Fracture Rolling Ball Sculpture - The Ball Machines in the Movie

The Rolling Ball Sculptures in "Fracture" with Anthony Hopkins

The movie Fracture, starring Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling, was released in 2007 and became, for a few years, a substantial accidental marketing tool for my work. By 2007, I had already been building rolling ball sculptures and ball machines for more than four years.

During the first year after the movie was released, I would get several inquiries every month, sometimes multiple inquiries in the same week, from people asking if I could recreate the rolling ball sculptures they had seen in Fracture. My response was always pretty much the same. Yes, I knew about the movie. Yes, I had seen the sculptures. And no, I couldn't recreate them.

I would politely explain that I could build them a rolling ball sculpture of a similar size and complexity, but it would have to be made in my own style. I couldn't copy another artist's work. I also build primarily in stainless steel, while the sculptures in the movie used a lot of brass and wood. And frankly, I can't even copy my own sculptures exactly. I've tried. Haha.

The rolling ball sculptures featured in Fracture came from the work and designs of Dutch kinetic artist Mark Bischof.

Three Rolling Ball Sculptures in Fracture

There are two rolling ball sculptures prominently featured in the film - well, actually there are three.

The first appears during the opening credits. It's an incredibly intricate ball machine made with dark wood, brass tracks and a huge number of paths and mechanical elements. This is Mark Bischof's original sculpture, which lives in the basement of his home. The film crew traveled there and filmed the sculpture specifically for the movie.

The second is the smaller desktop sculpture Anthony Hopkins' character, Ted Crawford, works on during the film. It's a great little piece, with brass tracks, wood accents and a small wooden wheel that lifts the balls back to the top. The ball machines fit Crawford's character extremely well. In fact, one of the film's writers explained that the idea was to use a complicated machine as a physical representation of the way Crawford's mind works.

The third is the large rolling ball sculpture, roughly five feet tall, featured prominently in the living room of the main house where the murder takes place. This sculpture has an interesting story of its own. The production originally wanted to use Bischof's large original sculpture, but moving it simply wasn't an option. Instead, the large piece used on the set was built by the film production crew, by hand, based on Mark's designs.

And they didn't just make something that looked like a working ball machine. They actually made it work. One of the film's writers later commented that he hadn't expected the crew to build a functioning machine when he wrote it into the script, but they did.

And Then Anthony Hopkins Smashes It

There's another interesting bit that most people who have only watched the theatrical version of Fracture won't know.

If you have the DVD, there's an alternate ending where Anthony Hopkins destroys the large rolling ball sculpture. He smashes the thing! All of that work building a functioning ball machine for the movie, and then they destroyed it for a scene that didn't even make it into the theatrical release. The alternate ending does indeed involve Hopkins' character destroying the rolling marble machine while trying to retrieve evidence hidden inside it.

I guess that was easier than letting the production crew fight over who got to take the ball machine home.

Discovering Mark Bischof's Original Ball Machine

My interest in the sculptures from Fracture eventually led me to track down some wonderful videos of Mark Bischof talking about his experience with the movie, along with much better footage of his original rolling ball sculpture.

As I learned more about the original machine, I found out that it had already been roughly a ten-year journey of creativity and construction at the time. It's an extraordinarily intricate piece with many, many different paths. Honestly, it's one of the largest and most elaborate works of rolling ball art I've ever seen.

I've studied his sculpture many times. I appreciate, and am a little awed by, the amount of work and intricate woodworking that went into building it. My own rolling ball sculptures are very different. I primarily TIG weld stainless steel and tend to approach these machines from a more mechanical direction. Bischof's combination of wood, brass, mechanics and craftsmanship gives his work an entirely different character.

That's one of the things I've always enjoyed about rolling ball sculpture. Give different builders the same basic ingredients - gravity, balls, tracks and mechanical elements - and you'll end up with completely different machines.

Fracture Introduced People to Rolling Ball Sculpture

What I find particularly interesting looking back is how many people apparently had no idea what these machines were called.

They had seen this fascinating ball machine in a movie and wanted one, but they didn't necessarily know to search for a **rolling ball sculpture**. They might call it a ball machine, marble machine, kinetic sculpture, marble run or simply "that ball thing from Fracture."

And somehow, quite a few of them found me.

For several years after the movie came out, Fracture continued to send people my way. I had nothing whatsoever to do with making the sculptures in the movie, but because I was already building rolling ball sculptures professionally, the film unintentionally introduced potential customers to the type of work I was doing.

So, thank you, Fracture, for elevating my art and introducing a lot more people to rolling ball sculpture.