“Nearly a year after a series of wildfires ravaged Los Angeles, two awards contenders prominently feature deadly forest fires as a focal point: Netflix’s Train Dreams and Apple TV’s The Lost Bus. In the former, Joel Edgerton’s logger, Robert Grainier, returns home from a work trip to find a fire has destroyed his house, the”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Both movies required extensive visual effects, which started with grounding the films by shooting them in appropriate locations. Train Dreams was filmed in a forest that had already been destroyed by a fire.
“When I first read the script, my initial thought was, ‘OK, we really have to do this justice,’ ” VFX supervisor Ilia Mokhtareizadeh (After Yang) tells THR. “The film didn’t have the most … I don’t want to say it was a constrained budget, but we definitely had a lot of logistical challenges in order to get things done. I wanted to make sure we had a solid backdrop to build the effects upon. So we built this giant lighting rig that we put in the back of the forest that provided all of the orange backlight, along with smoke machines to give it the kind of atmosphere it needed.”
The lighting rig also acted as a visual guide for Edgerton while filming the scenes where he wanders through the forest as it’s ablaze, searching for his family.
While most of the wildfire sequences were entirely CG, Mokhtareizadeh and his team lit small, practical fires here and there for additional visual reference. “But for the giant wall of fire in the distance, there was absolutely no way that was going to be practical,” he explains. “The challenge there was, it had to feel really big and far away because if it felt like it was close, there’d be no way he’d even be able to even stand in it. … It had to be this kind of ominous monster in the distance.”
A camera on a track used to home in on Robert Grainier’s blazing cabin in Train Dreams. Courtesy of Netflix
A before-and-after shot of Joel Edgerton’s Grainier battling the fire in Train Dreams. On the left, you can see the lighting rig that was later replaced by fire with visual effects. Courtesy of Netflix (2)
Netflix’s Train Dreams was shot in a forest that had already been destroyed by a wildfire to ground the film in reality before VFX were added. Courtesy of Netflix
Similarly, VFX supervisor Charlie Noble (No Time to Die, Captain Phillips) and his crew knew they had to film The Lost Bus somewhere “dry, hot, dusty and windy, so New Mexico was a prime place,” he says. “We needed somewhere that looked like it would potentially go up [in flames] with the tiniest spark.”
The team chose a mountain village called Ruidoso as the location for the film’s town and then moved to a Santa Fe backlot, which had about a mile of paved roads that were useful for the driving scenes.
For the early, smaller fire sequences in the film, Noble and his team added CGI trees and smoke that flowed through them. When the wildfire in the film progresses, the film’s special effects team buried a pipe on the backlot so propane flames could pop up wherever they were needed. But because propane burns cleanly and doesn’t give off any smoke or embers, “we replaced the propane flames with burning CG vegetation to emit smoke and clouds of embers,” explains Noble.
Additionally, metal trees were built with propane gas inside them so they could be burned repeatedly and safely. Small metal bushes were also built with piping in them, and lights were buried inside the ground to add to the flame effect.
The challenge for Noble was smoke, specifically during the scenes with the kids in the bus. “We could only ever use water-based smoke — it was a kind of vapor,” he explains. “And even then, we could only have like 20 minutes of exposure. It’s pretty strict, but safety is paramount.”
In the film, the camera also pans through the fire as it spreads — a deliberate choice by director Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, United 93the Bourne franchise) to “cast nature itself as the prime antagonist so you can clearly visualize how this monster is hunting them down, basically,” says Noble. This was done with an “ember cam,” in which a virtual camera was attached to a CG ember, and then a human camera operator tracked the ember floating through the air as the fire enveloped the brush.
When the film wrapped, Noble jokes, “New Mexico’s propane … I don’t think there was any left by the time we finished.”
Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera shooting a sequence of the bus moving through treacherous terrain, with the bus mounted on hydraulic actuators to match the road conditions. Courtesy of Apple TV+
A before-and-after shot of a car driving through the fires in The Lost Bus, showing where lighting rigs were replaced with flames in postproduction. Courtesy of Apple TV+ (2)
In both Train Dreams and The Lost Busthe fires become characters in their own right rather than complements to the storyline. “I’ve done a lot of fire in the past, but never something where it was as significant as it was in this,” says Mokhtareizadeh. “It really took center stage.”
John Messina, a now-retired Cal Fire assistant regional chief who battled the Camp Fire and served as the fire consultant on The Lost Bus, adds: “Having been on the front lines of the actual fire, I was impressed by how accurately the film depicted the real experience. The way the flames moved, the smoke rolled and the light changed felt just like being there — chaotic, dire and devastating. It’s one of the rare portrayals that precisely reflect what first responders and residents experienced that day.”
This story first appeared in a November stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.