Free Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life by James L. Dickerson

she doesn’t have time, then changes her mind and agrees to fly to Charlotte with him. Later, while they are in bed, she asks, “Tell me what you love so much about racing?”
    “The speed—to be able to control it. To know that I can control something that’s out of control. I’d really have to show you.”
    “Show me,” she says, and they kiss.
    In another scene, after he has scared the hell out of her by racing with an irate cab driver, she yells at him: “Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac. Nobody knows what is going to happen next . . . nobody knows and nobody controls anything. You’ve gotten a glimpse of that and you’re scared.”
    As the story progresses, Trickle learns that Rowdy has more serious injuries than they first realized. He needs surgery and will be unable to race his car in the Daytona 500. Since Trickle has lost his sponsor, Rowdy asks him to race his car. Trickle reluctantly agrees, but everyone, himself included, wonders if he has lost his nerve as a result of the previous accident.
    On the day of the big race, Claire shows up at the racetrack but tells Trickle that she does not plan to stick around to watch the race. Says Trickle, “Claire, I’m more afraid of being nothing than I am of being hurt.”
    Of course, when Trickle drives out onto the track, Claire changes her mind and joins Hogge in the pit to watch the race and cheer him on to victory.
    For Nicole, making the film was an adventure unto itself, for she had never seen a NASCAR race. Not until Tom took her for a 180-mile-per-hour spin around the track did she understand what all the excitement was about. “It was fantastic,” she said in ESPN’s The Making of Days of Thunder. “I really like things that get my adrenaline pumping. I’d never watched a race before .  .  . now I can understand why people get hooked on it.” 
    To make Days of Thunder, the film company built sixty cars, but by the time production wrapped, they only had two cars left, having wrecked the other fifty-eight. One of those wrecked cars was used for the scene in which Tom experiences a devastating crash. To capture it on film, Tom’s car was equipped with a camera and a sawed-off telephone pole that was rigged to dig into the pavement at the appropriate time to send the vehicle tumbling end over end at 120-miles-per-hour. Taped inside the car was a note for the driver: “Turn wheel to left, push button—good luck”
    Parts of the movie were filmed during a live television broadcast, so it was always a challenge to keep the movie cameramen out of the way of the television cameramen. Before each scene, director Tony Scott used storyboards and an assortment of toy cars to show the camera crews and stunt drivers exactly what he wanted captured on film. They placed cameras beneath the cars and inside the cars, the goal being to find vantage points that had not yet been exploited by other filmmakers. In all, Scott used an astonishing twenty-eight movie cameras to make the film.
    Even with all the technical razzle-dazzle at his disposal, Scott placed a higher premium on making a film that explored the personalities of the men behind-the-scenes of NASCAR. “The characters that I’ve written are based on these people and not just cars going around in circles,” screenwriter Robert Towne said in the ESPN documentary. “I believe that we have gotten a sense of these people on film.”
     When Days of Thunder was released in June 1990, it did only moderately well at the box office—it took in nearly $89 million domestically when it needed $100 million to show a substantial profit—and reviews were mixed.
     “ Days of Thunder serves up little to think about, much less enjoy,” wrote David Sterritt for the Christian Science Monitor . “There’s a certain novelty in seeing Mr. Duvall give one of his rare mediocre performances, and there’s a certain hilarity in watching Australian actress Nicole Kidman impersonate a ‘brain doctor,’