>> CineFix Host: Before lights, camera, and action,
you have to start with the location.
These are the top 10 movie sets ever built.
>> [MUSIC]
>> CineFix Host: Kicking us off at number 10, things always seem to get
crazy when Hollywood decides to throw water into the picture.
And for sets that might be hooks,
30,000 square foot Pirate Wharf or Pirates of the Caribbean's Port Royal or
the Goonies Inferno, a beautiful 105 foot long underground ship.
But for our number 10 it doesn't get much crazier than The Atoll from Waterworld.
>> Waterworld Resident: We are safe, behind this wall.
>> [MUSIC]
>> CineFix Host: Dennis Gasner's massive $22 million 1000 ton behemoth of a set
a quarter mile around used up every single bit of steel in the whole state of Hawaii.
Most of the sequences were shot next to the shore, rotating the atoll around, so
that the camera was always pointed out towards the ocean.
But eventually, the towed the entire thing out to sea to shoot the 360 shots.
But with all the steel, and money, and size, they forgot one thing, bathrooms.
So they had had to stop shooting and bring in a ferry every time anyone had to poop.
Now Waterworld's atoll was pretty big, but it's got nothing on our number nine,
which could be rear window's city block that famously wasn't tall enough for
Hitchcock so they ripped out the floor and built into the studio's basement.
Or the Last of the Mohicans, Fort William Henry.
It could even be the Matrix Reloaded's mile-long highway set.
But for our number nine,
we've gotta give it to Batman's 4.1 million square foot Gotham City.
>> The Joker: [LAUGH] What are you laughing at?
[LAUGH] >> CineFix Host: That's right,
we said million.
And you can thank designer Anton Furst for
the unique architecture of this entire world.
Furst actually went out of his way to make the city
the ugliest metropolis imaginable.
The set itself took up 18 whole sound stages and
nearly all of the 95 acre back lot at Pinewood Studios.
Ultimately becoming the largest,
most oppressive fake city every committed to film.
Of course Gotham doesn't have the monopoly on big city sets.
Back in the golden age of Hollywood,
a slew of historical epics led to some sets of epic proportions.
There was Intolerance's Great Wall of Babylon,
a 300 foot tall colossus that cost nearly 2.5 million in 1916 dollars,
and the Pharaoh City from the 10 Commandments, a set that people
thought was destroyed until archaeologists dug it up in the California desert.
There was Ben Hur's chariot arena that took a year to carve from stone, or
even the fall of the Roman Empire's forum,
the largest outdoor set ever built at the time.
But if we're given slots to the Roman Forum, Cleopatra's takes the cake.
>> Marc Antony: Nothing like this has come into Rome since Romulus and Remus.
>> CineFix Host: Allegedly twice the size of the original forum and
even more expensive, they eventually built the damned thing twice.
Once in London, and then again in Rome, after the first one got ruined and
Elizabeth Taylor got sick from the cold.
Unfortunately, Rome was just as cold as London,
and the whole production nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox.
But at least we got this awesome set out of it.
Of course bigger isn't always better.
Size isn't everything.
It's not the scale of the ship it's the motion of the ocean.
Penis jokes, I'm making penis jokes.
And just like penis' sometimes the best sets are the smallest ones, or
at least that's what we like to tell ourselves.
So for our number seven we turn to beautiful miniatures.
Like Harry Potter's Hogwarts', the snow fortress from Inception,
Manhattan from Escape from New York, any of the miniature sets from King Kong, and
especially some of the gorgeous world building from The Lord of the Rings,
including the still enormous at 172nd scale, Ministeer.
However for our pick we have to hand it to the gorgeous futurist inspired city
from Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Estimated at 60,000 square feet at miniature scale, Metropolis City
is the originator, the innovator, the OG futuristic city ever created.
It had it all, planes, trains and
automobiles along a highway crisscrossed skyscape of epic proportions.
They even placed live action extras on the miniature set with nothing
more than the clever use of mirrors, carefully scraped into the exact size and
shape of the set.
>> [MUSIC]
>> CineFix Host: And keeping with out less is more mantra we're
stripping it down even further to the sets that managed to be
brilliant in their simplicity rather than their scale or intricacy.
So for our number six we wanna give our pick to set minimalism.
Because is the quality of a set really determined by how big or bulky or
even beautiful it is, or
is it perhaps in how it helps the film makers tell a good story?
So for as far as minimal sets go we first have to tip our caps to Buried
in the entire film shot in a single wooden Wooden coffin, which were actually seven
different coffins with the variety of different sizes and missing walls.
But when it comes to minimalism, nothing can possibly stand up to
the beautiful simplicity of Lars Von Trier's Dogville, and
the bare white painted outlines that made up its town.
>> Dogville Narrator: This is the sad tale of the township of Dogville.
The residents of Dogville were good, honest folks, and
they liked their township.
>> CineFix Host: Lars has always been a bit of a Maverick.
So for Dogville he repurposed a Brechtian technique more often found in black box
theaters, simultaneously stripped away the artifice while pointing a finger at it.
With the distractions all gone, all that was left was just humans and
their emotions.
>> [MUSIC]
>> CineFix Host: Of course not all sets exist in the physical world.
So for our number five pick we're diving into the world of digital architecture.
Sure the Hobbits Goblin Town was filled with some less than impressive
cartoon villains but the set itself was wonderful.
And what about the armory from Tron?
Or Gladiator's massive coliseum or
practically every single set from Sin City.
There's the home tree from Avatar, the hot gates from 300 and
the giant trash pile that was Earth for Wall-E.
All intricately crafted, designed, and built with pixels instead of plywood.
But for our number five pick, we have to give it to none other than the massive
digital creation of Bricksburg for The Lego Movie.
>> Lego Character: Good morning apartment.
Ready to start the day.
>> CineFix Host: Th entire film was built from actual physically available Lego
bricks by the 3D modelers at a massive scale in Lego's digital designer.
Imported into Maya and then textured lit, animated and render.
And when we say built, we don't mean sketched in out of far away 3D cubes that
they faked as Lego's, we mean brick by brick.
And while we don't think it's quite fair that these guys pretty much got paid to
play with toys, we love the worlds they created with them.
For number four, let's take a look at some of the massive fantasy worlds production
designers have been asked to create.
Designers like John Berry and Dennis Gassner created worlds like Tatooine and
Spector, in places like Tunisia and
Alabama where they still eerily sit in disuse today.
But if it's an entire town you want,
look no further than Grant Major's Hobbiton from Lord of the Rings.
>> [MUSIC] >> CineFix Host: After spotting
the perfect shire-like location from a helicopter, a nine month set
build began at this former and actually still current sheep farm.
Landscaping, bridge building and 37 different Hobbit holes decorate
this city of a set, and when they wanted an extra oak tree they just chop one down,
carted it in, and decorated it with fake leaves.
Today it's a major tourist attraction, but
back in 1999 it was a visionary example of a fantasy world brought to life.
>> CineFix Host: Counting down to number three we wanna take a look at
some of the crazy things happening on the European side of the world.
Hans Poelzig designed an entire lopsided expressionist city in a Berlin studio for
Dragalum, and Sergei Ivanov set a crew of 400 to
the task of recreating the Battle of Stalingrad down to the smallest detail.
But for our pick, we're going with the awesomely absurd and
actually pretty creepy set of the yet unreleased, Dau.
The director, Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, which is not easy to pronounce and
most likely mispronounced right here, created a beautiful recreation
of 50's Moscow, about two football fields in size and five stories tall and
populated it with an entire city full of extras.
All dressing, behaving and talking exactly like their characters.
Whether the cameras were rolling or not, whether they were in the scene or
not, whether they were even in the cast, every day for three years.
He would fine people who used unapproved language, fire people who aggravated him,
and used his power and money to seduce the women around him, which probably makes him
more of a megalomaniacal totalitarian dictator than a film director.
Dau is almost too weird to describe but we have to give it some hesitant morally
ambiguous props to the man who built an entire fascist state for the sake of art.
Closing in at number two, rooms and buildings are nice, but
what about the designers who have built some honest to goodness god damn vehicles?
There's Pirates of the Caribbean's Black Pearl, and
the full-scale Titanic that was built on a 50-foot tilting platform.
There's Snowpiercer's gorgeous gimbal-mounted 100 meter replicate train,
and The Empire Strikes Back's Millennium Falcon.
But for our number two,
there's nothing more awesome than the titular vessel from Apollo 13.
>> Mission Control: Houston, we are go for launch.
>> CineFix Host: Hollywood has always used a variety of tricks for weightlessness.
CGI, green screens and wire work are the name of the game.
But Ron Howard wanted the real thing.
Now, he couldn't quite build a set in space yet, but he did the next best fix.
Designer Michael Corenblith built the entirety of Apollo's set
inside NASA's Vomit Comet, a real-deal passenger plane that flew parabolic
arcs to achieve zero gravity 25 seconds at a time.
At two flights per day and
40 arcs per flight, the cast and crew made 612 total zero-g dives.
And, thanks to this set, spent nearly four hours actually weightless.
>> [SOUND] >> CineFix Host: And
finally securing our number one slot what the hell can best actual zero gravity?
Maybe it's some of Chris Nolan's insanity like an entire hospital for
the Dark Knight only to just blow it up, or
the massive hallway set of Inception that actually spun.
No these two just missed our list but there's one set that's even crazier still,
the deep core underwater platform from The Abyss.
>> Diver 1: Hey, how deep's the drop-off here?
>> Diver 2: This here's a bottomless pit, baby.
Two and a half miles.
>> CineFix Host: Designer Leslie Dillion and Director James Cameron built an honest
to goodness diving platform in a seven million gallon tank in an abandoned
nuclear plant, filled it with water, and shot the entire movie underneath.
That's right, the entire movie was made between 30 and
50 feet underwater by a 26 person diving crew.
This set went through everything, leaks so
big that dam builders had to repair them, lightning strikes, algae infestations,
chlorine burns, emotional breakdowns and electrical blackouts.
It was an absolutely insane endeavor, the adventure of a lifetime and massive feat
of engineering which is why we think, it's the best movie set ever built.
>> [MUSIC]
>> CineFix Host: So what do you think?
Did we leave out one of your favorite movie sets?
Do you disagree with one of our choices?
Got any ideas for our next list?
Let us know on the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix Movie Lists.
>> [MUSIC]