"Running is not about winning, it's about guts...
To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift..."

- Steve Prefontaine

Recalls Moore, "Robert and I happened to be working on a project with Tom Cruise, who is also a runner and was training for a triathlon at that time. Robert showed him seven minutes of "Fire on the Track," a documentary about Steve Prefontaine. Tom immediately loved the story and wanted to see it made as a dramatic feature."

"Pre is a great American character in a great American story," reflects Cruise. "And at another level, Pre was also a classic archetypal character, athlete as hero, with all the physical strengths and psychological weaknesses that inevitably lead to the most interesting dramatic conflicts. This story material is rich, multidimensional, complex. It really needs and deserves to be handled thoughtfully by a top motion picture talent such as Robert Towne."

"Pre was a true free spirit," notes producer Paula Wagner of Cruise/Wagner Productions. "He's the exception from the crowd as well as from the rules. He's a rebel. He's cool. He's sexy. He's a distinctively American kind of hero."

"What inspired me about the project was the ability to learn more about Pre, his fellow competitors and his magnificent coach Bill Bowerman," says Towne. "This was a sport that was certainly, at that time, purist. They were doing it just to run faster, to leap higher and jump farther. It was a sport that pitted Pre not just against his opponents, but against his own needs."

"The rigor with which Robert and I personally approached this story had to do with getting it right, doing it the way it really was, "says Moore. "This is a story about a brave guy going out and forcing his moral order into a race by being a front-runner. He ran so hard that no one had any chance of winning this race unless they dragged themselves through hell to do it, because Pre was going to do it."

"The first time I met Billy," says Moore, "I thought I was having dinner with the same Prefontaine who had lived five years longer and gone to grad school. He had that same cockiness, that same attitude. The real parallels are the things he reacts to, the almost instinctive way that he delivers his lines with the sense of himself. Billy's much more polished than Pre but he's got the same candor."

Bill Bowerman, Prefontaine's first coach at Oregon and later his Olympic coach, was the second key role to be cast. The part required another actor with a larger-than-life presence, because Bowerman's own history is a memorable one. The trainer of an astonishing series of winning runners at the University of Oregon and the developer of the first Nike running shoe, Bowerman had the exceptional ability to understand and motive the psyche of a runner. And he was particularly significant to Pre. As a friend, conscience and mentor, Bowerman's teaching and presence in Prefontaine's life were critical in shaping the runner's outlook and success.

The filmmakers were extremely pleased to cast award-winning actor Donald Sutherland in the role of Bill Bowerman. "Sutherland is one of the great communicative instruments of our age," says Moore. "He's not immediately a lot like Bowerman, who intimidated us with how unreadable he was. Bowerman could advance on you with an expression that you didn't know if he was going to grin, give you a kiss, compliment you or lift you up off the earth and tell you your training program was all wrong. One never knew until the last second what was going to happen."

"What Sutherland has done," says Towne, "is to take the Bowerman essence and run it through the Sutherland machinery."

The story of Steve Prefontaine also had a romantic aspect. Pre was a charismatic figure who enjoyed the attention he received, and dated many women. But Mary Marckx was special. When the filmmakers first saw Monica Potter, they were dazzled by her beauty and vulnerability. "She had the right combination of naiveté and strength that has helped her embody the character of Mary Marckx," says Towne.

For Potter, it was a challenge to portray a real-life character who was still living. She spent a lot of time with Mary Marckx, learning about her life and her relationship with Pre. "She's very strong willed, strong in her beliefs," says Potter of Marckx. "Mary really knew Pre. She saw a side of him that not very many people saw. Mary wrote a book about their relationship, how they spent time together, her feelings toward his running career and putting track first instead of her. After reading the manuscript I felt I was able to get inside her character."

Featured supporting roles in "Without Limits" are played by JEREMY SISTO as Olympic marathoner Frank Shorter, GABE OLDS as three-miler Don Kardong, JUDITH IVEY as Barbara Bowerman, DEAN NORRIS as assistant University of Oregon track coach Bill Dellinger, BILLY BURKE as Olympic marathoner Kenny Moore, Olympian ADAM SETLIFF as Olympic discus champion Mac Wilkins, NICHOLAS OLESON as javelin thrower Russ Francis, WILLIAM MAPOTHER as Bob Peters and MATTHEW LILLARD as miler Roscoe Devine.

"The challenges of the actor and the athlete are very similar," says producer Wagner. "Both professions involve tremendous concentration and focus."

Billy Crudup had been a college athlete and he had a natural quickness on the track. His four months of vigorous training involved the same kind of hard/easy drills that coach Bill Bowerman developed for his own teams.

Says Towne of his star, "He slept with the videos. He watched all the footage of Pre -- every move, every look to the clock, every arm action."

Knowing that there would never be a sequence that would require the athletes to run more than 110 to 200 yards for a 5,000 meter race, Crudup's coach for the film, Patrice Donnelly, trained the actor to run short distances at race pace. This did not involve a lot of mileage, but rather many repetitive high-speed intervals. Several times a week Crudup ran 100-200 meter strides with long rests, mimicking what he would be doing during filming.

Says Moore, "When I first ran with him, he was fast already. Crudup loved to get out and test himself. Patrice would time him at 200 meters. He would run 28.5 and the next week he'd run at 28, then at 27.5 the following week. He got down to the 26s before shooting started -- he even ran a whole quarter at :59. Crudup's responses to training were dramatic. That's what talent is - that potential, that response."

Says Towne, "We wanted to capture the familiarity of athletes who have run against one another so often that they can actually tell who's near them by the sound of the way they breathe. Or having the single footstep, the quickness of it, so that you get to know principal opponents. As a front runner, Pre always had one ear cocked, so sound is particularly important because he couldn't see who was behind him. We wanted to take advantage of that, so we used sound as character. Each footstep connected to a runner would be distinct."

Often referred to as "the Carnegie Hall of track and field," Hayward Field is where the Prefontaine era continues in the Oregon tradition of distance running excellence created by legendary coaches Bill Bowerman and Bill Dellinger.

One day during filming at Hayward Field a sudden commotion arose and there was the legendary Bill Bowerman in the flesh, standing next to Donald Sutherland, who was portraying him. "That was an exhilarating experience," says producer Wagner. "Here we were watching someone playing Bowerman and watching the real Bowerman watching the races that he'd coached years before. He got up and the crowd in the stands were cheering."

Other filming locations in the Eugene area included Heceta Head Beach, near Florence; Bill Bowerman's home; Laurelwood Golf course, where Pre ran; and the site where Steve Prefontaine died.

After two months in Oregon, the company moved to Los Angeles, where they filmed the 1972 Munich Olympic sequences at Citrus College in Southern California. "The infield and track at Citrus," explains executive producer Jonathan Sanger, "is very similar to the track at the Munich Olympic Stadium."

The Munich sequences involved a different style of running than the races shot in Eugene. Crudup had to run in groups, in traffic with experienced athletes, rather than front-running. "There's a lot of jostling that an uneducated eye would never pick out," says trainer Donnelly. But in order to achieve the desired level of realism, the filmmakers intercut actual BBC footage from the Munich Olympics with the footage they shot at Citrus.

Other runners who participated in the filming of the Munich sequences are some of the top U.S. distance runners: the 1994 National champ at 10,000 meters, TOM ANSBERRY, plays Emiel Puttemans; eight-time U.S. Cross-Country champ and Olympian PAT PORTER plays Lasse Viren; 1500 meter Olympic Trials qualifier STEVE AVE plays Mohamed Gammoudi; and 28-minute 10K runner ASHLEY JOHNSON plays Ian Stewart.

"Pre and the rest of the runners of his generation wanted to be tested, wanted to know the truth. Theirs was not a dance between perception and reality. It was the least political act that one can imagine -- purely about performance, not politics, not illusion."

"There were all these forces against the amateur athletes," adds Moore. "Some of them were exploitative, some were part of the leftover amateur establishment that had its exploitative aspect. You really felt in the '70s that you were on the cutting edge of some real social change -- Arthur Ashe; Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who waved their fists in the air in 1968 at the Olympics; Muhammad Ali. Yet there has never been a more powerful voice than Pre's regarding freedom of athletes to go and compete against the finest athletes they could find. It was the Olympic creed -- faster, higher, stronger. And Steve Prefontaine was the ultimate Olympic athlete."

Mary Decker Slaney, a former Olympic runner who met and trained with Pre when both were teenagers, vividly remembers his emotional approach to his sport. "Pre had, among some people, the reputation for being arrogant, but I knew him and that's not the way he seemed to me. He had great passion for running, and he was generous with his time, consideration and support to people who shared that passion. He had tremendous heart.

"I'm glad that this movie was made, because it will introduce Pre to young athletes, and because it shows someone who became a success on a singular, personal level. He was one of the best."

"I run best when I run free."
     - Steve Prefontaine