Shepperton Studios

And my dad had done a lot of work with them earlier.

Because my main claim to fame, lads, if I can boast a bit now... is that on my birthday, the 3rd of June, 1956, my dad was working at Shepperton Studios with Charlie Chaplin on A King in New York.

And what's that you're reading?

Karl

Oh, like a kind of voodoo kind of thing.

Yeah, he was, he's been to, uh, Shepperton Studios recreation of the East Indies or the West Indies.

[laughs] Yeah.

And he's, he's learned how to voodoo.

Frank Darabont, not a fan of this movie, but he wrote it.

This movie was made on a $45 million budget, and it was filmed mostly in studios, Shepperton Studios in Surrey, England, and it was filmed from October 1993 to February of 1994.

That's pretty much it for production.

Laura, let's talk about the cast.

So...

The live action filming, for the most part, was done at Shepperton Studios in Surrey in England.

Looks like the miniatures and effects stuff was done at Bray Studios.

I think a lot of that was done after the other shooting was completed.

Well, other people would use less kinder words, but I haven't had a bad interaction with him yet, knock on wood.

So you rehearsed pros and cons at Shepperton Studios, from my understanding, in 85.

Do you know whenabouts that would have been?

It would have been in the six weeks leading up to the first show.

Then, some time later, something incredible happened.

During the filming of Alan G. Parker's documentary Hello Quo, Lancaster reunited with Coghlan, Parfit and Rossi to jam together at Shepperton Studios.

My goodness, I mean just thinking back to it, it was incredibly exciting, wasn't it? And it left us wondering if we would see the Frantic Four reunited on stage again.

In 2013 and 14, all our wishes came true.

Uh, I was dig- doing some digging.

They filmed it at Shepperton Studios, and Bob Keen's Image Imagination group did the makeup.

Uh, this is a group that had worked on the Hellraiser films, Lord of Illusions, Life Force.

So it looks really sharp, and there are aspects of it that look better than what we see in this picture.

And ironically, part of what makes Whitewood feel so unnatural is that it isn't even real.

Like, the movie may be set in Massachusetts, but it was made in Britain [laughs] with Whitewood constructed on sound stages at Shepperton Studios.

This was the feature directorial debut of John Llewellyn Moxey, with Desmond Dickinson handling the cinematography, and that artificial environment actually works in the movie's favor.

The streets are too empty, the fog is too heavy, and the buildings seem to exist in some forgotten corner of the world where daylight has simply stopped bothering to show up.

For the Rebel Hangar sequence, filled with a squadron of X-wing and Y-wing fighters, the set was so enormous it had to be filmed on the largest soundstage in Europe.

This was located at Shepperton Studios in Middlesex, England, 20 miles from the EMI Elstree studios.

The scenes with the actors took 14 and a half weeks to film in England.

For the post-production work, George Lucas and Gary Kurtz worked out of Industrial Light and Magic in Los Angeles, where the special effects were completed.