One thing I;'ve been wondering from the “Scenes out of place in movies thread” there is why so much of this happened? It would seem to be easy enough to alter a script slightly, or change the listed location. End of the day, who cares if the action suppoedly takes place in one fictional or semi-ficitonal small town or another.
Plus, I keep seeing things like filming in Vancouver for New York, New York for LA, LA for Middle Earth, and [strikethrough]Middle Earth[/strikethrough] New Zealand for Vancouver.
Yeah, some very small productions have to make do, but even big films have very weird on-location shooting stuff. Sure, I understand that sometimes you have to zoom way over from place to place putting shots to bed. Heck, half the time, you can’t even do a single scene in one location because the camera gear won’t work from all angles. But still. It seems like a lot of wasted effort.
Money. They’ll choose the cheaper place to film. When you have an entire cast and crew you have to house and feed I think hotels in Vancouver are cheaper than NY.
Certain cities also make special accomadations to film crews in order to get them to film there.
One of the Cohen brother’s next movies was to be filmed in their home town of St.Louis Park, MN. However Milwaukee has been offering them a lot of perks to shoot there. (I think they finally did settle on MN though.)
LOTR trilogy was shot in New Zealand because Peter Jackson lived there, had the WETA studios there, and the terrain was ideal. Probably would have cost a ton more to attempt it in LA.
Would such films ever be made again? Sending hundreds of people to Egypt? I don’t think movies will ever have such budgets again.
but when you read about the insane amounts of money paid to leading actors, it makes you wonder!
According to Jules Feiffer (the movie’s screenwriter), director Robert Altman filmed Popeye on location in Malta because the distance from any desirable other location was a big incentive for studio honchos to stay away and not meddle with the creative process. Shoot on a studio lot, and those interfering suits are essentially an elevator ride away.
That movie should have been interfered with by the suits. I remember a similar story about Field of Dreams and how the executives didn’t come out to Iowa and left them alone.
Certain locations do offer tax incentives and such to film there. Having available crew members who live local is a big plus.
To some small degree, I’ll bet that is one of the lures of moviemaking. Hit it big, and you can travel to faraway, exotic places to do what you love…and get paid for it!
I heard that it was cheaper to redo entire sections of Tower City in Cleveland to look just like Manhattan than it would have been to get sections of the actual streets for a few extra days for Spider-Man 3
