PHOTO CREDITS: All of the above images with black borders are screenshots taken from Drive.I think we all remember hearing about Ryan Gosling right after 'The Notebook' came out. Enjoy!įor information on filming in California, visit the California Film Commission’s website. Here are a few behind-the-scene clips from Making Of and Daily Motion in which you can get a few glimpses of Drive‘s filming locations. In this case, Drive - the coolest movie in 2011 - is Refn’s love letter to L.A. “I’m very much a fetish filmmaker in the sense that I just shoot what I would like to see,” said Refn. “So it was very much like living the character as we were going through the process.” “Whenever I felt it was right, the moment between us, that’s when I would go back and recreate that emotion,” said Refn. Gosling and Refn took many drives around the city together, discussing all the locations where the book would take place. is in reality, and I would always go to things that I thought looked more interesting.” it’s like shooting Times Square in New York, it doesn’t do anything for me. “I don’t like Sunset, that’s my least favorite place in L.A. more interesting and beautiful than the mainstream iconic locations in the city. Refn found the real and practical neighborhoods of L.A. “I had to be on the outskirts of the city, and I wanted that kind of hillside, blue sky, almost a Western feel to it. Since Refn and his crew had to shoot in the Valley area where the production hub was, the lodge was a perfect location for filming. When Driver tries to help Irene’s husband Standard get out of an old debt, he agrees to drive the getaway car for pawn shop robbery. The pawn shop is actually a lodge off of the Sierra Highway in Santa Clarita. I like to find practical locations because it helps the actors a lot, to recreate everything.”Īddress: Vincenzo’s Pizza, 11045 Balboa Blvd, Granada Hills CA 91344ġ0. That’s why Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) calls him Izzie that’s his real name. I wanted that feel more, because Nino (Ron Perlman) is, you know, a Jewish man who wants to be an Italian gangster. were more like restaurant-oriented, where being a New Yorker you’re used to just walking in and getting a slice. But also a place that basically looks like a front for something else,” said Refn. “ was shot in the valley, and it was difficult to find because I wanted a real ‘New York’ kind of pizza shop, where you walk in from the street to get a slice. The film crew also placed a common hallway with doors opened into the actual apartment sets. It was once an old hotel and has often been used as film locations for movies.ĭriver’s and Irene’s apartments were built from scratch to function like practical locations. The film location used for the apartments where Driver (Gosling) and Irene (Mulligan) live are in the Los Angeles Park Plaza Hotel Apartments, located across from MacArthur Park. The Los Angeles’ Park Plaza Hotel Apartments Here are 12 of the film locations featured in Drive.ġ. Without further ado, let’s visit Refn’s Los Angeles. “It’s almost a mythological story, not a story about today or yesterday or tomorrow, so it was important that the movie have an almost indefinable time period,” states Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC, the movie’s director of photography in an intereview with American Cinematographer. So I decided that those were the places where I would find the locations within.” “That’s how when you do these low budget movies, you always have to think economically. “Because I didn’t have a lot of money to shoot the movie with I decided to come up with these three hubs, where I would shoot the film: one was in Echo Park, one was in the Valley, and one was in downtown L.A,” shares the director. as the three main film locations for Drive. Refn picked the Valley, Echo Park and downtown L.A. “So that was the idea-to create a movie about traveling into something I didn’t know.” “I wanted to live the life of a European filmmaker in Los Angeles, coming to a city that I didn’t know, that I only knew from cinema and mythology,” Refn recalls in his interview with Movieline. One of the reasons Refn agreed to direct Drive was because its setting is in L.A. In addition to the understated, top-notch acting caliber of its two main stars Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, Drive has another winning combination - its minimal but effective script, its pulsating Eurovision soundtrack of synth-based melodies, and its haunting film locations … showcasing the gritty, real-life neighborhoods of Los Angeles rarely mentioned in guide books. The movie (screenplay by Hossein Amini) is based on the 2005 James Sallis pulp-novel of the same name. Even though it has been snubbed by the Oscars this year, Drive - the “fairytale” stylishly directed by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn - is still one of my top 5 favorite 2011 films.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |