MAKING A SCENE.
CAPTAIN MARVEL she was an accomplished woman already, which means she represents a lot of things that we don’t normally see in these kinds of films.” Location shooting began in January 2018 with principal photography beginning in March that year. The state Tax Credit was a big part of why Marvel came back to California; as shooting was about to start, Marvel Studios co-president Louis D'Esposito said, "Our headquarters and postproduction facilities are in California, so it's very exciting to be able to film Captain Marvel here in our home state — thanks to this California Tax Credit.” L.A.-based location manager Ilt Jones came to the film in September 2017. His first contact was production designer Andy Nicholson and when the pair got the script, their initial task was to “break it down into possible locations, and then decide what will be on location and what will be on stage.” A key location was the surface of the planet Torfa, which was built in a quarry in Simi Valley in the southeast corner of Ventura County, about an hour’s drive from Downtown L.A. “Andy came up with the design — and it required us to sculpt a gigantic sand pit. So we employed huge caterpillar bulldozers to smooth out the sand,” Jones says. “And once we had the surface of the planet we then got to work on building the various sets that were needed for the action.” An important scene in the movie involves a
car chase that is following a train. “That was complicated and the L.A. Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) were amazing in helping us set that up,” Jones says. “Sometimes such large bureaucracies can be tough to deal with, but these guys were the opposite. They even helped us to find the right rolling stock to suit the midNineties, the era of the movie.” The script required an elevated railway so Jones and his team scoured L.A. Metro Rail and eventually found a stretch of track that was closed for upgrades at El Segundo, close to LAX, the city’s international airport. “It took months of planning,” Jones says. “We didn’t just need the railway, we needed to control the streets below the elevated tracks. And we had to work with a huge ice-skating center — the L.A. Kings’ training ground — which was half-way down the route of the car chase and had traffic constantly coming in and out.” Some six different locations were eventually used for the chase scene, ending up in Downtown L.A. “That involved different permits at each different stage and that wasn’t easy. But Carri Stevens from FilmLA (the official film office of the City and County of Los Angeles) was our dedicated coordinator and she worked so well with us,” Jones says. “We got great support from the state of California as well as from FilmLA.” Another striking scene in the movie involves tunneling inside a mountain towards a large
chamber. For this the producers approached power company Southern California Edison, which operates working hydroelectric power plants across a series of lakes — including Shaver Lake in Fresno County. “We used a working power plant,” Jones says. “It was like something straight out of James Bond. They had very specific safety procedures — everyone signs in at the start of the day and everyone signs out at end of the day and if anyone’s not signed out, they go in and find out why. They generate power during peak times and at low times they use the residual electricity to pump the water back up to the top of the lake. So when we went to film there, on power station two, they took it off line so power station one fed power station three — so the power supply was seamless.” Jones adds,“Edison works with the state of California to help the film industry, and they couldn’t have been better — they were great partners.” Captain Marvel is the first Marvel film to shoot primarily in California since 2013, with past films having been shot in the U.S. state of Georgia as well as Australia and England. For Marvel’s D'Esposito, “As a result, not only will we be able to streamline our production process for this and other films we're working on concurrently, but we'll have more time to spend with our families." Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) and his Skrull comrades emerge from the ocean. Photo: Chuck Zlotnick. ©Marvel Studios 2019
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