Anecdotes for
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

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• When casting for the role of Robert Ford it came down to Casey Affleck and Shia LaBeouf. Affleck eventually got the role, because LaBeouf was felt to be too young.
  
  
• Garret Dillahunt was originally set to play Robert Ford's brother, due to his striking resemblance to Casey Affleck, but due to a TV commitment, Dillahunt was given a smaller role and Sam Rockwell replaced his original part.
  
  
• According to Andrew Dominik, Brad Pitt had it put in his contract that the name of the movie was not to be changed.
  
  

• At the beginning of the film, Jesse James' finger disfigurement is revealed to the audience. If one pays close attention, the top half of Brad Pitt's left middle finger is painstakingly erased in every single scene it appears in with the help of computer graphics.
  
  
• The original cut of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" was nearly four hours long. It was edited down to two hours and forty minutes, its current runtime, at the studio's request. However, it did play at least once at its original 4-hour length, most notably at the Venice Film Festival, where Brad Pitt picked up the Best Actor Award. After the viewing, critics at the festival labeled the film as "majestic."
  
  
• When Jesse goes looking for Jim Cummings he introduces himself as "Dick Turpin". Dick Turpin was a legendary English rogue and famous historical highwayman romanticized in English ballads and popular theatre of the 18th and 19th century.
  
  
• The revolver Jesse James gives to Robert Ford is an 1875/1878 Smith and Wesson Model 3, Schofield .45 caliber with single-action, top-break and auto-eject. The first pistol to use a large caliber and auto-eject. It was famously used by other 'gunslingers' such as Pat Garrett and John Wesley Hardin.
  
  
• The singer whom Robert Ford confronts in the bar towards the end of film is Nick Cave, a composer for the film.
  
  

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