Who filmed what here in 2008?
We round up the past year's local film and television shoots
Glen Schaefer
The Province
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Some Vancouver actors are heading to this January's Sundance Film Festival with a film they wrapped last January, the drama Helen starring Ashley Judd and Goran Visnjic.
Judd stars in German director Sandra Nettelbeck's movie as a psychiatrist battling depression. Canadians Lauren Lee Smith, Alexia Fast and Ali Liebert are among the supporting cast, and they'll be joining Judd in Utah for Helen's premiere. The movie was among a diverse collection of smaller-budget features filming in and around Vancouver last year, jostling for locations and crew with the mega-movies and TV series.
Here's how Vancouver's star meter ticked over during the year:
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Jennifer Aniston and Aaron Eckhart showed up in January for a two-month shoot on the romantic drama Traveling, in which she plays a flower-seller and he's a widowed self-help author. Aniston's Vancouver work trip was part of a whirlwind year that took her to Miami afterwards for Marley & Me and then to L.A. for He's Just Not That Into You. How does she find the time to get the abs in shape for all those magazine covers?
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A couple of 2008 mega-movies were already rolling as 2008 began. Watchmen started mid-September 2007 and continued until mid-February on sets that included several blocks of a New York streetscape built in south Burnaby. The dark comic-book adaptation is one of the most anticipated movies of 2009, set for a March 6 release.
"I guess for me, first of all, Watchmen is the work that made intellectual, thinking deep thoughts OK in a comic," director Zack Snyder (300) mused on set. "It made it OK to be an adult and read a comic, or at least perceive yourself as, look, I'm literate, I read Watchmen."
That movie will be looking to cross over from fans of the cult-hit graphic novel to the mainstream.
"I can't help but want people to love what we're doing," said actor Patrick Wilson, among the art-house ensemble playing the movie's self-doubting superheroes. "You want to bring in people who haven't seen [the comic book]."
The movie uses a mix of CGI and real sets to create a gritty 1980s New York that mixes fantasy locales and superheroes with real figures from recent history.
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The Day the Earth Stood Still, currently in theatres, started work at Vancouver Film Studios in December and wrapped mid-March. Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly and Jaden Smith starred in the remake about an inscrutable alien who sparks a global panic. No point guessing who plays the alien. Simon Fraser University had an extended cameo as a military facility, and Jaden's superstar dad Will was a frequent set visitor.
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Director Chris Carter and stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson came back to Vancouver at the beginning of the year after years away, for the feature X Files: I Want to Believe. Duchovny hit it off so well with supporting player Callum Keith Rennie that he invited the Vancouver actor to L.A. to join him on the second season of his sexy Showtime TV series Californication. I Want to Believe was in theatres last July, a quick turnaround by feature film
standards.
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No word on a North American release date yet for Personal Effects, a smaller scale drama with Michelle Pfeiffer and Ashton Kutcher that wrapped two months filming last January. SFU was a popular site for the movie folk this year -- Personal Effects, about an ex-wrestler trying to solve a murder, spent several days atop Burnaby Mountain as well, filming wrestling scenes.
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Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp slipped in and out of Vancouver separately early in the year to film scenes for director Terry Gilliam's fantasy The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Star Heath Ledger died after filming exteriors in London on the movie. When the production moved to Vancouver, the superstar trio stepped in to play versions of Ledger's character after Gilliam rewrote his script.
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On the TV production side, the year started off with a grinding halt as a half-dozen series suspended production in January due to the U.S. writers' strike. The writers went back to their laptops by mid-February, and the TV scene was humming within weeks.
Unscathed by the strike was the sci-fi series Stargate: Atlantis, with a mostly Canadian writing staff. That show filmed its last season this year, and the producers are launching a new series, Stargate: Universe, next year. Amanda Tapping, the Canadian who starred in 10 years of the original Stargate SG-1 and guest-starred frequently in Atlantis, moved on to the entirely Canadian-produced Sanctuary, a paranormal series about an ageless monster-hunter. Sanctuary starts its second season early in the new year.
One series that didn't last the year was Men In Trees, the cancelled ABC romance starring Anne Heche and Canadian James Tupper alongside a mostly Canadian supporting cast. Off-screen couple Heche and Tupper kept their place in West Vancouver, though, and hosted a summer farewell party for the cast and crew.
TV's Battlestar Galactica, which wrapped four seasons this year with a feature-length TV movie, had an especially strong contingent of Canadian actors in its ensemble, with X-Files' Rennie joined by Grace Park, Michael Hogan, Tricia Helfer and several others playing either humans or their cyborg enemies.
"We did the M.O.W., the webisodes, then they took everything down," said Park of the popular show's farewell. "Everything's been catalogued, it's going for sale, it's done. You'd have to rebuild everything."
It was a fond farewell. Park has gone on to multiple jobs in Vancouver, L.A. and Toronto as have a number of her co-stars similarly boosted by the show's success.
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Have the U.S. networks gotten over their snobbery about hiring Canadians for feature TV roles? Sure looks like it -- Reaper, Smallville, Kyle XY, The L Word and the new show Harper's Island also feature substantial recurring roles for Canadians.
Meanwhile a Canadian cast got to play Canadians in the second season of Global's coast guard adventure series The Guard, filmed on and around Howe Sound.
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Back on the movie front, some of the players behind the Vancouver-filmed Juno came back to the city last spring to make Jennifer's Body, a horror comedy penned by Oscar-winning Juno writer Diablo Cody. Megan Fox stars as a man-eating zombie cheerleader, with Adam Brody as a musician who sells his soul to the devil.
Also in on the cheerleader action was Heroes star Hayden Panettiere, whose high-school comedy I Love You, Beth Cooper was filming across the North Shore Studios lot from Jennifer's Body. Panettiere's director was Harry Potter's Chris Columbus, back in Home Alone territory: "I'd forgotten how much I love doing comedy."
The intimate family drama Dim Sum Funeral filmed in a Surrey mansion for a month in the spring with stars Talia Shire, Bai Ling and Vancouver's Steph Song in a story about estranged adult siblings. The movie had its North American premiere close to home, at this month's Whistler Film Festival.
Another smaller movie going to camera in spring 2008 was the teen thriller Deep Cove, starring Hayley Duff and Aaron Ashmore. Toronto's Ashmore couldn't get away from Vancouver this year, what with his recurring role as Jimmy Olsen on Smallville and another thriller, the Canadian-produced ecological drama The Thaw, filmed in the summer in Williams Lake and Surrey with Song, Superbad's Martha MacIsaac and Val Kilmer.
Another Canadian-produced feature that headed up-country this summer was Cole, which took an up-and-coming cast (Sonja Bennett, Kandyse McClure, Richard de Klerk and Michael Eisner) to Lytton for some small-town drama.
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From May to September, Ben Stiller was back in town reprising his role as a security guard in the kids fantasy Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian. Amy Adams joined him as aviator Amelia Earhart, a museum exhibit come to life. Hundreds of workers spent weeks building the movie's elaborate sets in Burnaby's Mammoth Studios and a ship hangar in North Vancouver
When Stiller's crew were finished with that cavernous North Van hangar, John Cusack, director Roland Emmerich and crew took it over in July as one of the sets for their end-of-the-world epic 2012. That movie also used Ashcroft exteriors and finished filming in mid-December on a budget estimated at close to $200 million US.
Wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne Johnson showed up in September with Ashley Judd, Julie Andrews and Billy Crystal for the kids' movie Tooth Fairy, abut a pro hockey player who gets a magical new assignment. Apparently Johnson can't skate, so he was pushed around the ice at the University of B.C.'s Thunderbird Arena on a little sled. We'll see how it turned out when the movie opens Nov. 13.
The kids-movie spy sequel Cats and Dogs: the Revenge of Kitty Galore had animals battling for control of the world through the fall at Vancouver's City Hall, Playland and soundstage sets in south Burnaby.
Back at the smaller end of the budget scale, last September Erika Christensen and Jesse Metcalfe played grieving parents looking for revenge in The Tortured. That movie took advantage of the Vancouver Art Gallery's third-floor heritage courtroom.
Another smaller movie was Frankie and Alice, which brought frequent visitor Halle Berry back to Vancouver to star as a woman with multiple personalities.
Canadian writer-director Sook-Yin Lee came to Maple Ridge for her feature debut, the comic drama Year of the Carnivore starring U.S. actor Cristin Milioti and Canadians Will Sasso and Ali Liebert.
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It was a slow year for Canadian-created TV series in Vancouver, but that's likely to change in the new year with two promising pilots in the can. Writer-producer Brent Butt created Hiccups, which stars his wife and Corner Gas co-star Nancy Robertson as a grumpy children's author, while writer Rick Drew and producers Debra and Hugh Beard joined forces to make the crime drama Shattered, which stars the popular Callum Keith Rennie as a traumatized ex-cop whose various personalities team up to catch bad guys.
As the year ended a couple of features were continuing work into January: The martial arts vid-game adaptation King of Fighters, starring Maggie Q and Ray Park; and director Joe Dante's 3-D family thriller The Hole.
Dante isn't sure what's next for him when this movie wraps in February, but it probably means time away from his L.A. home. "I have only worked in Vancouver for the past 10 years, except for one movie in Hollywood," he said on his Richmond soundstage. "It's just the way the business is."
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