sorry I am an idiot - sometimes - lol...............
the OP did not list the link so I just copied the whole article:
The following is an article from the Calgary Herald's Swerve magazine, March 3 - Friday Entertainment/Arts insert with fascinating details about the Alberta locations and shoot.
It had been posted previously, but deleted recently.
WE CALL IT MOOSE MOUNTAIN ‘ROUND HERE
BY JACQUIE MOORE
If there was an Oscar for best locations, southern Alberta would win in a landslide. Here’s the inside scoop on where the most memorable movie of 2005 was shot
For Ang Lee, the landscape was as important to the telling of the story of
Brokeback Mountain as shag carpet was to the director’s 1970s suburban drama The Ice Storm, and Peking rooftops were to his martial-art epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee was determined to be faithful to the Annie Proulx short story upon which the film was based, which meant finding a suitably rugged backdrop to tell the tale of a “pair of deuces going nowhere” who fall in love on a Wyoming mountaintop.
If the film had been a conventional love story between a man and a woman instead of a controversial “gay cowboy movie,” Lee would have undoubtedly been given a bigger budget, in which case he could have filmed Brokeback Mountain in the actual locations mentioned in Proulx’s story. Instead, he had 14-million bucks to work with—chump change in Hollywood terms. So, when three guys from Calgary—Murray Ord, Tom Cox and Jordy Randall of powerhouse production company Alberta Film Entertainment—came calling, Lee answered. Their sales pitch? Alberta is home to a full crew of top-flight filmmakers accustomed to working on Oscar-worthy movies, such as Unforgiven and Legends of the Fall. More importantly for an auteur as meticulous as Lee, it’s got the malachite-green rivers, black mountains and quirky, dusty towns Proulx brought to life along with the tragic love story of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist. Still, the director and executive producer, Michael Hausman (Gangs of New York), as well as Focus Features, had to be convinced that Alberta could sub in seamlessly for Wyoming, Texas and a Mexican bordertown.
That’s where Darryl Solly came in. The veteran Calgary location manager and his team scoured the province for every location, including the kitchen sink (a Scarboro setting for one of the movie’s most powerful scenes). The towns and landscapes showcased in the film make Brokeback Mountain unforgettably authentic, both as a place and a feeling. KANANASKIS COUNTRY’S rugged, seemingly remote wilderness areas easily pass as the Sierra Madres or Grand Tetons in Wyoming with no set dressing required beyond a few trees planted temporarily to hide the nearby roads. Brokeback Mountain itself, where Ennis and Jack spend their first summer together but which they never again visit, was a composite of shots of Moose Mountain and the peaks of the Three Sisters.
It was the sheep, whose well-being is the reason Ennis and Jack are hired to spend the summer alone on Brokeback Mountain, that created the biggest logistical headache.
Though the herd may have looked at home in the Alberta Rockies, these domestic livestock are, in fact, a potentially fatal addition to the area. As Ord, the executive co-producer from Alberta Film Entertainment, explains, domestic sheep carry a bacterium that, if passed on to wild sheep, could wipe out the entire population in Alberta. “Because of that obvious danger, the parks people at Kananaskis were reluctant and at first told us no, we couldn’t transport the sheep into the area,” says Ord.
In 1960s Wyoming, where the sheep scenes supposedly take place, ranchers commonly kept their sheep high in the mountains where government land was cheap to lease. Since authenticity was paramount to director Lee, Ord “just couldn’t accept no for an answer.” Instead, he spent months in talks with park officials including biologist Jon Jorgensen. “I persisted and Jon was very cooperative about working with us to figure out a way to let us film and still keep local wildlife safe,” explains Ord. “We finally came to an agreement which had us hand-counting the 1,000 sheep every morning and night to ensure none had strayed, and putting plastic on the ground to protect the vegetation from the manure. We kept the sheep penned until Ang was ready to film them.” In the end, the animals were fine, the park was happy and the filmmakers were thrilled. “I loved seeing the sheep,” says Ord. “Those scenes are stunning.” As for Jorgensen, he has yet to see the fruits of his labour. “It doesn’t sound like my kind of movie,” he says. “Though I’ve been told my name appears in the credits. I guess I’ll rent it when it comes out on DVD.”
NOT SURPRISINGLY, some of the film’s locations came easily, while others—like the chapel in which Ennis and Alma are married—took a little digging and a whole lot of driving. The script called for a slightly dark, austere ambience, says Solly, which meant “turning a lot of churches upside down” looking for a chapel with no stained glass or other adornment. The crew eventually found the perfect church in Dinton, 20 minutes east of Okotoks on Highway 547. “The chapel had that feeling of having stood the test of time; it was so simple.”
Dinton also provided the location for the drive-in scene, a softball diamond across the street from the chapel, upon which set designers re-created an old drive-in theatre. “Dinton’s not even on the map,” says Solly. “We had to convince the municipal district that the ball field existed so we could get permission to use it.” The crew planted dozens of speakers salvaged from the wreckage of the old 17th Avenue drive-in. As for the movie screen, it was added digitally but the two-minute scene still required days of preparation and restoration. Crews had to cut out swaths of grass to create the fake drive-in’s parking lot, then resod the field after filming, to get it back to its original shape.
The “Riverton, Wyoming” locations were a lot easier to find and set-up, says Solly. “We got lucky with the grocery store (located in Crossfield). The owner was in the process of moving to a new location, so we could take the place over without having to pay for lost business or haul out a ton of food items.”
As for the Del Mars’ apartment, Solly and crew spotted it on their first visit to Fort Macleod, and knew instantly that it would work—not only visually, but metaphorically as well. “The script asked for a place above a business to show the contrast between what Ennis wanted—to be on the land, alone, so people couldn’t find him out—and what he was willing to do to stay with Alma,” explains Solly. “It shows what a big sacrifice he made.”
YOU WOULD THINK weathered old homesteads on the Alberta prairie would be as common as seaweed on West Coast beaches. In fact, such sights are as rare as spotting an orca from the shore. As Solly puts it, finding a southern Alberta farmhouse in “exactly the right state of disrepair” to convey the bleakness these scenes required wasn’t easy. “Farms in this area generally do relatively well—especially back before BSE was causing such problems for farmers—so it wasn’t easy to find a couple of still-upright, bottom-of-the-barrel houses, which is what we wanted.”
Hoping to get their hands on one or two such properties, Solly set out on yet another road trip with director Lee and producer Hausman, heading west from Claresholm on a sunny afternoon in June, 2004. It was just off Highway 520 that Lee spotted exactly what he was looking for. “He pointed and said, ‘What’s that place?!’,” says Solly, “and we pulled over to get a closer look, then tracked down the owner.”
The owner of the house and cabin lived in a well-kept farmhouse a few miles away. He apparently didn’t take offense to a movie crew deeming the two old residences, which have been in his family for decades, sufficiently run-down. “It wasn’t uncommon for farming families, as they became more successful, to build a new house on their property and leave the old houses as they were,” says Solly. “You don’t see that as much anymore.” Luckily for the crew, the interior of the newlyweds’ house had remained virtually unchanged since the 1970s when it was last occupied. “The set designer loved that house because it was so authentic: the curtains, the wallpaper; there was even a calendar from the ’70s still on the wall.” The interior of the cabin, which became Ennis’s home after his divorce, required a major renovation but, as often happens in the cutting room, only the exterior made it into the final film.
NO COWBOY MOVIE filmed in Alberta would be complete without a two-step at the Ranchman’s. But as authentically honky-tonk as the Calgary bar is, the location wasn’t exactly camera-ready for Jack and Lureen’s first romantic encounter. “We spent all day and night taking ad material down from the walls,” says Solly. “Everywhere you looked were Coors signs that couldn’t be seen in the movie” (unless the filmmakers wanted to pay a licensing fee). Once the bar was stripped of all the signage—as well as of the rodeo images that would have revealed the location as Calgary rather than Childress, Texas (the rodeo town was played by Rockyford)—the cameras were ready to roll.
“The day we filmed there was amazing,” says Solly, explaining that Lee and Hausman stuck around to shake hands with the dozens of extras on the scene. “They stood at the door and thanked everyone. I’ve never seen that before.”
Other Calgary locations included the alleyway behind Space Gym in Ramsay, which served convincingly as a Mexican bordertown, thanks to its old brick. The Thanksgiving kitchen-sink scene was shot at the Scarboro home of Fred Schwab and KC Moriarity, who moved out of their house for five weeks so set designers could work their magic. “It should only have been three weeks,” says Solly, “but the contractor stapled the shag to the hardwoods. We had to refinish them.” The couple was thrilled to have an Ang Lee movie filmed in their house, but was happy to see the vintage wallpaper go with the crew. “The set director told me it was rare and suggested I keep it,” says Moriarity. “I’m sorry to say, but it was hideous.”
“LIGHTNING FLAT,” the Wyoming homestead where Jack grew up and where his parents still lived, turned out to be one of the two toughest locations for Solly and his crew to pin down (the other was the dance hall where Jack and Lureen meet a newly hired ranch foreman and his wife; the interior scene was ultimately shot at the Royal Canadian Legion #1 in Calgary, the exterior at an old bank in Rockyford). As with the other farmhouses, explains Solly, it was difficult to locate a house that would convey an appropriate level of neglect in a part of the country where abandond rural homes are often either maintained or torn down.
As Proulx describes it, Lightning Flat was “desolate... (the) houses sitting blank-eyed in the weeds, corral fences down...leafy spurge taking over.” In addition to the challenge of meeting those bleak standards, says Solly, what made finding exactly the right place so difficult was that older farmhouses are relatively cramped—because ranchers sought to maximize grazing land—whereas a movie crew requires space. After several fruitless days, the crew happened upon this long-abandond house southeast of Beiseker, just off Highway 9. Solly had to convince the director and the American producers that the tall, scruffy vegetation surrounding the home—commonly used as windbreak—was a necessity on the plains in Alberta and Wyoming.
While the location and size of the house fit the bill, the biggest hurdle still lay ahead: the interior was a disaster zone—you could see the earth through the floorboards, the stairs were ready to collapse, the windows were broken—and required a small fortune and four weeks to get it ready for its stark-white, bone-cold close-up.
Looking back on the seven months he spent looking for Brokeback Mountain, Solly quotes the movie’s script supervisor: “She said, ‘After working on a film like this, you look ahead to all the years left in your career and know it won’t get any sweeter.’ I think she’s right.’ ” Maybe, or maybe not, depending on what AFE has up its sleeve (they’re promising even sweeter things to come). However Brokeback Mountain fares at the Oscars, one thing is certain: anyone who has seen Alberta through Ang Lee’s lens knows there’s no place like home.
