By Martha Waggoner
Wilmington, NC. (AP) --A massive indoor water tank for filmmakers to shoot underwater shots, said to be among only three in North America, will become part of a North Carolina studio that also will soon include the largest sound stage built east of California.
Forced inside by inclement weather, EUE/Screen Gems Ltd. officials held a groundbreaking ceremony Thursday to discuss the stage and the 283,000-gallon tank, which they say already attracts six availability inquiries a month.
By next spring, the studio will be home to a 37,500-square-foot, no-column sound stage, the 10th on the 50-acre lot.
Filmmakers use the indoor tanks to shoot everything from ocean to river scenes.
“The dream stage is really a dream come true for North Carolina,” said Gov. Mike Easley, who directed the show, advising others to turn their gold shovels.
“I do this a lot,” Easley said to Chris Cooney, president of EUE/Screen Gems, and others. “One, two three … action.”
The stage and 60-foot-by-60-foot indoor water tank will “fill a void that the major Hollywood studios and the best international producers and directors have demanded,” said Bill Vassar, executive vice president of the Wilmington studio.
“The … stage will accommodate the almost daily advances in technology for special effects and the countless emerging production platforms,” he said. “Wilmington is on the verge of becoming one of he major film production centers in the world.”
EUE/Screen Gems researched film industry needs for three years before deciding on what the studio calls a dream stage and the tank. The other indoor tanks at Universal and Warner Brothers in Los Angeles are typically reserved for productions by those studios, Vassar said.
He said studio reaction in California last week was positive and that filming is much less expensive in North Carolina than Los Angeles.
Also scheduled for Thursday is the second North Carolina screening of “Nights in Rodanthe,” which stars Richard Gere and Diane Lane. The movie, which involves a surgeon, a separated wife and an approaching hurricane, seems determined to attract storms.
A system that eventually became subtropical storm Andrea interrupted filming in May 2007, and on Thursday, high winds and heavy rain were hitting the coast. Despite the weather, locals packed a screening held Wednesday in Kill Devil Hills, said Carolyn McCormick, managing director of the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau.
Jackie Fearing, 54, of Kitty Hawk, and her husband, Charles, 61, were extras in the movie, appearing during filming of the ferry scene. “Tonight we’ll find out if they cut us or kept us,” Jackie Fearing said. “Even if they did cut us, we’re still excited about seeing it tonight.”
The scene was supposed to involve a sunny day, but a nor’easter was at sea, so the couple spent much of their time waiting for better weather. Finally, the crew set up bright lights to get the look they wanted, she said.
The weather was cold and windy, and the extras spent their day “going back and forth, back and forth” on the ferry between Hatteras and Ocracoke, she said.
Cooney and others used the day to push for film incentives higher than North Carolina’s current 15 percent, and Sen. Julia Boseman, D-New Hanover, said legislators will discuss it when they reconvene in January.
“We really believe that this industry needs a shot in the arm – a bigger facility to house larger-scale productions or we’re going to lose them to the states that have the tax incentives ready to go,” Cooney said in an interview. “And we’ll do our part, and we would just love the state to step up and do its part to be competitive.”
Easley, meanwhile, indicated he’s looking toward a career in film after his second term in office ends in January.
“I’m looking forward to learning more about this industry when I get out of office,” he s aid.
“So if you’ve got a typecast situation for a village idiot or the town drunk like Otis Campbell in Andy Griffith or someone who can wreck a race car, I’m your guy,” he added in a veiled reference to his racing skills.
In 2003, he slammed a stock car into a wall at 120 mph at Lowe’s Motor Speedway near Charlotte; and in 2005, he ran a stock car up a curb and just missed a parked car and a utility pole. He left both accidents unscathed, saying only his ego was hurt.
Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More