Glasgow backdrop for key scene in Pitt’s zombie film

Senior features writer

Friday 22 July 2011

IT HAS the walking dead and near-extinction of the human race in place of Pacino and De Niro but the spectacle promises to be just as impressive.

dead good: George Square will double for Philadelphia in Brad Pitt's blockbuster with up to 700 extras hired to play members of the public fleeing from blood-thirsty zombies. coup: Jennifer Reynolds of Glasgow Film Office at first held little hope of the city being chosen as a location for the Hollywood blockbuster.

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Maureen Ellis

The film commissioner who helped bring Brad Pitt’s zombie blockbuster to Scotland has compared key scenes being shot in Glasgow to the climactic shoot-out in Michael Mann’s Heat.

The 1180 cast and crew involved in the sequence of World War Z, being filmed over 15 days in George Square next month, are expected to spend more than £1 million in hotels alone.

Jennifer Reynolds, who has been facilitating film and tele-vision shoots in the city for 11 years, said she initially held out little hope of securing the adaptation of Max Brooks’s post-apocalyptic zombie novel.That was until location manager Michael Harm, who has worked on the Harry Potter series and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, visited Glasgow just days after first seeing a dossier of potential sites prepared by Glasgow Film Office (GFO).“When this inquiry actually first came to our office, I said it’s like the scene in Heat,” said Toronto-born Ms Reynolds, 38, a business graduate with a masters in film and television, who grew up in Las Vegas and Dublin. “It is massive, and that was downtown Los Angeles. It takes about 10 minutes of screen time and I remember thinking: How did they do it? They must have had to shut the place down for so long to do it. Now I realise, yeah, they did, because they’re doing it here.”Glasgow will double for Philadelphia for the pivotal scene in the £80 million blockbuster, requiring fake shopfronts and cars imported from the US.The switch has not gone down well in the US, as the Philadelphia Enquirer recently wrote: “Imagine moviegoers seeing what looks like City Hall, except it’s really Glasgow City Chambers at George Square, which -- ouch! -- was named for King George III, the very despot Philadelphia led the Revolution against.”The crew are expected to use George Square as a base camp, while filming against backdrops of Cochrane Street, the City Chambers and George Street.Glasgow City Chambers has previously doubled for New York City courts in Legacy, starring The Wire actors Idris Elba and Clarke Peters, and as early 20th- century New York rooming houses in the film version of Edith Wharton’s novel House of Mirth.Auditions have already been held for the 500 to 700 extras required to depict members of the public running away from blood-thirsty living dead in the movie, which is being produced by Pitt’s company Plan B and Paramount.The city’s architecture, wide roads and grid layout reportedly swung it for Mr Harm, acting on behalf of the film’s director Marc Forster, whose credits include Quantum of Solace.Ms Reynolds said: “It’s by far the biggest budget production that’s come into the city. And it’s going to have the biggest impact on the city centre, just given the amount of road closures.“The location managers are doing their best to go around to every individual business to say ‘Can we find an alternative entrance and exit for your property? Can we work out when your deliveries are?’ to try and keep everything going as normal as possible.”The four-strong GFO team, part of Glasgow City Council’s Development and Regeneration Services department, carry out a free “signposting service” for production companies looking for suitable locations and local crew, as well as assisting with the administration of closing roads, accessing parking permits and securing Strathclyde Police help.Last year the GFO dealt with 271 inquiries that translated into 666 days of filming, an average of almost two a day.Council leader Gordon Matheson said: “We look forward to the producers’ vote of confidence in Glasgow as a location bringing more major productions here over the next few years.”World War Z is the latest in a series of Hollywood movies to be filmed in Scotland this year.Christopher Nolan’s third Batman instalment, The Dark Knight Rises, used locations in the Cairngorms; Tim Burton’s remake of TV series Dark Shadows, starring Johnny Depp and Eva Green, is thought to be filming in the Highlands this summer; actress Scarlett Johansson arrives in October to play a man-eating alien in Under the Skin, trawling the A9 from Inverness to Thurso in the adaptation of Michael Faber’s novel; while another zombie film The Curse of the Buxom Strumpet, starring Gillian Anderson, Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench, is to be shot in the Fife coastal village of Culross.And tourist chiefs in Edinburgh predict a boost when One Day, the film of David Nicholls’s rom-com novel in which the characters climb Arthur’s Seat, is released in September.

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Glasgow backdrop for key scene in Pitt’s zombie film

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