A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind is a book and Academy Award-winning film (starring Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, and Paul Bettany) about the Nobel Prize (Economics) winning mathematician John Nash and his experiences of schizophrenia. The biography, written by Sylvia Nasar, was published in 1998. The movie, inspired by the biography of the same name, was released in 2001.

The movie's inspiration

The book A Beautiful Mind is a detailed biography of John Nash, including his work as a mathematician and his private life. The book won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for biography, as well as making the New York Times bestseller list. It is particularly notable for the clarity and detail; and accessibility of its treatment of Nash's mathematical accomplishments.

Fictionalized nature of film

The movie should not be regarded as a biography of Nash, nor as a film version of Nasar's book. It is a drama inspired by the life of John Nash.

Goldsman brought to the script his life experience as the son of child psychologist Mira Rothenberg, who maintained a group home for emotionally disturbed children in the family's residence. Goldsman said that his goal was "to use [the story of John Nash's] journey to give some insight into what it might feel like to suffer from this disease." It can be inferred that Goldsman's priority was conveying his conception of the truth of the inner experience of schizophrenia, rather than the documenting the factual data of John Nash's life. In an interview, Goldsman stated:

I was reasonably absurd in my approach. I don't know how to write a bio-pic and this was one of the best researched scholarly biographies I'd ever read. Instead I wanted to use my understanding of what I'd read with additional research to evoke the grander beats of John's life. I didn't want it to be literal. I wanted to take [a] stab at the truth of John's life, but not by way of the facts.

Critics argue that the movie glosses over his alleged homosexual relationships, his anti-semitic statements, his abandoning a woman shortly after fathering a child with her, and that it rewrites his actual psychotic experience (eg. being "attacked by Napoleon" or being "the left foot of God") into a more exciting but fictional account. The producers of the film argue that the claims of Nash's relationships with men are unverified and that Nash himself continues to deny that he is homosexual. The producers claim that they omitted the anti-semitic remarks because they did not serve the story. Nash himself has argued that although he did make these comments, he was extremely mentally ill at the time.

The movie also misrepresents the effect Nash's mental illness had on his work. The movie depicts Nash as already suffering from schizophrenia when he wrote his doctoral thesis. In reality, Nash's schizophrenia did not appear until years later and once it did his mathematical work ceased until he was able to bring it under control.

Many of the specific incidents and life events depicted in the movie do not correspond to anything mentioned in Nasar's biography. "There are many discrepancies between the book and the film," says a Nash FAQ on the Princeton website [1]. For example, the pen ceremony " was completely fabricated in Hollywood. No such custom exists." The scene in which Nash thanks his wife Alicia during his Nobel prize acceptance speech is fictitious; Nobel prize winners do not give acceptance speeches, and Nash was not invited to give the traditional Nobel lecture due to concerns about his illness.

The plot of the movie makes much of Alicia Nash's unwavering devotion to her husband. In reality, the Nashs divorced in 1963 and lived apart for several years. In 1970, Alicia allowed John to live in her house but it was not a romantic relationship. It was not until the 1990s, when John was recovering from his mental illness, that their romantic relationship was revived and the couple remarried in 2001.

The scene in which Nash demonstrates to his girlfriend his ability to find any specified pattern in a starry sky does not correspond to anything in the book; nor does the scene in which Nash's infant son almost drowns because he believes that his hallucinatory colleague Charles is taking care of him; nor Nash having delusions of a password-generating device being implanted in his arm; nor were Nash's hallucinations both visual and auditory, in reality they were exclusively auditory.

Trivia

• Robert Redford was considered as director, but withdrew due to scheduling conflicts.
  
  
• Tom Cruise was considered to play Nash.
  
  
• The Pentagon office scene was filmed in the basement of Keating Hall on Fordham University's Bronx campus (the same room was used in the filming of the Georgetown University language lab scene in The Exorcist (1973)).
  
  

• The Nobel Prize ceremony was filmed in Prudential Hall at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark, NJ. The filming for that one scene, including set up, make up, etc, took over 8 hours. However, the scene in the lobby afterwards was filmed at another location.
  
  
• In the scene on the veranda with Richard Sol, Nash is kidding about an imaginary person called "Harvey". This is a reference to Harvey (1950).
  
  
• When Nash first sees Parcher, he refers to him as "Big Brother", a reference to George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Later, we see that the room number of Nash's office is 101, another reference to the book.
  
  
• One of John Nash's sons plays the orderly on the right in the scene where Nash is being dragged down the hall.
  
  
• The scene towards the end of the film where John Nash contemplates drinking tea is based on a true event when Russell Crowe met the real John Nash. He spent 15 minutes contemplating whether to drink tea or coffee.
  
  
• Nash's mutterings after he loses the board game (along the lines of "the game is flawed" "I had the first move, I should have won") are in reference to "Game Theory" - the economic theory that Nash is probably most famous for.
  
  
• A love scene with 'Russell Crowe (I)' and Jennifer Connelly was cut from the film.
  
  
• Anthony Rapp and Adam Goldberg play Nash's assistants Sol and Bender, who are usually seen in the film together. The two actors also played rarely-separated best friends Tony and Mike in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993)
  
  
• John Nash visited the set, and Russell Crowe said later that he had been fascinated by the way he moved his hands, and he had tried to do the same thing in the movie.
  
  
• Salma Hayek was originally considered for the part of Alicia Larde because Alicia is from El Salvador.
  
  
• The Harvard scene is actually filmed at Manhattan College.
  
  
• After coming up with the idea for his revolutionary paper, John Nash goes and shows a manuscript of it to Helinger (Judd Hirsch). The manuscript is an actual copy of the original article, published in the specialized journal "Econometrica", under the title "The Bargaining Problem". (Figure 1 of the original paper, appears in the manuscript shown in the movie).
  
  
• Producer Brian Grazer won the rights to the project after John Nash and Alicia Nash chose him over competitor Scott Rudin; the Nashes had long resisted having a film made of their story.
  
  
• Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman had plenty of personal experience to draw on in developing the story; he had previosuly worked as a child care counselor and had developed a method for training mental health workers, and had also grown up in a house where his parents had established a group home for emotionally disturbed children.
  
  
• Barnard College professor Dave Bayer served as the math advisor on the film, and also was Russell Crowe's hand double for the scenes where he is writing equations on windows, etc.
  
  
• The film was shot in sequence in order to help Russell Crowe develop a consistently progressing manner of behavior.
  
  
• To create the "golden" look of the campus scenes early in the film, the filmmakers took a low-contrast stock (Fuji F-400 8582) and exposed it to an orange light before loading it into the camera for shooting.
  
  
• The problem that John Nash writes on the blackboard in his lecture is a real one (unlike in other movies, where math on boards is usually either too simple or fake). There is an important theorem in mathematical physics that directly says the answer to this is 1. Later, when he discusses the problem with Alicia, he makes additional restrictions for the solution, without which the problem is much harder, so he is pretty confident she didn't solve it.
  
  
• While this film is inspired by the life of John Nash, there were elements from his life that were deliberately omitted: a) he was married several times; b) in the past, he had several hetero- and homosexual affairs; c) He fathered a child out-of-wedlock in his twenties.
  
  
• According to a 2001 Entertainment Weekly article on this film, the filmmakers originally wanted to mention Nash's homosexuality, but they feared the film would make the wrong connection between homosexuality and schizophrenia, so they abandoned it. This connection, according to the article, was based on several now-discredited psychological studies that first appeared in the late 1950s.
  
  
• Director Cameo: [Ron Howard] guest at Governor's Ball, talking to another guest on the right of the screen.
  
  
• John Nash didn't receive the Nobel prize alone, but with colleague Reinhard Selten and Hungarian-born János Harsányi. "Game Theory" was initiated by Hungarian born John von Neumann and Austrian born Oskar Morgenstern in 1944.