Film Pittsburgh

There may be lens filters and less homeless, but I recognize Market Square when I see it.

Sneak peek: 'The Road' is fiction, but the bleak scenery is real

Imagining the end of the world is not easy, especially if you're not going to create one with a computer. But director John Hillcoat and filmmakers of The Road believe they discovered it in Pittsburgh.

"It's a beautiful place in fall with the colors changing," Hillcoat says. "But in winter, it can be very bleak. There are city blocks that are abandoned. The woods can be brutal. We didn't want to go the CGI world."

"We wanted the heightened reality in the book."

That book is Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winner of the same name. It's about a father and son who navigate a countryside devastated by an unnamed catastrophe.

The film, which stars Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron and 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee, also was shot in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and on Mount St. Helens in Washington state for scenes of devastation.

But most of the film was shot in and around Pittsburgh.

Hillcoat found abandoned coal fields, a deserted amusement park and an 8-mile stretch of closed freeway as locations.

"It's tangible, the misery and hopelessness and the bleakness," Mortensen says. "It gives you much more to work with if you're filming in that world instead of a green screen.

That's right, New Orleans where a hurricane devestated some of the poorest neighborhoods imaginable and most haven't been rebuilt or even cleared, Mt. St. Helens where a volcano went off with the concussive force of an atomic bomb destroying the countryside, and Pittsburgh......which...uh....is...um...had a steel industry.

Fuck! They think our city is more suitable for filming a post apocalyptic wasteland conceived out of the gin soaked mind of Cormac McCarthy, than two of he places hit by the biggest natural disasters in our country's history. I don't think we're gonna be putting that up on the City website. They film post apocalyptic zombie movies here too. Plus Striking Distance and Inspector Gadget. This is a cursed place.

So all you budding filmmakers, if you have a good idea for an apocalypse movie: Film Pittsburgh, we'll throw some more leaves on the ground and point you to the really rusty places on the outskirts for that extra wasteland ambiance. CG is for chumps, Skynet can't replicate that post-industrial, bombed out and depleted look like we can. If you want to film a movie set in Pittsburgh that isn't about the end of the world, I think you have to go to Vancouver or something.