Go backBack to selection

“We Shot in Wildly Different Landscapes” | Sam and Andy Zuchero, Love Me

Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun lounge on a bed and gaze at each other. Steward holds a book of crossword puzzles and a pencil in her hands.Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun in Love Me, courtesy of Sundance Institute. Photo by Justine Yeung.

Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? 

Love Me takes place over Earth’s 10 billion year life, from its birth to its death when the sun becomes a red giant and consumes our solar system. From the beginning, we knew that we couldn’t rely on just VFX to show these stages of Earth but needed to go to actual locations around the world. We shot in wildly different landscapes. Our fingers nearly froze shooting the earth thawing from a nuclear winter on an icy lake in Alberta. Our seasick stomachs churned while staring at a little monitor in the melted water world on the Salish Sea. Our eyes were blinded by whipping sand and searing sun on a sunbaked earth in Death Valley. Each location presented challenges, opportunities and uniquely gorgeous realities. Woo-hoo planet earth for all your sublime majesty!

Here’s where you can find us in the universe (cosmic map courtesy of Carl Sagan):

A "cosmic map" of the universe as depicted by Carl Sagan

See all responses to our annual Sundance Question here.

© 2024 Filmmaker Magazine. All Rights Reserved. A Publication of The Gotham