![Casablanca: Written While It Was Being Shot](https://cdn.slatesource.com/a/4/b/a4b775c0-d9b6-4ebc-80b2-bebc2fbf728e.webp)

# Casablanca: Written While It Was Being Shot

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/casablanca-written-while-it-was-being-shot)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/a/4/b/a4b775c0-d9b6-4ebc-80b2-bebc2fbf728e.webp)

## Casablanca (1942)

Pages arrived on set daily and the cast did not know how it ended, which is why it plays like a war being lived through.

Runtime

102 minutes

Director

Michael Curtiz

Budget

$950,000

Cinematography

Arthur Edeson

> We'll always have Paris.

## A Studio Film With Real Refugees In It

Warner Brothers bought an unproduced play, put three writers on it and started filming before the script was finished, which should have produced a disaster. What it produced instead is a film whose plot is a series of transit documents and whose subject is neutrality running out. Rick's cafe is staged as a place where every nationality in Europe is waiting for paperwork, and the casting is not a metaphor: a large part of the supporting cast had genuinely fled the continent, including Conrad Veidt, who plays the Nazi major and had left Germany with his Jewish wife in 1933. The film was rushed into release to coincide with the Allied landings in North Africa, so its audience watched it while the place names were in the newspapers.

journey·6 Chapters

# Watching Casablanca

Emotional weight

/

Chapter

Letters Of Transit

Trafficked

"A murder on the desert road puts two exit visas in the hands of the one man in Casablanca who claims to want nothing."

Much of the supporting cast were refugees from Europe, including Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser, Peter Lorre and Marcel Dalio, who had been the lead in The Rules of the Game three years earlier.

The Epstein brothers and Howard Koch were rewriting during production, and the ending was settled so late that Ingrid Bergman played her scenes deliberately uncertain about which man she would leave with.

[Casablanca on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/?utm_source=slatesource)