designer Cardenas' palette reinforce the illusion that, as Daniels
jokes, "the whole show seems to have been photographed at
magic hour."
Authenticity comes from a mixture of practical locations,
working elements and selective construction that describes the
gritty world of oilfields and the exclusive realm of those making
billion dollar decisions in the high-stakes arena of West Texas oil.
The Highway
For the Landman plane sequence, Daniels and his team had been
looking for a while and hadn't yet found their stretch of road. The
location had to be straight and wide enough for the plane, able to
be shut down completely for an extended period, and any poles,
signage or fences would need to be removed. There would also
need to be a slight rise so that the tanker truck that arrives near
the end of the sequence could be concealed until the last possible
moment.
Daniels' scouts had looked at numerous roads, but each had
failed for one reason or another. That's when Daniels called in
Hayden Yancer/LMGI who was on hiatus from 1923. "I'd never
landed a jet on a highway and literally crashed a truck into it,"
Yancer says with admirable understatement, "so it was pretty
huge."
Yancer eventually found a road near Graham, Texas. "It was
a stretch of state highway that met both the practical demands
of landing the aircraft and the dramatic requirements of the
sequence," he says. "Twenty-four individual properties touched
the road. Power serving the area had to be rerouted. Mailboxes,
fences, highway signs and raised pavement reflectors had to be
removed. Cattle were relocated. A nearby barn became a SFX
workshop where technicians could assemble or, more accurately,
de-assemble what I called the 'Franken-plane' which is the one
that would get blown up."
In the end, it was a mile-and-a-half road closure that also required
a truck-weight-conscious detour, round-the-clock sheriff deputies,
and layers of approval from the county, nearby cities and the
Texas DOT. The highway itself would be scraped and reshaped for
the tanker stunt and then any grass around it was replanted to
grow back naturally before the shoot.
Yancer spent roughly two months preparing the road for that
sequence, but weather postponed filming, and his obligations
to 1923 pulled him back to Montana before the cameras rolled.
Daniels and location manager Nate Wells carried the work through
filming, and in the end, the achievement belongs to the unique
Sheridan system that allows personnel to cross projects, inherit
months of preparation and preserve the same standard.
Billy Bob Thornton is Landman's Tommy Norris
