Jonah Hex is an action adventure about one man’s personal quest for redemption against the canvas of the battle between good and evil. This theme has been a standard of classic Westerns, but here the story also has a supernatural element and is based on a series of DC Comics.
Merging comic book and Western took a good sense of balance. To bring Jonah Hex to life, director Jimmy Hayward and the producers worked to create an original world with one foot in history and the other in fantasy.
“As he meanders across the West, through the Southwest, and eventually into the Deep South into Louisiana, you are getting closer and closer to his past and deeper into his true character and history,” production designer Tom Meyer explains. “The Deep South itself is a great visual metaphor for the ghosts that he’s either running from or trying to conquer and put to rest. So, we start off in the West — in the hot, dry desert sand — and as we move south, things get wetter and deeper and a little more complicated.”
The production managed to find all of these different vistas in and around New Orleans. “We shot in the historic French Quarter of New Orleans, but we also shot in every direction outside the city,” Meyer says. “One of the things that we wanted to do throughout the film was … not augment the sets with too much CGI. The idea was to layer the supernatural elements over a real, very dirty, post-Civil War America. This isn’t the future where you can get away with things that are imagined. People have a sense of history and especially Americana and the West and the Southwest. And so if we could build something real in three dimensions, it would give us the kind of depth and realism we wanted.”
The production built the mining town Stunk Crick — with 14 buildings and a two-mile-long road — in St. Francisville, La. “It was literally a giant sandbox that we could push around with bulldozers and sculpt into a desert valley,” Meyer says. Designers even had lumber milled for the buildings that would appear period-appropriate.
In the French Quarter, filming simply required — as was done for Interview with A Vampire — a layering of dirt over the street, signage, horse drawn carriages and set dressing to look as it might have in the 1800s. City Park, a former golf course that became overgrown after Hurricane Katrina, became the town of Cactus Hole, where the crew created a fully built Catholic mission with a four-story bell tower that had been co-opted into Lilah’s brothel. Another key location was historic Fort Pike, which is one of the only standing forts left from the early 19th century. It became Fort Resurrection, where Turnbull prepares his attack.
One of the most exciting sequences has Turnbull and his men hijacking and destroying a train. For this, the production set up tracks in Raceland, southwest of New Orleans. This was one of the most challenging sequences, involving horses, a moving train and live explosives. “We built 500 feet of full-scale, running train cars at Raceland,” Meyer says. “We looked at a lot of locomotives all across the country and ended up using one that was based out of New Orleans, The Spirit of St. Louis. Its scale was much bigger than anything of the period of the 1860s or ’70s, so I had to make everything else over-scale — we added the big diamond smokestack, cow catcher and a giant lantern. We built two flat cars for armament transport, an open air troop transport car, a fully built first class car, and an agriculture cart for sugarcane that literally rains down fire following the explosion. The idea was to take the reality and turn it on its head a little bit. I still wanted it to look like something of the period but tweaked to match the aesthetic of the movie.”
“The train looked amazing and the people that operated it were incredible,” Hayward says. “Seeing what those guys actually had to do to keep that thing rolling was pretty remarkable. The amount of work that went into it, with the heat and the belching sparks and flames, was pretty cool.”
Even this is dwarfed by what is Turnbull’s technological creation—an armed battleship from which he plans to launch his attack on the United States. The 150-foot ship, based on the period Merrimack, was constructed in Bayou Gauche, a scenic marshland crisscrossed with interlocking canals, located about 36 miles southwest of New Orleans. Here, Meyer, supervising art director Seth Reed, art director Jonah Markowitz, construction coordinator Chuck Stringer and their teams constructed the ship as it stood in dry dock, waiting to set sail and take on the new Union navy.
The result is a blend of old and fantastic that producer Akiva Goldsman says “is the embodiment of western myths, but twisted together in fun, bizarre and totally fresh ways.
“Jonah Hex” is now showing on Video On Demand. Check your cable system for availability.
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© 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Legendary Pictures. Credit: Frank Ockenfels
