and the producer conceded it didn’t work as well as what replaced it.

11. The film’s leading man wanted his workout on screen

Cage had been through an intensive training regime for the role and was disappointed to find there were no shirtless scenes in the script. He lobbied Bay for one, Bay resisted, and Cage kept pushing until the day he turned up on set wearing only a pair of pink and blue Speedos. Bay reportedly sighed and said, “Alright, let’s get it over with.” The two still disagree about the result, the early scene introducing Goodspeed naked at home with a guitar. Bay says it was a way to give Cage what he wanted and get it out of the way up front, while Cage maintains he simply wanted to show the character was comfortable at home.

12. The character on the page was a different man entirely

In Hensleigh’s October 1995 shooting script, the hero is “Bill Goodspeed”, a conventional frustrated desk agent who fires toy darts at a colleague. Cage rebuilt him on arrival. He changed the name to Stanley and created a neurotic chemistry nerd who scorns grunge, collects Beatles vinyl (he has just paid $600 for a first pressing of Meet the Beatles!) and would much rather be at his desk. Cage invented the childhood chemistry set story (“blew my eyebrows off, we never saw the cat again”) and an anxious father-to-be streak modelled on a real Department of Defense chemical expert he had met. He even made Bay and Bruckheimer watch Jaws (1975), pointing them to Richard Dreyfuss’s jittery oceanographer Hooper as the template for the early scene in which Goodspeed defuses a sarin-rigged doll. “I don’t think anybody knew that I was going to revamp the entire character,” Cage said.

13. Mason was only ever going to be one man

Once Bay was on board, Bruckheimer personally sent the screenplay to Connery. At 65, the Scot held a black belt in Kyokushin karate and was looking for an action comeback, with GoldenEye (1995) having just reignited public enthusiasm for Bond. There is no documented shortlist of alternatives for the role, and Bay flew to the UK on Concorde to pitch it to him (still nearly arriving late). Connery’s fee was reportedly around $12 million, plus a producer credit. A long-running rumour claims he also had a cabin built on Alcatraz to save him the commute. In reality he allegedly asked to anchor a yacht off the island’s dock, the Coast Guard refused, and he made do with his trailer whenever he didn’t fancy the trip back to his San Francisco hotel.

14. The director found an unlikely bodyguard

Connery’s contract stipulated that his coverage would always be filmed first, which Cage insisted he was fine with, although on the long day spent shooting the morgue shoot-out, he was exhausted and struggling with his dialogue by the time the cameras turned round to him. That clout came in handy for Bay. When the San Francisco car chase put him two days behind schedule, a trio of Disney executives summoned him for a stern talking to. As Bay recalls on the Criterion commentary, Connery, dressed in his golfing gear, asked where he was going and then asked to come along. The executives’ jaws dropped when the star walked into the room behind the director, and Connery told them Bay was doing a good job and should be left alone.

15. Familiar territory proved surprisingly unnerving

Michael Biehn, best known as Kyle Reese in The Terminator (1984), was cast as Commander Anderson, leader of the SEAL team sent to retake the island. It was his third Navy SEAL role, after The Abyss (1989) and Navy SEALs (1990), but this time he was surrounded by the real thing, including technical advisor Harry Humphries and Dennis Chalker, a founding member of SEAL Team Six. Biehn admitted to Bay he was freezing up, and it came to a head during a sprawling shot of twelve SEALs piling out of a Humvee, which took an hour to set up each time. “Sean Connery’s standing there, there’s Nic Cage, who’s just been nominated for an Academy Award for Drunk In Las Vegas or whatever it was,” Biehn told the AV Club. “I come up to give this big speech, and… I just went blank.” Bay screamed the dialogue at him from off camera one line at a time, and that single take is the one in the film.

16. The ambush reunited two old opponents

Midway through the film, Hummel’s Marines trap the SEAL team in the prison’s shower block, and the standoff ends in a massacre. Biehn didn’t think much of the scene while shooting it. “But it was the second time I went up against Ed Harris,” he said, “and people always respond to that scene. In fact, a lot of people tell me that it’s the best scene in the movie.” The pair had previously faced off in James Cameron’s The Abyss. Anderson’s defining line in the standoff, “General, we’ve spilled the same blood in the same mud,” is widely attributed to Sorkin’s dialogue pass, although that has never been confirmed.

17. Goodspeed’s girlfriend faced a bizarre audition

Vanessa Marcil was 27 and starring as Brenda Barrett on the soap General Hospital when she auditioned to play Carla Pestalozzi, Goodspeed’s pregnant girlfriend. “It was the most ridiculous audition scene I’d ever gotten,” she told Soap Opera Weekly. “My character started out singing a country-western song; then spoke with a New Jersey accent; then switched to a Western accent; then burst into tears.” She refused to do it all unpaid, until she learned Connery, Cage and Harris were attached. The song was by country singer Carlene Carter, a remnant of a subplot about Carla’s musical ambitions that was quietly dropped. Marcil kept her soap job throughout the shoot, catching 6am flights to San Francisco and flying back at night to tape General Hospital. “We pretty much did the whole film in the rain,” she said.

18. The villain was the easiest role to fill

Ed Harris was a clean offer with no audition, and Bay’s first choice for the weight and gravity he brought. On set, Harris stayed so deep in character that he addressed his director as “sir” between takes. That discipline makes the outtake reel from Hummel’s videoconference with the Pentagon, preserved on the Criterion Collection DVD, all the more startling. Over roughly five minutes, Harris flubs lines, slams a phone handset into the table, kicks set decoration and yells at the smoke crew, and when Bay tries to coach him to “f*ck it up!”, he snaps back, “Oh, f*ck it up… f*ck you!” He finally nails the take with an ad-libbed flourish aimed at an imaginary aide: “Hey, Al, put some rigging tape over this motherf*cker’s mouth, would ya? He’s wasting my time.” Bay’s response: “Good! Cut!”

19. The credits don’t tell the whole story

The final credits went through arbitration at the Writers Guild of America, the union that decides screen credit. Weisberg and Cook received story credit, and the screenplay credit went to Weisberg, Cook and Mark Rosner. Under the guild’s rules, a later writer had to contribute more than half of the final script, and with so many hands involved nobody else cleared the bar, leaving Hensleigh off entirely. Bay published an open letter in the Los Angeles Times on May 21, 1996, calling the result “a sham, a travesty”. Hensleigh was blunter still. “It’s probably the single worst thing that’s happened to me in my professional career that I was denied credit by the WGA,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve yet gotten over it.” He was later compensated with executive producer credits on Bruckheimer’s Con Air (1997) and Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), and full credit on Bay’s Armageddon (1998).

20. Several ideas never made the final cut

Spoilers ahead. In earlier drafts, Major Tom Baxter, Hummel’s loyal second-in-command played by David Morse, turns on the general and fires the shot that kills him during the final standoff. In the finished film, Baxter’s betrayal is a momentary feint before he turns his fire on the mutineers, sharpening the idea that Hummel’s Marines are not prepared to kill American civilians. The shooting script also had Mason signing his presidential pardon “Adolph Hitler”, and an extra coda showing Mason and his daughter Jade driving up a freeway in a Jeep. Both went, so the film ends on Goodspeed and Carla outside Sacred Heart Mission Church in Saticoy, California, with Goodspeed holding the stolen microfilm and asking, “Honey, you wanna know who really killed JFK?”

21. The man behind the camera had links to both stars

Bay’s director of photography, John Schwartzman, had known him since the director was nine years old, shooting his student films at ArtCenter College of Design and his music videos and commercials at Propaganda Films. The Rock was his first action feature. His family tree runs straight through the cast list. His father, Jack Schwartzman, produced Never Say Never Again, and his stepmother is Talia Shire, the younger sister of The Godfather (1972) director Francis Ford Coppola. That makes John the older half-brother of actor Jason Schwartzman and, by marriage, a cousin of Coppola’s nephew, Nicolas Cage.

22. The island itself fought back

Disney wanted the film shot in Los Angeles, with only a handful of exteriors on location. Bay refused, telling the studio, “I gotta shoot on this island because this island is so f*cking bitchin’.” The crew spent six days a week for six weeks on Alcatraz, a National Historic Landmark run by the National Park Service, which would neither close the island to visitors nor allow anything to be altered. “It was like shooting in the Louvre,” said Schwartzman. On a Saturday, up to 40,000 tourists might be milling around, and every piece of kit had to be carried down six flights of stairs and a quarter-mile round the island. “I lost seven pounds during the shoot, and that was about average,” he said, likening the experience to “doing a documentary on Mt. McKinley.”

23. The tunnels beneath the prison are pure fiction

Anything involving gunfire, fire or destruction was shot on soundstages in Los Angeles, including the shower room, the VX lab and the maze of cisterns, boiler rooms and mine-cart tunnels beneath the prison. Schwartzman based their look on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), all industrial steam, flame jets and rusted steel, and none of it has any basis in the real Alcatraz. Bay happily admitted on the commentary that working boilers in a prison closed since 1963 was “a major logic flaw”, adding, “Screw it, it’s entertaining.” The mine carts were originally meant to feature in a much bigger chase, with carts hanging from a ceiling track, “but we ran out of money.” The hanging cart Goodspeed lands in is all that survived.

24. The film’s signature look came from deliberate chaos

For a 1996 studio picture, the camera setup was unusually aggressive. “We always ran multiple cameras, at least two, often three, and up to as many as nine,” said Schwartzman, pairing extreme wides with long lenses on the same take. The other ingredient was instability. “Our approach was to take an image and attack it,” he explained. “We shook the cameras a lot in action sequences, by banging on dollies or shaking iris rods. When we used car mounts, I told my grips, ‘Keep the bolts loose, we want these cameras to shake.’” For Hummel’s speeches, the lens was just 11 inches from Ed Harris’s face.

25. The score was meant to be someone else’s big break

Composer Hans Zimmer, fresh from a Grammy for Crimson Tide and burned out, intended The Rock as a solo showcase for his long-time right-hand man Nick Glennie-Smith. “The main theme is mine, as are a few other bits,” Zimmer later said. “But I never really wanted to write any of it.” Glennie-Smith’s theme demos were reportedly rejected, so Zimmer wrote a replacement while protégé Harry Gregson-Williams took on set pieces including the car chase. Gregson-Williams later described “probably the most odious director alive plus the eternal task master Jerry ‘let’s torture Harry now’ Bruckheimer.” The theme itself became a staple of action trailers for years, and fans have noted that Glennie-Smith’s opening theme for The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) sounds strikingly similar, which some read as the composer reclaiming ideas he pitched first.

26. The soundtrack hides a few in-jokes

The film uses five licensed songs, and most of them earn their place. Scott McKenzie’s hippie anthem “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” introduces the city about to be threatened with nerve gas, and Connery himself sings a snatch of it, uncredited, as Mason. Elton John’s “Rocket Man” plays over Goodspeed and Carla’s rooftop love scene early on, then pays off on Alcatraz when Goodspeed dispatches Captain Darrow, one of Hummel’s men, with a flare and a question: “Do you like the Elton John song ‘Rocket Man’?” For a hero who has just spent $600 on a Beatles record, the film uses Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love”, a Lennon-McCartney song that gives Goodspeed some Beatles flavour without the cost of licensing an actual Beatles recording.

27. The film’s deadly weapon was a work of art

The iridescent green orbs nestled inside the VX rocket warheads are probably the most imitated piece of design in the film. Each was a custom hand-blown glass sphere mounted in a plastic carrier plate inside warhead racks built by the effects workshop WKR, and filled with a tinted mix of glycerin and water. The mother-of-pearl shimmer came from a thin dichroic film on the outside of the glass, lit from inside the racks. Real chemical weapons look nothing like them, a detail that would become important several years later.

28. A real SEAL ruined a take for the right reasons

Technical advisor Harry Humphries showed up on set one day just as the crew were filming a stuntman suspended in mid-air and engulfed in flames. His training took over instantly, and he grabbed the nearest fire extinguisher and put the man out. Humphries hadn’t realised a stunt was in progress, and he had just ruined the take. Bay shouted from the sidelines: “It’s the movies, man!”

29. One of the producers didn’t live to see the release

Exactly one month after the partnership was dissolved, on the night of January 18, 1996, Don Simpson spent five or six hours on the phone to writer-director James Toback, pitching Toback’s script Harvard Man as his first solo project. They hung up around midnight, and Simpson was found dead in his Bel Air home the next afternoon. His drug use had reached an extraordinary scale. According to Charles Fleming’s biography High Concept, the coroner found 21 different drugs in his system, and police later found 2,200 prescription pills lined up alphabetically in his closet.

The Rock was already in production when the news came through, and Bay and Bruckheimer cried together in a trailer on location. Bruckheimer insisted on keeping Simpson’s producer credit despite his near-total absence from the shoot, and the film carries the dedication “In memory of Don Simpson”.

30. Goodspeed’s steady hands belonged to someone else

For the doll bomb sequence in the decontamination chamber, the prop was a 20.5-inch rubber baby with articulating eyes, split open at the back and fitted with clear tubes that pumped pinkish “sarin” out of its mouth. The bomb suit was a real bomb disposal suit, complete with a working cooling fan. Cage was so worried about breaking the delicate doll props that he didn’t handle them for the close-ups. Instead, assistant prop master Skip Crank put on Cage’s costume and served as his arm and hand double for every insert shot of the defusal.

31. Shooting among the public had its moments

The guided tour of Alcatraz that Hummel’s men hijack early in the film was shot on the real island, with the tourists a mix of production extras and genuine visitors, including an uncredited appearance from comedian Luenell Campbell. The park ranger leading the tour is played by Tom Towles, best known for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), and Harris, so disciplined he was calling his director “sir”, kept breaking up at Towles’s tour guide business. It was one of the few times he broke character on the entire shoot.

Across the bay, the public was less amused. When Mason escapes custody, he leaves FBI Director Womack, the man who has kept him locked away without trial, dangling from a hotel balcony. The scene was shot at the real Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and plenty of passers-by had no idea a film was being made. The hotel was inundated with calls from people who had spotted a man hanging off the building.

32. One supporting actor took a gamble with Connery

William Forsythe plays FBI agent Ernest Paxton, and in the scene where the Bureau first brings Mason out to question him, he threw in a line of his own and then tapped Connery on the head as he walked past. “That was a moment where he could’ve turned around and gone, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’” Forsythe told the AV Club. “But instead he reacted, you could see it in his eyes, and… that’s a real actor.” The same scene features Mason’s coin trick, Bay’s idea, which earned the director what he called “the amazing James Bond smile of approval.”

Forsythe’s status was less secure elsewhere. Three weeks into shooting, he was making himself a hot dog when a crew member told him, “Extras aren’t allowed hot dogs!” She fetched security, who took one look and told her, “That’s William!” As Forsythe recalled: “So I ate my hot dog, but I’m thinking… I don’t know what the hell they’ve got for the extras today. Trail mix, maybe?”

33. The car chase was a late addition

The Ferrari versus Humvee chase through San Francisco was added after an early test screening revealed what Bay called “a big flat hole” in the middle of the film. When one of the writers, believed to be Mark Rosner, objected to him “talking about demographics”, Bay replied, “This is a business.” Clearances for even two blocks of the city required hundreds of signatures, and Bay called it “the biggest clusterf*ck I’ve ever done in my entire filming career.” The finale at Pacific Avenue and Jones Street sacrificed Cable Car #49, a real decommissioned body mounted on rubber tyres. The yellow Ferrari F355 was real for the hero shots, but the cars wrecked on screen were fibreglass kit bodies on Pontiac Fiero chassis, which is visible in the final crush when the “Ferrari” splits open.

34. One sequence sparked a standoff with the studio

When Disney tried to scrap the scene in which the Navy SEALs approach Alcatraz underwater, Bay walked off the film for a couple of hours and was threatened with a $60 million lawsuit. He held his ground, and the studio backed down first. The sequence was handled by Dream Quest Images, the effects house Disney was in the process of buying, which delivered the film’s effects while physically relocating from Simi Valley to Burbank. Supervisor Hoyt Yeatman’s team combined footage of stunt divers in a tank with motion-controlled puppet divers, a miniature Sea Stallion helicopter, miniature cistern interiors and digital bubbles.

35. The water scenes tested everyone’s patience

About 82 minutes into the film, Mason and Goodspeed have to stay underwater while flames blast across the surface above them. It took Bay a while to persuade Cage and Connery to do it, with safety divers waiting just out of frame. “It was very frightening,” said Cage. “And Sean wasn’t happy about it.” The fireball stunts sparked the pair’s most famous row, when Connery realised he could be seriously burned and erupted at his director: “So you’re telling me I could burn my face off!” Bay has called Connery “a director eater” who “hates directors”, but also says he “really, really taught me a lot.”

Connery did win one battle. He asked for the water in the interior sequences to be heated to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, but after several crew members came down with a stomach bug within hours of each other, a doctor identified the warm water as “a big incubator”.

36. The film’s most iconic image borrowed from two eighties classics

Spoilers ahead. In the climax, Goodspeed kneels on the edge of the island, desperately waving green flares at the incoming fighter jets to call off the air strike. Bay says the composition was inspired by the famous shot of Willem Dafoe on his knees with his arms raised in Platoon (1986), Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War drama. Cage had a different reference in mind for the performance: Matthew Modine in Alan Parker’s Birdy (1984), as a traumatised Vietnam veteran.

37. The Bay style was codified in the edit

Editor Richard Francis-Bruce was an Australian from George Miller’s circle, having cut Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), and he arrived straight from back-to-back Oscar nominations for The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and Se7en (1995). Together he and Bay assembled what is now recognisable as the Bay style. Critic Matthew Dessem counted five slow tracking close-ups against four master shots in a single two-minute Hummel scene, and the Humvee’s collision with a taxi in the car chase is built from six shots from four cameras in roughly three seconds. Bay openly credits Busby Berkeley, the choreographer behind Hollywood’s kaleidoscopic 1930s musicals, as his influence: start wide, then cut to “privileged angles”. The clearest example is the SEALs surfacing one by one in the boiler room, which Bay calls his Busby Berkeley moment.

38. The premiere was held somewhere unusual

On Monday, June 3, 1996, four days before the film opened, The Rock held its world premiere in the recreation yard of Alcatraz itself. Around 500 invited guests were ferried out to the island, and according to Disney’s archive, fans on water scooters circled it hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars. The marketing broke new ground too. Dan Chapman’s poster was the first from Hollywood Pictures to print a web address, pointing viewers to www.movies.com at a time when most cinemagoers had barely heard of the internet.

39. The gamble paid off handsomely

Made on a budget of $75 million, The Rock took $335.1 million worldwide and finished as the seventh-highest-grossing film of 1996. It even earned an Oscar nomination, not for Bay’s direction but for Best Sound, and while it didn’t win, Cage and Connery took home Best On-Screen Duo at the MTV Movie Awards. Bay has since outlined an idea for a sequel, in which a now-married Goodspeed, still holding the microfilm, finds himself hunted by the government and has nowhere to turn except Mason. It has never been made.

40. The film played an unexpected role in the run-up to war

In September 2002, MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove said the agency had acquired intelligence from a new source claiming Iraq was stepping up production of chemical and biological weapons, and told the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee they were on the edge of a significant breakthrough. It was later noticed that the source’s description of glass containers, which are not used for real chemical munitions, closely resembled the green glass spheres in The Rock. By February 2003, a month before the invasion of Iraq, MI6 had concluded the source had been lying, but failed to tell Downing Street, even though Prime Minister Tony Blair had been briefed on the intelligence.

Screenwriter David Weisberg was appalled. “Anybody in the poison gas community would immediately know that this was total bullsh*t,” he said, adding that nobody had done “the most basic fact-checking” by asking a chemical weapons expert. “It’s not a nice legacy for the film,” he said. “It’s tragic that we went to war.”

And you’ve reached the end: 40 explosive facts about The Rock, the film that made Nicolas Cage an action star, gave Sean Connery one of his last great roles and turned Michael Bay into a brand. Please share on your social media channels, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for lots of great video content.