LMGI COMPASS
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Summer 2024
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53
Oppenheimer
NAPOLEON
Filmed mainly in the United Kingdom, the
dynamic leader's rise and fall is explored through
landscapes that grow in scale and status alongside
him as key historical backdrops to Napoleon's life.
From guillotine squares to stately homes like the
Boughton House known as the "English Versailles,"
to replicating Paris protests in Malta, along with
Napoleon's Notre Dame coronation filmed at the
Lincoln Cathedral and his various battlefields
across the world, the locations illustrate some
of the most significant events and famous war
sequences in European history and humanize a
key historical figure.
OPPENHEIMER
The dread of war comes full circle with a world-changing
weapon thanks to a brilliant but haunted physicist, whose
remarkable story plays out within a mélange of actual
historical sites and versatile filming environments. J. Robert
Oppenheimer's brilliant academic career shines on location
at UC Berkeley, UCLA and Princeton, with ultra-rare access to
the actual secret lab site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where
he and his team were recruited to develop the atomic bomb
under the Manhattan Project. Domestic scenes are captured
in Oppenheimer's real-life home near the lab and at Glacier
National Park, contrasting a deeply intimate human side with
his extraordinary and historic endeavor. A full-scale replica of
Los Alamos was covertly built in nearby Abiquiu for exterior
shots, with production mirroring the secrecy and creativity of
the original story.
THE ZONE OF INTEREST
Eden and Hell exist side by side in 1940's Poland in
a chilling historical drama that examines the life of
Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who lives in
an idyllic high-walled villa with his family next to the
camp. The locations are wildly symbolic, historic
and had to lend themselves to the brutally honest
commentary—that evil lives right next door and
society chooses detachment and willful blindness.
The production renovated and landscaped an
abandoned house yards from Höss's actual home
outside of Auschwitz, and selected sunny rural
spots for summer picnics, Lake Klimkowskie,
horseback riding outside Kwaczala and canoe trips
on the river Sola to illustrate the normality of the
family's life in stark contrast to the camp's atrocities. The Nazi officer's party was sited at Ksiaz Castle in
Wroclaw which was seized by the Germans during the war, while the SS Administrative Building in Berlin was
housed at the Silesian Voivodeship Building in Katowice.
The Zone of Interest
Napoleon
