Locations
I guess everyone gets this – it’s just impossible to find a post-nuclear Las Vegas in Moscow or its neighborhood. We got that as well. So… we had to consider various options, all the way up to going to Astrakhan or Volgograd. Well, having in fact no budget, these dreams were not to come true, alas, and… this is where our wits turned up.
‘What looks like a desert?’ we thought. Open pits. And… what looks like wastelands with stunted bushes scattered around? Forsaken open pits. One hundred and fifty kilometers from Moscow, and there you go – excellent landscape on camera. Where can you find destroyed premises? It’s forsaken plants, factories, slum areas and long-delayed construction. What do we do with the specific locations, like…. The Royal Palace? That’s when a photo gallery might be useful. Need a scene in a bar? Well, that’s easy-peasy. Just go to a biker’s club. And …. what if you have to show on camera something like a nuclear bunker? So, we go look for a real nuclear bunker! I am serious. We did go and look for it. And we found it. It cost us about 30 bucks and a bit part for a bunker keeper, always boozy. We shot the whole episode there (Thanks God, the keeper never showed up).
We had a miscount, though. In the script, we had a derelict aircraft to film in the final scene. In Tushino, once an airfield, we found an AN-26. Got through the security. Turned out, the field belonged to a construction company, the takeoff strip owned by a flying club, the plane itself is distrained. We got in touch with the club’s owner who was on vacation abroad. He, unfortunately, said ‘no’ to all our pleas to shoot a movie there. ‘This aircraft belongs to you know who it does’, he said. ‘So, don’t poke the bear, guys’. We couldn’t but start making calls again and visiting sites. Surfing fans’ film forums, we found out a couple of slum area locations. In Zhukovski, a city not far from Moscow, there were 3 planes, pretty old, the trespassing area fence all holed, security guys were pretty far. We went there. But … bad luck again! All fence holes are fixed. Out of the three birds, just the two were more or less fit. The point was there were a lot of security, per se, and … the background was not that good. So, 3 days later, we went to Monino (another town not far from Moscow), to an aircraft museum.
Accepting us in a very spacious study, they told us confidentially how much they wanted for an 8-hour filming session! The money was big but possible to handle. But that was not supposed to happen. Two weeks before we started filming, the guy we had a deal with took off on vacation. Deal’s off… The last chance was a private flying club of a friend of mine. But that was not worth it again. All planes were small, plus fur-trees all around.
That’s how we were there left with no plane. So we had to lean over backwards, as usual. Why usual? ‘Cause all locations I mentioned we had to be looking for pretty the same way. Just one remark: we ended up net positive, eventually!
The first part here
The second part here
To be continued...
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