The PMC Gives the Lowdown on Filming “Fantastic Beasts” on an NYC set in London

Nov 09, 2015

Posted by: Catherine

Fantastic Beasts, News, Pottermore

A lot of us have been questioning the fact that Fantastic Beasts, set in NYC, is being filmed in London (and Liverpool). Of course, this is great for London studios, and other companies providing products and services for these films. But some of us questioned about the authenticity of filming New York scenes, without being in New York.

The Pottermore Corespondent would like to qualm all of our potential fears, and reassure us that nothing but the best will be done for these Potter-related films. After finding that the UK didn’t have a city like New York City, the  best “creatives” in the business were brought in to build a replica of the magnificent 1920’s metropolis.

The PMC reports:

Right now, I’m standing with set decorator Anna Pinnock, who’s responsible for the New York window dressings, all the props and furniture. Because everyone on this set is offensively talented, Anna’s got an Oscar too – for her work on The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014. She’s been nominated four times (for Gosford Park, The Life of Pi, The Golden Compass and Into The Woods). She’s worked on three James Bond films, including Spectre. If you need to build a life-size replica city in a place where that city does not actually exist, she’s the woman to do it.

Anna’s as elegantly dressed as me, wearing a matching hard hat, neon yellow safety waistcoat and boots, giving me a tour of the New York she has helped create on a massive lot in the middle of a muddy field. We start on the Lower West Side where the bricks are filthy, the posters are peeling off the concrete walls and most things are light brown, dark brown or in-between brown. All the signs and posters were designed by extraordinary graphic design double-act Mina Lima… But more about them another time.

Fantastic Beasts is set in the roaring twenties and every single detail of the set screams that era. Every shop sign, every newspaper headline, every restaurant menu, every window dressing, every wheel, every food cart, every streetlight. Oh, the street lights! They’re actual, real, functioning street lights – great big black structures built eight metres into the ground so they don’t sway or fall on anyone important.

There are several cobbled streets, and if you stand in the right spot you can see all the way from the Lower West Side to the Upper East Side.

You can see the outside of Tina and Queenie’s apartment, as well as restaurants, a church, and all manner of shops. As Anna tells me, they’ve had to take some of those shop facades down and dress them up as a completely different building very fast when they get a last-minute change in the filming schedule.

 

For more details, a little on the PMC’s visit to Queenie and Tina’s apartment, and pictures of 1920’s NYC to reference, please take a visit to Pottermore’s article in 1926 NYC.





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