Aoraki, Mount Cook: Inside the Vertical Limit Filming Locations In Vertical Limit, a climbing team fights for survival on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. None of it was actually filmed there. The production instead turned to Aoraki, Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak. It became one of the most demanding shoots in the country’s film
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Jul
The World’s Fastest Indian: Oreti Beach and Lake Hawea Roger Donaldson’s The World’s Fastest Indian tells a true story. However, the film still needed the right New Zealand scenery to bring Burt Munro’s life back to the screen. The World’s Fastest Indian filming locations span two very different landscapes. One is the wide, hard-packed sands
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Lake Pukaki: New Zealand’s Otherworldly Wrinkle in Time Set Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time sends its characters across the universe to search for a missing father. For a handful of scenes, that universe was actually New Zealand’s Mackenzie Basin. The Lake Pukaki filming location gave director Ava DuVernay one of her most striking backdrops. Its
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Mount Taranaki: New Zealand’s Stand-In for Mount Fuji Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai is set in 1870s Japan. However, most of its rural scenery never came anywhere near Japan at all. Instead, the Mount Taranaki filming location on New Zealand’s North Island doubled convincingly for feudal-era Japan. The mountain itself stood in for the country’s
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Pete’s Dragon Filming Locations: Redwood Forest, Rotorua and Beyond Disney’s 2016 remake of Pete’s Dragon takes place in small-town 1980s America, deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The crew never actually filmed there. They shot the entire production in New Zealand instead, and this guide to Pete’s Dragon filming locations covers all of
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X-Men Origins: Wolverine Filming Locations: Stirling Falls and Glenorchy X-Men Origins: Wolverine opens its most dramatic sequence at a facility called Alkali Lake. It’s where Logan undergoes the procedure that fuses adamantium to his skeleton. That facility doesn’t exist. The waterfall behind it does, and it’s one of the most striking in New Zealand. Stirling
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Where Was The Piano Filmed? Karekare Beach New Zealand Some film scenes fade with time. This one hasn’t. A grand piano sitting alone on a windswept black sand beach, a mother and daughter beside it in dark bonnets. Jane Campion filmed that image, from her 1993 masterpiece The Piano, at Karekare Beach New Zealand, on
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Flock Hill: Where Narnia’s Great Battle Was Filmed High in the Canterbury high country, a working sheep station became the setting for one of the biggest set pieces in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Flock Hill Narnia filming location hosted the climactic battle between Aslan’s forces and the
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Cathedral Cove: New Zealand’s Real-Life Entrance to Narnia Long before Aslan ever set foot on screen, New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsula was already one of the country’s most photographed coastlines. However, once The Chronicles of Narnia began filming here, this same stretch of coast picked up a second identity. Today, the Cathedral Cove Narnia filming location
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Where Was Sweet Tooth Filmed? Rees Valley to Tasman Glacier Netflix’s Sweet Tooth is set in a post-pandemic America. However, not a single frame of it was actually shot there. Instead, the Sweet Tooth filming locations in New Zealand span three dramatically different corners of the South Island: the Rees Valley near Glenorchy, the Tasman