Trivia for
Dead Poets Society (1989) More at IMDbPro »

• Originally, Professor Keating was supposed to die of leukemia. But the director decided to have the story focus on the boys instead.
  
  
• Director Peter Weir chose to shoot the film in chronological order to better capture the development of the relationships between the boys and their growing respect for Mr. Keating.
  
  
• Filmed at St. Andrews, a private boarding school in Delaware.
  
  
• Loosely based on the experiences of private school students with Samuel Pickering, who is currently a Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.
  
  
• Liam Neeson had originally landed the leading role to be directed by Jeff Kanew, but lost it to Robin Williams when director Peter Weir came on board.
  
  
• Originally slated to be filmed at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, the project was moved to Delaware because it would have been too expensive to create fake snow on the campus grounds.
  
  
• Frequently shown to fraternity members during leadership seminars because of the striking similarities between the film's plot and the historical events that led to the creation of fraternal organizations at universities in the United States 200 years ago.
  
  
• Peter Weir attended The Scots College, a private boys school in Sydney. The uniforms, discipline and overall feel of the school translated into many of the film's scenes. In 1994 a stage production of the film, the first in the world authorized by Touchstone Pictures, was put on by the school. Peter Weir attended the opening night and spoke about the making of the film.
  
  
• The part of John Keating was once intended for Dustin Hoffman.
  
  
• Charlie Dalton has copied some lines from Abraham Cowley's poem "The Prophet" on the centerfold of Elaine Reynolds, Miss October 1959.
  
  
• When the boys show Professor Keating his old senior yearbook picture, it is in reality Robin William's high school senior picture when he was a student at Redwood High School in Larkspur, California, north of San Francisco
  
  
• The movie's line "Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary." was voted as the #95 movie quote by the American Film Institute (out of 100).
  
  
• The phrase "carpe diem" is from Odes 1.11 of Q. Horatius Flaccus ("Horace"), 65BC-8BC.
  
  
• The poem by Henry David Thoreau that is featured on the front page of the poetry book Neil receives is not an original poem by Thoreau. Rather, it is a rearrangement of sentences from his work "Where I Lived", Chapter 2. The passage containing the quotes seen in the movie actually reads "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, ..."
  
  
• Bill Murray was once considered for the role of John Keating.
  
  
• Mr Perry wants his son Neil to be a doctor. Robert Sean Leonard (Neil) would later play a doctor in _"House" (2004)_.
  
  
• What attracted Robin Williams to the role of John Keating more then anything else was that John Keating was the type of teacher he in his school days always wished he had.
  
  
• According to a 1991 interview on Late Night with David Letterman, Lara Flynn Boyle was told the day of the film's premier that she had been edited out of the film and should not attend the premier.
  
  
• In an episode of The Simpsons, Robin Williams' manic portrayal of an English Literature Teacher in this film is blamed for having "destroyed a generation of educators".
  
  
• The mathematical formula for rating poetry by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard is PxI=G.
  
  
• The first Touchstone Pictures release to receive a best picture nomination.
  
  

Related Links