20 Things You Didn't Know About Speed
18. It Was Inspired By A Kurosawa - Indirectly
Screenwriter Graham Yost - who later went on to create the FX hit Justified - was the son of Canadian TV host Elwy Yost. As a young man, his father told him of a Jon Voight film entitled Runaway Train about an unstoppable train containing convicts in the Alaskan wild. The idea for the film was first spawned by acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, who had read an article in Life Magazine and considered doing a co-international production loosely based on what he'd read.
Runaway Train passed hands several times, from Francis Ford Coppola to finally the Golan-Globus production company. Despite the messy, decades-long history and the property winding up in the hands of the producers of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Runaway Train was surprisingly well-received, earning Voight and co-star Eric Roberts Oscar nominations for their respective roles.
But all Yost's father mistakenly recalled was the reason for the train's unstoppability: a bomb.
Yost spitballed from there and, after a Japanese man read Life in 1964, the initial kernels of Speed were planted.