Trivia for
Traffic (2000) More at IMDbPro »

• Michael Douglas originally declined the role of Robert Wakefield, and it was offered to Harrison Ford, who accepted. Ford worked with director Steven Soderbergh to improve the character, but then decided not to do the movie. Douglas liked the change in the character so much, he accepted the revamped part.
  
  
• Kevin Costner was reportedly also offered the Judge Wakefield part.
  
  
• Writer Stephen Gaghan originally planned to set the Wakefield family storylines in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. During his research, he determined that Cincinnati's bad neighborhoods looked worse than Louisville's, and would serve the finished film better, so he moved the Wakefields' stories to Ohio.
  
  
• The film has 135 speaking parts and was shot in over 110 locations in eight different cities.
  
  
• The film's soundtrack, except for the musical score, was recorded in mono.
  
  
• The scenes that take place in the White House were shot on the set of the television series "The West Wing" (1999), which is a near-exact replica (albeit wider, to allow for free movement of the cameras) of the actual interiors of the White House's West Wing.
  
  
• Catherine Zeta-Jones was pregnant during filming, and the role was adjusted to suit her condition. Originally, her character was already a mother of two instead of six months pregnant.
  
  
• In the movie, Michael Douglas's character lived in the suburb Indian Hill, which is a real neighborhood ten miles outside of Cincinnati. The scenes were actually filmed at a house in Hyde Park, an affluent suburb within city limits.
  
  
• This is a remake of the British mini-series "Traffik" (1989), produced and shown by Channel Four.
  
  
• Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas were engaged before filming began; they married soon after. They do not appear in any scenes together.
  
  
• Helena Ayala's license plate is 2GAT123. The same California license plate also appears in Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), L.A. Story (1991), Go (1999), Pay It Forward (2000), Mulholland Dr. (2001), Crazy/Beautiful (2001), "Two and a Half Men" (2003), and S.W.A.T. (2003).
  
  
• After filming one day, actor James Brolin returned to his car to find two youths attempting to break in. Still in his general's uniform, he frightened away the would-be thieves, who mistook him for a real military officer.
  
  
• In the original theatrical release it was mentioned that Caroline and her friends went to a school called Cincinnati Country Day, a small prep school in Cincinnati. When CCD protested being associated with drug addiction, references to the name of the school were removed from the video version.
  
  
• Four people won Oscars for this film. Their names were Steven, Stephen, Stephen and Benicio.
  
  
• Benicio Del Toro is one of only five actors to have won an Academy Award for a part spoken mainly in a foreign language (most of Del Toro's dialog is in Spanish). Sophia Loren, Robert De Niro, Marion Cotillard and Roberto Benigni are the other four.
  
  
• When a critic commented that it seemed unrealistic that the daughter's high school record was almost perfect when she was taking drugs, screenwriter Stephen Gaghan pointed out that the high school record in the movie was his and that he had been abusing drugs at the time.
  
  
• In the original big screen release, Caroline (Erika Christensen) states that she attends Cincinatti Country Day. Stephen Gaghan, (screenplay), attended a private school in Louisville, KY called Kentucky Country Day and was expelled the week before his graduation for driving a go-cart down the halls of the school.
  
  
• Every scene that takes place in Tijuana is shot with a hand-held camera.
  
  
• To prepare for the scenes in which they were high, the teens had to have peppermint dust blown into their face to make their eyes and noses red.
  
  
• During the party scene where Bowman ODs, the teens were snorting dried milk. Corey Spears (Bowman) snorted so much that he became ill.
  
  
• Senator Harry Reid is shown speaking with Michael Douglas's character at the beginning of the movie. A script was written for the senator, but he didn't like it. Instead, he had the actor ask him the question and he responded as he would normally.
  
  
• To achieve a distinctive look for each different vignette in the story, Steven Soderbergh used three different film stocks (and post-production techniques), each with their own color treatment and grain for the print. The "Wakefield" story features a colder, bluer tone to match the sad, depressive emotion. The "Ayala" story is bright, shiny, and saturated in primary colors, especially red, to match the glitzy surface of Helena's life. The "Mexican" story appears grainy, rough, and hot to go with the rugged Mexican landscape and congested cities.
  
  
• Director Steven Soderbergh is known as being first camera on many of his films, as a result, he was operating the camera for most of the shooting.
  
  
• On the first day of production of Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) - Steven Soderbergh's first film - the producers of that movie sent a telegram to Soderbergh. They teased him good-naturedly, telling him they'd heard reports he "couldn't direct traffic". Twelve years later, Soderbergh won an Oscar - for directing "Traffic".
  
  
• The hotel that Eduardo Ruiz was being kept at, The Hotel San Diego, was imploded in 2006 to make way for the expansion of the Federal Courthouse in San Diego.
  
  
• Al Pacino was also asked to play Judge Wakefield but couldn't fit it into his schedule and Richard Gere was considered before Michael Douglas came on board.
  
  
• The scene where Michael Douglas takes his trip to the California border crossing to discuss drug interdiction was actually shot at the Tijuana crossing. The video and sound quality is so low in part because it was never supposed to be part of the movie. Douglas started asking, out of character, Rudy M. Camacho about drug trafficking on the border. Camacho was, at the time, the actual Customs chief in charge of the California border crossings. Steven Soderbergh began filming it with a hand-held camera, praying that Camacho wouldn't address the actor as "Mr. Douglas".
  
  
• The company where Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzmán) go to apprehend Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer) is called Perennial Storage. Director Steven Soderbergh has used the name "Perennial" for companies in several of his films. The courier company that Terence Stamp's character visits in The Limey (1999) is called Perennial Couriers and it is also referenced in Out of Sight (1998) and Underneath (1995).
  
  
• All of the scenes in the US have a blue tint and all of the scenes in Mexico have a yellow tint.
  
  

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