Where to watch Speed (1994)

Trivia & production notes

• Graham Yost conceived the Speed premise after his father mistakenly thought a 1985 film about a runaway train featured a bomb, inspiring him to adapt that idea for a bus instead.
• The script was originally titled Minimum Speed but Yost changed it to avoid negative associations with the word 'minimum'.
• Jan de Bont came up with the opening elevator bomb sequence by drawing on his own experience of being trapped in an elevator while working on Die Hard.
• Joss Whedon was hired just a week before filming began to revise the dialogue and created the iconic line 'Pop quiz, hotshot.'
• Keanu Reeves was cast after director Jan de Bont saw his performance in Point Break and believed he conveyed both vulnerability and strength.
• Stephen Baldwin turned down the role of Jack Traven because he felt the character was too similar to John McClane from Die Hard.
• The bus jump stunt failed on the first attempt when the stunt driver missed the ramp, destroying the bus, and a second attempt two days later was successful but sent the vehicle further than expected and destroyed one of the cameras recording it.
• Jan de Bont adjusted the shooting schedule to give Keanu Reeves less demanding scenes after River Phoenix, Reeves' close friend, died during production.
• The freeway scenes were filmed at an incomplete Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange under construction, which de Bont noticed during a location scout and suggested adding the bus jump to capitalize on the unfinished sections.
• One of the buses used in Speed was auctioned for $102,000 in 2018.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Speed (1994 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.