Trivia and Quotes
Trivia
 When Marcus Wolf (Charles Martin Smith) discovers the comet, he is sitting alone and eating a pizza, exactly as his character was doing in Starman (1984) when notified of the alien craft`s landing.
When Jenny Lerner is looking up "ELE" on the Internet, the ad banners on the right-hand side of the screen foreshadow the tidal wave at the end of the film: "The Wave of the Future", "You`ve got some ocean coming", etc.
When Marcus Wolf (Charles Martin Smith) is trying to send email about the approaching comet, we see the first few entries in his e-mail inbox. Two of the messages are from "cshoemaker arizona.unv", one of which has the subject line "101 Mir jokes". Carolyn Shoemaker and Eugene Shoemaker are well-known comet experts, credited as "comet advisors" to the movie.
After discovering the comet, one of the astronomers is killed in a car accident. This mirrors the real life car accident death (July 18 1997, in outback Australia) of astronomer Eugene Shoemaker, who helped discover the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet.
One of the NASA officials in the movie is played by Gerry Griffin, who is a former NASA flight director. Griffin presided over the Apollo 12 mission and later became director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Joshua Colwell, who played one of the NASA officials in mission control, was also a technical advisor on the film.
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# The movie begins in the year 1998, where Leo and Sarah`s astronomy club is on top of the hills looking at stars and where Dr. Wolf died in a car crash. A year passes, and it`s 1999, the year when President Tom Beck announces to the world that a comet would threaten to hit the Earth in one year on August 16. Therefore, the date of the Wolf-Beiderman impact is predicted to occur on 16 August 2000.
A line was edited in the President`s press conference scene. President Beck stated "Life will go on, we will prevail." Originally, President Beck said "Life will go on, we will prevail...THIS IS NOT ARMAGEDDON!" The producers later realized that the movie was going to be in box office competition with the movie Armageddon (1998/I).
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# During the school assembly, one student makes the observation "You`re going to have more sex than anyone else in our class!" to Leo Biederman. This line was improvised by the young actor, and the reactions from the other students are genuine.
The motorcycle that Leo rides at the end of the movie is a 1997 Yamaha XT225.
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# The traffic jam scene was filmed on a highway in northern Virginia that was under construction at the time. The roughly 1,800 vehicles used in the scene came mostly from volunteers from the Washington D.C. suburb of Manassas, Virginia.
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# ‘Deep Impact’ was a NASA space probe designed to study the composition of the interior of the comet Tempel 1. On July 4, 2005, one section of the Deep Impact probe successfully impacted the comet`s nucleus. This is coincidental, as the scientists behind the mission and the creators of the movie devised the name independently of each other, at around the same time.
The freeway where the traffic jam occurs, is Virginia State Route 234 bypass around Manassas.
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# An actual giant object from space did once strike the general area of the Eastern Seaboard where "Biederman" impacted in the film. Hitting the Norfolk, Virginia vicinity about 35 million years ago, it created the huge, now-buried Chesapeake Bay impact crater.
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# The film portrays the wave that struck New York City crashing over and around the towers of the World Trade Center, which were the only buildings barely above water at the end of the sequence, surviving the wave. After the events of the September 11 terrorist attacks, some television broadcasts of the film were edited to remove the buildings.
At the beginning of the movie when Dr. Wolf is using his computer the screen reads May 10, 1998.
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# This film discussed preparations for surviving a massive comet strike upon the Earth, and mine shafts are drafted into service for this reason, in an echo of the survival plan in Dr. Strangelove. Additionally, a lottery system is proposed for selection of candidates for survival, much like that proposed by Dr. Strangelove himself.
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# Director of Photography Dietrich Lohmann was very ill during the production phase of the film, and the cast and crew found out he was dying from leukemia. A special dedication to Lohmann was put in the movie`s closing credits, as he passed away not long after the film was finished.
The first cut of DEEP IMPACT had more scenes with Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski`s characters. However, a poor sneak preview led to the time for these scenes being drastically reduced.
Morgan Freeman wanted his character (the President) to be wearing an earring. Director Mimi Leder turned him down. Later we see the President addressing the nation from the oval office. His sleeves are rolled up and one of Freeman`s tattoos is showing. The director liked this. She felt it gave the President an everyman look.
Hidden among the cars and trucks in the traffic jam on the freeway near the end of the movie is a truck that had water and food for all of the extras used in the scene.
The first movie to prominently place MSNBC as the main journalistic station in the film.
When the astronomer (Wolf) drives down the road to deliver an envelope, we see that it is addressed to Carolyn Shoemaker.
The scene where Jenny Lerner first meets the president was filmed in the actual kitchen where Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.
When the crew makes rendezvous with the comet, they are reported to have a 20 second delay in transmission of pictures to the ground. This is a distance of 3,728,120 miles.
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Leelee Sobieski
(as Sarah Hotchner)
with Elijah Wood
(as Leo Beiderman)
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