Cruel Intentions has a lot of memorable moments. It’s the 90s teen film that’s always 69% more cooked than you remember and, when it comes down to it, is mostly about anal.
But what is remembered as the most epic scene in the whole movie is definitely the final shot, of Annette (Reese Witherspoon) speeding away from Sebastian’s (Ryan Phillippe) memorial in his sports car to the sound of The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’.
It’s oddly triumphant for a post-your-boyfriend’s-funeral vibe, but odd pretty accurately sums up everything that goes down in this movie, so it works.
Entertainment Weekly has commemorated the film’s 20th anniversary with an oral history that dives deep into all the dirty details, and filmmaker Roger Kumble pointed out a major error in that final sequence.
If you look beyond Reese Witherspoon in that shot of Annette’s grand escape from the evils of New York, she’s definitely out of place.
“You see the tumbleweeds of L.A.!” Kumble said, laughing. “There’s burnt-out grass as she’s driving by, and then we cut to Manhattan. We never got called on it. It’s a huge thing, and no one cares. They’re not looking out [her] window.”
In spite of being set in New York, the majority of Cruel Intentions was filmed on the West Coast. Luckily that scene keeps us so absorbed in the moment with the wind in the hair and the music and the general energy, that no one noticed the backdrop.
Even if they decided to re-do the scene so that the setting was accurate, Witherspoon apparently didn’t love shooting it in the first place.
“I was terrified because the car was rattling,” she admitted. “I was driving this rickety Jaguar. It was a cool shot, and I was glad we did it! But I just remember getting out and going, ‘I’m never doing that again.’”
But it didn’t matter in the end, because no one noticed or cared that the final scene is completely out of place, and that’s a testament to how damn good that final scene is.