Posted Aug 31, 2008, 9:14 PM
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Coquitlam
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How Vancouver (minus the moss) became New York
like reading about behind the scenes stuff
Quote:
How Vancouver (minus the moss) became New York
Glen Schaefer
The Province
Sunday, August 31, 2008
When audiences watch the Vancouver-filmed Elegy, with Ben Kingsley and Penélope Cruz in a New York-set romance, they probably won't notice the trees behind the older man and his younger object of desire.
And that's just fine with Claude Paré, Elegy's production designer. The Montreal-based Paré spent the spring of 2007 turning Vancouver into director Isabel Coixet's fictional New York, including some scenes set in that city's Greenwich Village.
"We had a couple of exteriors where we shot on the corner of Bute, one street south of Robson," says Paré, in Vancouver again working on the mega-budget fantasy sequel Night at the Museum 2. "There's a walking path there, lots of big trees. I asked the painters to paint the moss brown that was covering the trees. That was a giveaway for Vancouver, it's not as humid in New York."
His art department budget on Elegy was perhaps a tenth of the budget for either of the two Museum movies, but Elegy's smaller scale meant different challenges.
"I had been to New York a lot on the first Museum, so it was extremely difficult for me to compromise on anything," Paré says.
"We had a fair amount of exteriors. Obviously Gastown was a preferred spot, still you have to pick your angles."
Paré went for subtle cues that said New York; when the characters played by Kingsley and Dennis Hopper were sitting at a table outside a café, Paré would have New York cabs go by behind the camera, so that they were reflected in the café's window.
He was pleased after a screening earlier this year at a Chicago festival, when a critic commented on Elegy's "well-worn Manhattan
locations."
"I really fooled a lot of people," Paré says. He organized a screening of the movie in Vancouver earlier this summer for the movie's local crew.
Aside from a couple of establishing shots and an opening scene between Kingsley and New York talk-show host Charlie Rose, the whole movie was filmed in
Vancouver.
Kingsley's Manhattan apartment was built in a former boat hangar under the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, a great site says Paré, because the crew could wander down to the shore during breaks from filming the heated love scenes between Cruz and Kingsley.
"It's very convivial right by the water."
gschaefer@theprovince.com
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http://www.canada.com/theprovince/ne...a-bb0700b99e71
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