Big Movie Comes to a Small Town
there's a big sequence at the end of the book where this river god comes and takes away the bridge and i was able to just look for what is the most beautiful spectacular interesting river to do that and we found a river in slovenia in this town of bovich the socher valley [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] logistically it's a challenging thing to make a film this size around 40 drivers 34 different kind of vehicles tonnage-wise quite a lot you know we had crews of 1200 people depending on the day that's a small army a small town so you have to have a very very strong production team obviously to help you and when you go into any new environment particularly a new country there's always fears will you be accepted by the community how experienced are the crews how how smoothly is the operation going to run and we had this production company called propeller that brought us into there and they handled the logistics of what was an incredibly complex situation a propeller is working mainly in the field of advertising so this is our first feature film which is wow quite the beginning at the beginning it was just a scout somebody gave a hint to the location scout about slovenia about this river north stars [Music] it's a well protected area so the biggest problem was to get all the permissions to realize it and this was almost six months of work even more i would say nine months of work so it's really a lot of paperwork for each and every small thing here you need a permission it's like every stone is a protected item upon 40 50 different permissions so this was difficult quite difficult it's a huge thing you know for slovenia it's a huge thing actually it's one of the pearls of the country [Music] it's a beautiful location which matches the rivers in new zealand beautifully that we've already filmed and we started to toy around with the idea of building a bridge the bridge is based on the bridge that julius caesar built looked across the rhine when he was attacking the germans a wooden structure made out of big pine logs it had to be quite a kind of sophisticated design but look of the period and the style that roger wanted to look like so basically we went to like the biggest bridge builder in the in the country and mr hummer which is the one of the managers of this company was immediately ecstatic about this project because he's a bridge builder since his young years recovered in order to build the bridge it's a very wide flood plain that the river's in and it's a stony flood plain which was to our advantage because we were able to believe it or not redirect the river enabling us to build our bridge across a dry axe riverbed i can recall about seven big dredgers digging and moving all this driver is really like a symphony of all these machines and it was quite a shock for me to see it in this environment you know we don't want to do any ecological damage and well in fact we haven't because of the nature of the riverbath we found ourselves a very lucky situation they were in the process of wanting to redirect the river the river had suffered damage during a landslide a and that enabled us to actually solve their problems and create an incredible environment shooting the sequence then it turned to logistics i started getting the numbers it started with 700 people first unit then 900 then 300 extras 1200 all together then 100 trucks then 370 i think is the last number we got vehicles and this is huge at the moment you know we are organizing the base game sunday we start building a tent for the makeup wardrobe and aesthetic and catch rectangle for the crew and for the extras she's gonna be really big and filled up with a lot of equipment there's gonna be another village it can be another bullets in the boats so let's say the main preoccupation i had was how to handle all this and i shouldn't forget accommodation i can tell you accommodation is a science fiction we're talking about above it which has i think 1 600 inhabitants and i have to find beds for 1 000 people so in the beginning it was nightmare because this is such a small village so we are spread from this point where we are now for about let's say 70 80 kilometers i will just show you this maybe this will explain to you everything these are maps for the whole little towns cities villages around above we have 28 villages and around 95 i think different apartments so really it was nightmare and then when all those dates changed you build something for a week for two weeks and then oh my god we start from the beginning we practically doubled the inhabitants of bovets so it's really a huge impact for this community i always feel slightly worried when we take over small towns because i'm sure that not everyone in the small town wants a huge movie crew coming in and sort of making a noise and disturbing things i don't think people here are really aware how much is like 1 200 people you know i i'm not sure if they have this number in their head you know so they are saying to us [Music] i think this would be really a shock for bobbitts because all the restaurants they close at nine o'clock in the evening hotels they serve food till 10 o'clock in the evening well it's going to be full on i mean suddenly we're going to have 850 crew descend on this town for the next two and a half weeks it's going to be absolutely crazy all the uh all the things that can have been done to make that a smooth operation have been done but it's going to be unlike this town has ever seen [Music] a movie company really isn't it's like a carnival you know our trucks pull into town and we create hopefully this this magic that captivates some of the local citizens rehearsals call it boys [Music] a bit now you can just work on the weather they just called uh lunch it's starting to rain i think we got two or three takes oh wow andrew you want the water level to be high no problem and then we get the news that there's a storm coming and uh it we had to close down shooting i i don't know if anybody could hear me back at base camp but i'm calling rap tomorrow fourth of july i heard we're gonna maybe uh have off to celebrate fourth of july or maybe it's just gonna rain all day so it's the please take it easy get a good night's sleep [Music] i think that at first maybe the people in slovenia were like what did we get ourselves into there's only a certain number of restaurants and the first night we were there some of them just ran out of food i went down to the restaurant to have a little bite of dinner and the waitress looked like a deer in headlights a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of us she ran back there checked with the chef came back and she said i'm sorry we have problem uh no more food and i said really there's no more food she goes well there's food but the chef he quit so people were having to go to the supermarket and cook their own food because the restaurants basically just had to turn people away it was kind of a touristy town like a lot of river rafting tours went out of there so they were used to some influx of people and i don't think anything prepared them for us you know i mean all of us were out every night eating drinking it's like what do you mean the bar's closed we just got off work it's 10 30 at night and it's like of course everybody's in bed it's a small sleepy town [Music] beauvitch was actually consumed by the film for a small period of time i mean we had our editorial and a fire station that's right they were they had this uh elaborate fire station so there was quite a nice room that we used to screen dailies next to that was a was a room set up with a pool table it's the first place i've edited with a pool table in the same room and that's where i had my habit and where our assistants were i've already won a number of pool trophies and every now and then i'd be editing and i'd hear sort of a creak of a door and a guy in kind of full fire kit would peek out hi how are you doing very good thank you the firemen were very keen on looking after their visitors we hope that you will also return after it at least as a tourist yeah but they're very sweet very sweet it was a pretty intense storm later that night i was getting calls we don't know what the bridge is going to hold the biggest risk that we have here is weather having been here and experienced it now for a month and a half i can tell you that whatever anybody says about the weather you don't know you just don't know if there's a sudden really really heavy rain for a day there could be a flash i was getting really worried i mean if the bridge had been washed away i think we would have lost months of production non-stop rain and this river has gone up twice in size the real danger is quite frankly right now the river can take it it's a question of whether or not our scent it had been built to withstand i can't remember exactly the cubic force of the water but we were within a tiny tolerance we got to the point of flying our engineers in and we had an emergency runoff in the river that we you know had bulldozers standing by [Music] we came so close to having to do that rose it's quite strong current today it's crazy actually the irony of it is this is what the river should look like this is the river there no there is a cubic meters per second we raised as a location to go just for a holiday great people great food great accommodation incredible surroundings and we got to shoot there for a couple of weeks how beautiful is this slovenia was one of the highlights of the shoot we need that refreshing course that refreshing period you know to kind of get our spirits up in the summer in slovenia right people might be doing all the adventure because slovenia is known for like all it's amazing white water rapids and all that not that i did any of that which i think means strategically falling down a mountain i'm digging slovenia you know the social river is a big trout fishing area as well we originally thought we might shoot the gorge down here somewhere and we saw pools like this just full of fish i couldn't believe it i was like i gotta go fishing there when you're there it's just hard to describe where we were at i swore that we were in new zealand when we were filming it's magical almost looks like home it's just this paradise in the middle of europe lovely lovely town lovely country lovely people pretty much 10 out of 10. we're all soon there going how can we shoot more here is there a way we can transport the castle set on the banks of the river we've set it up so we can stay in slovenia we love it it's like nothing i've ever seen we were really really lucky it was a very warm and welcoming experience i want to say that i am very pleased to greet the film crew who has chosen this beautiful part of slovenia's scenery for one part of the film the story of narnia i think everybody realized that this is really something special something big maybe because it's the first time in slovenia this is the fact that [Music] [Music] they asked [Music] i think one of the things that has struck me quite strongly since i've been here is is what we're actually doing in this place in this environment and how it sits with the history of the area generally is [Music] um [Music] i used to go for a run every morning across the floor of the valley and one time i ran back towards the italian border and that coincides with where the trenches were in the first world war and and you can actually peer through the gun sights so it was pretty moving pretty amazing experience to be there in the rain and to look through those gun sights and think very little has changed since then raging battle between narnians and telmari and stretching across our bridge and now this awful warfare has already sat in this valley it was uh something that struck me very strongly and who would have thought you know all those years later that from a whole lot of shooting of one time you end up over here shooting a different kind of thing today is day 100 of however many but we're excited this is celebration time at the end of our time there it was really sweet the the mayor came to see it and actually thanked me for what we brought to the to the town and he gave me this wonderful naive painting of our location this is after the bridge and the middle that gave me sort of an honorary membership to the to the town we have a little something for you it's not much but but you can wear it i would say one of my lifetime experiences personally let's take us home boys and girls a lot of fun a bit of gray hair let's roll please rolling no really it was something special see you next time next time and now that the bridge is gone everybody's kind of sad because it's uh it was so beautiful well done everybody and when everybody will be gone in few days i know it's gonna be quiet good everything too quiet and then on top of that we were actually able to help them restore a location to its original state as part of our process so in the eyes of all the conservation people there they were very happy that we were actually leaving in the better state that we found it is but yeah the social river is just a beautiful location and vervice was just an incredibly welcoming town you
2021-01-05 13:32
