In the movie Pineapple Express, and in various other films, there are scenes with giant grow rooms filled with huge marijuana plants. When they do this, are they filming actual pot plants? Is there some kind of legal hoop they have to jump through in order to do this, if the answer is yes? What are the plants actually, if the answer is no? They usually look pretty damn real.
I haven’t seen *Pineapple Express *yet, but whenever I’ve specifically noticed, they’ve always been fake.
They’ve got a budget, how hard would it be for them to film on location in BC or Amsterdam?
My guess is that they use some other plant in the family cannabus as a stand-in.
Here’s a picture of an industrial hemp field in France. As a passing shot, it looks enough like pot to move the story along. But botanists in the audience may note the difference.
Tangent: Hitchcock used chocolate syrup as a stand-in for blood, since it had the viscousness he wanted. Only problem, it was dark brown instead of red. Hence, his bloody movies were in black-and-white, so color didn’t matter.
I was once involved in a feature film where marijuana plants were a big plot point. They made them all by hand, all entirely fake. They probably could’ve gotten away with similar-looking plants for distant shots, but I think there was some obstacle which prevented them from doing that, and instead they made them all out of artificial materials.
how about false aurelia? They look cursorially like pot? I remember seeing them in a plant store a number of years ago.
I think you have cause and effect reversed there – Hitchcock was already filming [BPsycho** in black and white for various reasons (Saved monrey, got the chance to use the production crew from his TV show, B&W was still a standard format in 1960), so he chose to use chocolate syrup as blood because it would show up like blood in black and white.
By the way, the use of chocolate syrup for blood LONG predates [B\Psycho**. Willis O’Brien was using it for blood back in 1925’s The Lost World.
The fake pot plants are often made of silk. They are a bit pricey, too - you’ll note a 3-footer from the source listed above is $180.
The movie “Homegrown” was partially shot in the Forest of Nisene Marks, outside Santa Cruz. They set up a bunch of fake pot plants for the movie, and somebody stole them. Perhaps smoked them, for all anybody knows.
You’d run into pretty much the same problem up here, even you had the budget to get your cast and crew up.
Oh, so they’re to blame for the fakey looking pot plants on Weeds. (With the exception of some oddly placed outdoor plants, I’ve never seen a marijuana plant that was strikingly asymmetrical.)
So more than likely they’re fake plants… What about when they’re smoking joints and blunts? Are they just smoking tobacco (or perhaps it depends on the set/movie being filmed?)?
The Canadian TV show Trailer Park Boys featured a large field of marijuana for most of one of their seasons. They used a real hemp field in Canada for the shots.
These days people don’t even smoke tobacco in films. They use fake herbal cigarettes.
The English movie Saving Grace involves an entire hot house full of marijuana plants. Most of them are fake, but the movie got permission to borrow real plants from a research lab for the close-ups.
According to Mitch, it’s fake.
It seems that real pot was smoked in Easy Rider.
That’s cheaper than a real one. :smack:
This is a tiny bit off topic, but I read somewhere that in the movie Platoon when they were in the “underworld” scene in that bunker, they were smoking actual Thai stick marijuana in that scene. Don’t know how true it is, I haven’t looked it up in a long time.