Quest for trivia:

Ten facts about Quest for Fire

1.
Quest for Fire is a loose adaptation of a 1911 Belgian fantasy novel by J.-H. Rosny, a pseudonym for brothers Séraphin Justin François Boex and his older brother Joseph Henri Honoré Boex.

2.
Quest for Fire was the movie debut of Ron Perlman, who went on to play the titular superhero demon in Guillermo del Toro’s film series Hellboy.

3.
David Prowse, the actor and body-builder who played Darth Vader in Star Wars, auditioned for the film. He had previously played a cameo part in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

4.
The film’s stars, Everett McGill and Ron Perlman, suffered frostbite during production, while the set designer contracted anthrax from handling animal skins.

5.
The woolly mammoths in the film were played by specially-trained circus elephants. Before they arrived in the country, their Iceland ranch was stricken by a volcanic eruption.

6.
Quest for Fire won an an Academy Award for Best Makeup, making it a 1983 Oscar winner alongside Meryl Streep, ET: The Extra-Terrestrial and Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.

7.
The characters’ gestures were choreographed by the anthropologist Desmond Morris, who has studied body language in 91 different countries.

8.
The Kzamm tribe were played by professional wrestlers. Among them was The Great Antonio, who could eat 25 chickens in a single sitting, and Giant Haystacks, well known to viewers of British television as the nemesis of Big Daddy.

9.
Director Jean-Jacques Annaud was bombarded with letters from creationists, who insisted that mankind was no more than 6,000 years old.

10.
The heavy-metal band Iron Maiden wrote a song inspired by the film. This appeared on their 1983 album Piece of Mind, a surprisingly literary work which also referenced Frank Herbert, Ramsey Campbell and G. K. Chesterton.

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