Deliverance to play Lewis Medlock. Jack Nicholson was considered for the role of Ed, while both Donald Sutherland and Charlton Heston turned down the role of Lewis. Other actors who were attached to the project included Robert Redford, Henry Fonda, George C. Scott and Warren Beatty. The film is infamous for cutting costs by not insuring the production and having the actors perform their own stunts (most notably, Jon Voight climbed the cliff himself). In one scene, the stunt coordinator decided that a scene showing a canoe with a dummy of Burt Reynolds in it looked phony; he said it looked
Jon Voight psychological thriller based on a story by Swiss novelist and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Voight was Steven Spielberg's first choice for the role of Matt Hooper in the 1975 film "Jaws", but he turned down the role, which was ultimately played by Richard Dreyfuss. In 1978, Voight portrayed the paraplegic Vietnam veteran Luke Martin in Hal Ashby's film "Coming Home," and was awarded Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, for his portrait of an embittered paraplegic, reportedly based on real-life Vietnam veteran-turned-antiwar-activist Ron Kovic, with whom Fonda's character falls in love. The film included a much-talked-about love scene between the