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Firewall
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 Firewall Production NotesTagline: Everything he loves is about to be used against him.
After a security chief for a global bank is forced to topple his own security safeguards and steal $37 million from the bank to save his kidnapped family, he has to stop the kidnappers, who've created a complex trail that will make him look guilty of embezzlement.
Harrison Ford plays the head of security at a major global bank whose wife and children are held for ransom in order to convince him to rob his own bank for millions of dollars.
Computer security specialist Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford) works for the Seattle-based Landrock Pacific Bank. A trusted top-ranking executive, he has built his career and reputation on designing the most effective anti-theft computer systems in the industry, protecting the bank's financial holdings from the constant threat of increasingly sophisticated internet hackers with his complex network of tracers, access codes and firewalls.
Jack's position affords a comfortable life for him, his architect wife Beth (Virginia Madsen) and their two young children - a standard of living that includes a beautiful home in a residential community just outside the city. But there's a vulnerability in Jack's system that he has not accounted for: himself. It's a vulnerability that one very ruthless and resourceful thief is poised to exploit.
Bill Cox (Paul Bettany) has been studying Jack and his family for many months; monitoring their online activity, listening to their calls and learning their daily routines with an arsenal of digital and video recorders and parabolic microphones that tap into the most personal of information. He knows the names of their children's friends, their medical histories, and the I.D. code for the security station that guards their neighborhood.
Having spent the better part of a year methodically infiltrating every aspect of Jack's identity, Cox is now ready to make good on his investment.
Leading a tight team of mercenary accomplices, he seizes control of the Stanfield house, making Beth and the kids terrified hostages in their own home and Jack his unwilling pawn in a scheme to steal $100 million from the Landrock Pacific Bank.
With every possible escape route shrewdly anticipated and blocked by Cox, every potential ally out of reach and the lives of his wife and children at stake, Jack is forced to find a breach in his own formidable security system to siphon funds into his captor's offshore account - incriminating himself in the process and eradicating any electronic evidence that Cox ever existed.
Under constant surveillance, he has only hours to accomplish the risky transactions while desperately hunting for a loophole in the thief's own impenetrable wall of subterfuge and false identities to save his family and beat Cox at his own game.
About the Production
When banking security specialist Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford) heads home after a day’s work at the Pacific Landrock Bank, he generally breathes a sigh of relief. It’s not that he isn’t fully committed to the job, it’s just that he’s glad to be away from the ever-present cameras and identity checks, the constant maintenance and upgrading of elaborate electronic firewall defense measures that have become standard business practice in this age of online communication and commerce – and online crime. As he parks his car and unlocks the door to his upscale suburban home, Jack would never suspect that here, too, his every move is being observed.
He exchanges greetings with his wife Beth (Virginia Madsen) and they discuss the details of their day while their children argue over the television remote control, unaware that their every word is being recorded via state-of-the-art sensors tuned to every room in the house. When Jack uses the phone, his conversations are overheard. When he opens his E-mail, pays bills, logs onto the Internet, every keystroke is captured. It seems that someone is exceptionally interested in Jack’s habits and schedules, his relationships and concerns….his potential weaknesses.
“The idea that someone evil could attach himself to you and worm his way into your life like that both fascinated me and creeped me out,” says Firewall screenwriter Joe Forte, who poses some disturbing questions about our expectations of privacy and security. “This is a movie about vulnerability,” he adds, noting that most people never encounter this kind of extreme intrusion, so don’t even consider it a possibility. But the reality is, as uncommon as such a scenario might be, “it could potentially happen to anyone.”
“People’s belief that their computers are secure is far from the truth,” says Harrison Ford. “It only depends upon someone having a clear ambition, plus the expertise and energy to break into your system, as well as a compelling reason to do it.” Add to that the number of ways in which surveillance can infringe upon the intimate details of everyday life with equipment readily available on the Internet, and the illusion of privacy wears thin. “I think most people are safe only because they simply don’t have things the bad guys want.”
In this case, it’s not the Stanfields the bad guys are after. It’s the bank. The bulk of a bank’s assets today are more likely to exist not in concrete-reinforced vaults but in cyberspace, attests computer security expert Lawrence T. Levine, a founder of SecurePipe, who provides information security services to businesses worldwide and was a technical consultant on the film. “The industry has experienced a huge transition,” he says.
“The amount of cash in a bank is often insignificant compared to what’s in the computers, generally no more than one percent. So if 99 percent is in the computers, and you’re talking about banks with holdings measured in billions of dollars, then those computers are a very meaningful target for hackers.”
“We’re moving beyond the age of old-fashioned bank robberies. It’s an electronic world and vast sums of money are controlled by codes and keyboards,” says Firewall producer Armyan Bernstein, producer of the Golden Globe-nominated The Hurricane (which he also co-wrote), Thirteen Days and the Harrison Ford blockbuster Air Force One.
Citing pre-production research the Firewall team conducted into the banking industry, Bernstein notes that security today is a 24-hour effort, with teams of experts dedicated to “circumvent thieves on the Internet trying to break into the system. It’s happening right now, as we speak. Someone is trying to crack the firewall of a bank and walk away with your money.”
Combine that reality with the shock of a home invasion and you have the nightmare possibility that provided the inspiration for Firewall, in which the fictional Jack Stanfield finds himself facing such an insidious and overpowering adversary – a man who takes control of his entire life. Knowing any system that can be built can be breached, he then forces Jack to override his own security protocol to steal $100 million from the bank where he works.
“Here’s a man who has spent his entire life building a career and a reputation, a loving family, a safe home, happiness, essentially the American dream, and it’s all taken away from him in one fell swoop,” says Firewall producer Basil Iwanyk, whose production credits include Terminator 3 and The Laws of Attraction and who worked with Ford on K-19: The Widowmaker. He believes this is the emotional core of the story. “It’s not just devastating, it’s devastation at a primal level and something that, I think, really hits home for most people.”
The mastermind behind this cunning crime, the man who calls himself Bill Cox, is played by Paul Bettany, whose performance as Dr. Maturin in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World earned a 2003 BAFTA nomination. Bettany sees the deadly but dispassionate Cox as “essentially a businessman. He does whatever is necessary to get the job done,” while conceding, “he’s also a thief and a psychopath, but I don’t think he sees himself as a cruel man. It’s not personal. He has simply decided to make a lot of money very quickly and using Jack is the most logical and expedient way to achieve that end.”
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Harrison Ford as Jack Stanfield and Virginia Madsen as Beth Stanfield in Firewall.
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