Catch Me If You Can Trivia
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This Catch Me If You Can trivia quiz has 48 free questions with answers and covers Steven Spielberg's 2002 film from the animated title sequence to the closing captions: Frank Abagnale Jr.'s three careers (pilot, doctor, lawyer), his aliases, the FBI agent who chases him across two continents, the Christmas Eve phone calls, the engagement party escape and the getaway through an airliner's toilet. It also goes behind the camera to the directors who nearly made it, the actor once cast as Hanratty, the 52-day shoot, the Oscar nominations, and the real Frank Abagnale, whose 1980 memoir sparked it all and whose story has since been picked apart by investigators. The 2011 Broadway musical gets its own questions too. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who directed the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can?
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg joined only as a producer and offered the job to other directors before taking it himself, later saying he had never worked faster in his life.
Q 02Which actor plays FBI agent Carl Hanratty in Catch Me If You Can?
Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks came to the dogged FBI man straight from playing a Depression-era hitman in Road to Perdition, a switch Variety summed up as 'from gangster to G-man'.
Q 03Which actor earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor as Frank Abagnale Sr.?
Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken was first suggested for the part by producer Walter Parkes, who saw Frank Sr. as a modern Willy Loman, a charmer whom the American dream keeps eluding.
Q 04Which then little-known actress plays Brenda Strong, the nurse Frank gets engaged to in Catch Me If You Can?
Amy Adams
Amy Adams won the part after a casting search that lasted months; the director loved her audition tape, and a producer called her as fresh and honest as anyone they had seen.
Q 05In Catch Me If You Can, which airline's pilot uniform does Frank wear while cashing forged payroll cheques?
Pan Am
Pan Am supplies the uniform itself: Frank phones the airline posing as a co-pilot whose hotel has lost his, and is sent straight to its uniform supplier.
Q 06Cornered in a motel in Catch Me If You Can, Frank poses as a Secret Service agent with what name?
Barry Allen
Barry Allen is the Flash's real name, as Carl learns in a diner, and the comic-book slip is his first clue that the forger he is chasing is only a kid.
Q 07In Catch Me If You Can, under what name does Frank pose as a doctor at a Georgia hospital?
Dr. Conners
Dr. Conners is hired to supervise the emergency room's overnight shift, and gets through it by making his junior doctors agree every diagnosis among themselves.
Q 08Which state's bar exam does Frank pass in Catch Me If You Can with the help of Brenda's father?
Louisiana
Louisiana: Carl spends the rest of the film asking how he cheated on it, and Frank's final answer is that he studied for two weeks and passed.
Q 09In Catch Me If You Can, how does Frank escape when Carl turns up at his engagement party?
Through a bedroom window
Through a bedroom window: first he tells Brenda he is no doctor or lawyer, shows her a case full of cash and begs her to run away with him.
Q 10In Catch Me If You Can, in which French town, his mother's home village, is Frank finally arrested?
Montrichard
Montrichard is where his father, a young GI, first watched his mother dance, and Carl finds it by recalling her remark about a village that had never heard of Sara Lee.
Q 11How does Frank get off the plane flying him back to America in Catch Me If You Can?
Through the lavatory
Through the lavatory: told on the descent that his father has died, he shuts himself in, unbolts the toilet and drops out beneath the plane as it lands.
Q 12In Catch Me If You Can, how does Frank end up serving most of his twelve-year prison sentence?
Working for the FBI
Working for the FBI: Carl has him released into the bureau's custody to examine bad cheques, a nine-to-five routine that soon bores him into nearly running again.
Q 13In Frank Sr.'s favourite story in Catch Me If You Can, two mice fall into a bucket of what?
Cream
Q 21Catch Me If You Can opened in American cinemas on which holiday in 2002?
Christmas Day
Christmas Day suits a film whose hunter and quarry keep meeting at Christmas: Frank rings Carl on Christmas Eve because, as Carl guesses, he has no one else to call.
Q 22Who composed the jazzy score for Catch Me If You Can?
John Williams
John Williams dropped his usual large orchestra and broad themes for a progressive-jazz sound featuring a solo saxophone.
Q 23Which Frank Sinatra song features on the Catch Me If You Can soundtrack?
Come Fly with Me
Come Fly with Me was a particular favourite of the director's, and the title alone suited a hero who talks his way into cockpit jump seats for free rides.
Cream: the first mouse gives up and drowns, the second struggles until it churns the cream into butter and climbs out, and Frank later recites the tale as grace at dinner.
Q 14In Catch Me If You Can, with whom is Frank's mother having the affair that ends his parents' marriage?
His father's friend
His father's friend Jack Barnes, president of the Rotary Club that honours Frank Sr. in the first flashback, is the man she later marries, as Frank discovers years on.
Q 15In Catch Me If You Can, in which suburb does the Abagnale family live before tax troubles cost them their house?
New Rochelle
New Rochelle's Rotary Club makes Frank Sr. a lifetime member in the first flashback, shortly before a tax investigation takes his shop and the family home.
Q 16In Catch Me If You Can, from which French port city does Carl collect his prisoner?
Marseille
Marseille: Carl finds Frank feverish in a filthy cell and demands a doctor, only for the sick man to make one more dash for the door before agreeing to go home.
Q 17From which TV medical drama does Frank pick up the line 'Do you concur?' in Catch Me If You Can?
Dr. Kildare
Dr. Kildare: Frank studies the show at home, then tries the line on his own junior doctors, one of whom can only ask what exactly he is supposed to concur with.
Q 18On his first day at a new school in Catch Me If You Can, Frank passes himself off as what?
A substitute teacher
A substitute teacher: teased over his old school blazer, he writes his name on the blackboard and runs the French class for a week before his parents are called in.
Q 19According to Frank Sr. in Catch Me If You Can, why do the New York Yankees always win?
Rivals stare at the pinstripes
Rivals stare at the pinstripes, he says, waving away his son's guess of Mickey Mantle, and the Broadway musical later built a song on the line.
Q 20Which Martin Scorsese film did Leonardo DiCaprio also have in cinemas when Catch Me If You Can opened?
Gangs of New York
Gangs of New York opened five days earlier, and waiting for DiCaprio to finish its overrunning shoot had already cost Catch Me If You Can one of its directors.
Q 24The real Frank Abagnale makes a cameo in Catch Me If You Can as what?
A French police officer
A French police officer: the real Abagnale helps arrest his own screen self, as one of the gendarmes who seize Leonardo DiCaprio's Frank.
Q 25Which director, then living in Paris, screen-tested French actresses to play Frank's mother in Catch Me If You Can?
Brian De Palma
Brian De Palma filmed the tests at the request of his friend the director, who wanted a real Frenchwoman as Frank's French mother, and they turned up Nathalie Baye.
Q 26Which future Hunger Games star plays Lucy, the cashier Frank takes to dinner in Catch Me If You Can?
Elizabeth Banks
Elizabeth Banks's Lucy tells her charming date how cheques carry routing numbers along the bottom, a lesson he at once turns into a new kind of forgery.
Q 27The director spotted Jennifer Garner in which TV series before casting her in Catch Me If You Can?
Alias
Alias had Garner playing a different character every week, and it won her a one-scene part as a call girl who thinks she is the one doing the hustling.
Q 28Which future Grey's Anatomy star plays Marci, one of the young women Frank charms in Catch Me If You Can?
Ellen Pompeo
Ellen Pompeo's Marci is the flight attendant who greets Frank on his first free ride in a cockpit jump seat, and whom he takes on what he calls the best date he has ever had.
Q 29Who wrote the screenplay for Catch Me If You Can?
Jeff Nathanson
Jeff Nathanson was hooked by a twenty-minute tape of Abagnale telling his own story, sent by a producer, and his script then waited years while directors came and went.
Q 30Which regular collaborator of the director shot Catch Me If You Can as its cinematographer?
Janusz Kamiński
Janusz Kamiński's speed suited a shoot that sometimes took in three locations a day; the producer said he and the director share an unspoken shorthand like nothing he had seen.