Trivia for
Lolita (1997) More at IMDbPro »

• Hospital scenes filmed in Austin High School in El Paso, Texas.
  
  
• Since actress Dominique Swain was only 15 at the time of filming, a pillow had to be placed between her and Jeremy Irons' lap during all their scenes together.
  
  
• Over 2500 girls, including Christina Ricci and Melissa Joan Hart, tried out for the title role.
  
  
• Interior shots of Clare Quilty's home were filmed in Chinqua Penn Plantation in Reidsville, NC.
  
  
• Dustin Hoffman was originally signed to play Humbert Humbert before being replaced by Jeremy Irons.
  
  
• Gérard Depardieu was originally signed to play Quilty before being replaced by Frank Langella.
  
  
• As Dominique Swain was not yet an adult woman when the movie was filmed, an adult body double had to be used for some of the sex scenes.
  
  
• The film had a hard time in finding a distributor. When filming finally began, New Line Cinema was the distributor, but they dropped the film from distribution when they saw an early cut. It later got a limited cinema run, through a small independent distributor, before finally making a big premiere on the Showtime Entertainment TV channel.
  
  
• In Australia, the film was held back from release, due to concerns about promoting pedophilia. It was granted release in 1999 with an R rating.
  
  
• Natalie Portman turned down the role of Lolita.
  
  
• The house where all the Haze home scenes are shot is located in Wilmington, North Carolina. All the scenes in the house were actually filmed there, rather than using a sound stage for the interiors.
  
  
• In the novel, Lolita is only 12 when Humbert first meets her. In the film, her age was changed to 14. The same thing happened in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962).
  
  
• Nadia Litz auditioned for the title role.
  
  
• Ralph Fiennes was considered for the part of Humbert Humbert.
  
  
• Charles Chaplin's relationship with his second wife Lita Grey was reportedly the inspiration of the novel "Lolita" as she was underage when they first started their relationship.
  
  
• Frank Langella discovered belatedly that director Adrian Lyne had kept a full-frontal nude-shot of him (during Quilty's death scene), and left it in the movie. Langella was furious with Lyne over what happened; he still gets embarrassed talking about it.
  
  

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