This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Danny Boyle remembers the first time rock climber Aron Ralston took him into Utah's Bluejohn Canyon, where in 2003 Ralston had to cut off his arm to escape being pinned by a boulder.
"[I remember] how unbelievably isolated it was," Boyle said. "I thought, 'My God, if you came there on your own and something went wrong — nothing as dramatic as what happened with him, if you twisted an ankle or got bitten — nobody would find you.' "
The remoteness of Bluejohn Canyon is a key element of Ralston's story, told in Boyle's new movie, "127 Hours" (which opens nationwide on Friday, Nov. 19). That remoteness is also why trying to shoot the movie there was practically impossible.
"Every lighting moment is scripted," said Suttirat Anne Larlarb, the movie's production designer and costume designer, who worked with Boyle on his Oscar-winning "Slumdog Millionaire." "It was part of Danny's grand plan of [showing] how the days pass and how the [cinematographers] want to manipulate that light. You can't bring that kind of lighting equipment to show those moments into the real Bluejohn Canyon."
The production did shoot on location, particularly for the moment when Ralston (played by James Franco) enters and exits the canyon. But to capture most of Ralston's 127-hour ordeal, Boyle's crew did something remarkable: They built an exact replica of Bluejohn Canyon in a Salt Lake City warehouse.
Boyle, in an interview during a visit last weekend to Salt Lake City, said when he mentions that it's a set, "people look at [me] funny. … There's no difference at all. It's a brilliant match."
Building a slot canyon in Sugar House
The production chose to build the set in the old Granite Furniture warehouse in Sugar House. "We were looking for somewhere with a lot of height, a dramatic sense of height," Larlarb said. The crew cut a hole between the first and second floors and went to work.
The process was "the same technical checklist you have, all the same steps you have to building a structure," Larlarb said. "You just take those rules and apply them to re-creating a canyon."
First they drew out the floor plan, then put up plywood supports for the walls. A latex skin is attached to those supports to simulate the canyon walls. Then foam is sprayed in to make the walls firm, and "then you paint it and texture it the way you would inside a house," Larlarb said.
But slot canyons don't come with blueprints. The walls don't meet at right angles, and they don't come in solid colors.
"We had to really match nature exactly, and that's really hard to do," said the film's art director, Christopher DeMuri.
Larlarb and her team — including DeMuri, construction coordinator Brent Astrope and his brother, head scenic painter Tyler Astrope, who all live and work in Utah — took several tours of the canyon, photographing and measuring every inch of it.
"We set out there on a few expeditions, where we brought very cursory old-school survey things, like a 100-foot measuring tape and a fish-eye camera lens," Larlarb said. They meticulously shot photos of 30 feet of the canyon corridor, surveyed the canyon floor and measured the height and width of every passage in what Larlarb called "an arduous, sort of hyperdocumentarian 'CSI'-type thing."
Casting an 800-pound boulder
They also took castings of some walls and the 800-pound boulder that pinned Ralston.
Larlarb was surprised that the boulder "doesn't have the visual gravitas that you imagine if you've never been there.
"You can wrap your arms around it," she said. "I think that's precisely why Aron got in trouble. I think in a flash, when your mind thinks about what you can handle and what you can't handle, on a cursory glance it looks like something you can probably stop with your hands. You don't calculate that it weighs over 800 pounds. It misrepresents itself."
DeMuri said he knew they got the boulder right when Ralston visited the Sugar House set. He looked at the boulder and was surprised that it was a copy. "He said, 'You see these indentations right here? This is what I chipped away with my multitool.' Danny looked at me and winked. I knew we got it right."
That fidelity extended to the costume design, Larlarb said. She tracked down the manufacturer of Ralston's shoes and even outfitted Franco with the same brand of headlamp.
She made one small change, finding a different Phish T-shirt (Ralston's favorite band) because the band's name was too prominent on the one he actually wore during his accident. "If I had used that shirt, we would have read the word 'Phish' for 90 minutes, and that would have been incredibly detracting," Larlarb said. "I went through the Phish back catalog of concert T-shirts, and I found one that was a little more abstract, but in keeping with what he wore."
Trapped on the set
Working for several weeks on the giant set wasn't easy. "It was an awkward son of a bitch to work in," the director said. "We sealed it so that it wasn't movable. Normally with a set, you build convenience walls that you can float out, so you can get lighting in or equipment. …
"That paid off in the end, I think," Boyle added. "If you do cheat, you only cheat a tiny bit on the first day. But by the 12th day, you're cheating quite a lot. I think audiences, without consciously spotting it, can sense it."
During filming, Franco would sometimes spend a couple of hours in the same position, and Boyle would communicate with him by a speaker installed inside the canyon wall. Between takes, Boyle said, Franco sometimes would pull out his homework — he's a student at New York University — from a hidden spot behind a false rock.
"You mustn't give the actor playing the part any advantages or disadvantages, compared to Aron. You must have an exact copy," Boyle said. "It does give you the freedom, when you get everything exact, he's only ever going to be able to do what Aron could do."
Filming in Utah: Redrock in the crew's blood
The Utah film crew were integral to creating that authenticity. "If I had brought in people from outside of Utah, who didn't know that landscape, I'm sure the process would have taken three times as long," Larlarb said. "Either we would have never made our deadline, or we would have made our deadline and the product would have been inferior."
She particularly credited the Astrope brothers, construction coordinator Brent and head scenic painter Tyler, for bringing their personal experience to the job.
"They've been going to Moab for 20 years for recreational reasons," Larlarb said. "The vocabulary of sandstone and the canyon system and all of that was already in their blood. All the R&D I would normally have to do with quote-unquote 'the best of L.A. and New York workers,' I didn't have to actually do that much spoonfeeding of the visual part of it."
"It felt insane to do it anywhere else," said Boyle, who made his first American movie, "A Life Less Ordinary," in Utah in 1997.
Still, the Utah Film Commission had to persuade Fox Searchlight, the studio that made "127 Hours," to film the movie in Utah. The state's 20 percent tax-credit incentive helped seal the deal.
Without the incentive, said Marshall Moore, director of the Utah Film Commission, the production could have opted to film around Moab for a few days — and then film more redrock location work in New Mexico (which has a 25 percent tax break), then build the set in Los Angeles.
"In the business of film, a studio will always tell you, 'If you get a rebate in Jamaica, can you go and do it there?'," Boyle said. "I think [the studio] understood with a story like this, which has a resonance and a prior knowledge, you have to do it where it was set."
The Utah crew members, Boyle said, "really know their stuff. You not only have local knowledge, generally speaking, you also had intimate knowledge of who Aron was, the type of equipment, the type of behavior, and a knowledge of the landscape."
The 127 hours of the work week
The crew worked day and night to create the Bluejohn set, DeMuri said, adding that a joke on the set was that the title "127 Hours" referred to some crew members' work weeks.
"When you're working with someone as driven and as passionate as Danny Boyle, and such a visionary as that, he really was able to bring the best out of everybody," DeMuri said. "Everybody was giving 110 percent, because they wanted to be part of the creative effort of the show."
DeMuri, who calls the Utah film crews "every bit as good as anybody in L.A.," marveled at the production team's ability to rebuild a southern Utah slot canyon in a Sugar House warehouse.
"You felt like you were in peril," DeMuri added with a laugh, "and there's a SmashBurger about 10 steps away from where you're working."
movies@sltrib.com Faking (another) natural wonder
For all the authenticity of the Bluejohn Canyon set built for "127 Hours," another location seen in the film was more a flight of fancy.
In a scene before his accident in Bluejohn Canyon, Aron Ralston (James Franco) meets two female hikers (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn) and shows them a fun sight off the beaten path. The movie shows the three of them scuttling through a narrow rock passage — then dropping into the dark and landing in a beautiful blue pool.
In reality, the rock passage and the pool aren't in the same part of Utah.
The canyon is near Moab, said production designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb, but the pool is the Homestead Crater in Midway, in Wasatch County.
The invented location provided Franco's character with "a sort of abandon, a nice memory for him to have right before the event — girls and water and all the things he lacks later," Larlarb said.
Sean P. Means