Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley opens in theatres today. It’s the writer/director’s first feature since The Shape Of Water became an unlikely Oscar juggernaut four years ago, winning Academy Awards for best picture, director, production design and original score. As I wrote in my NOW review earlier this week, it’s a deliberately paced showcase for Bradley Cooper’s career-best performance as a drifter turned mentalist. And its existence is also something of a miracle, because COVID almost killed it.
In the latest episode of the NOW What podcast, del Toro’s longtime producing partner J. Miles Dale tells me how his team regrouped, rethought and safely completed production after the pandemic forced Nightmare Alley to shut down six weeks into principal photography.
“We shot the second half of the movie first because it’s [set] in winter,” he says, which meant starting production in Toronto in mid-January and then going to Buffalo for a week of location shooting in late February.
“If you look at the movie carefully, you’ll see outside Buffalo City Hall everyone has their hands on their heads holding their hats on; some people were actually being blown along the sidewalk. And then we came back to Toronto and we shot for a week… and we got back to the studio and it was the night before the NHL and the NBA both shut down. And we realized everyone was getting very anxious. It was no way to run an operation – it was ceasing to be creative – and in all good conscience, we just had to stop.
“So we called the studio and said, ‘We’re going to send everybody home. We don’t know how long it’s going to be for, but safety is the primary interest here.’ I spoke to the crew, I said, ‘Pack up your stuff. We’ll see you when we see you – in a week, a month, who knows, whenever it’s safe to do that. And then we were down for six months, almost to the day.”
As soon as shooting stopped, the strategizing began.
“I almost immediately started trying to figure out what to do,” Dale says. “I call it Producer Med School, where a bunch of us were just on the phone all day every day: ‘Okay, what’s happening with testing? What is this PPE we’re hearing about, and how can we get it? Should we get it?’ We’re professional problem-solvers; that’s what we do.”
Even with a safety plan in place – constant testing, distancing, cast and crew bubbles, isolation strategies at the ready – Dale says it took a while for everyone to feel comfortable. But he and del Toro did their best to remain optimistic. And shutting down halfway through production gave them a unique opportunity to take stock of Nightmare Alley.
“You take what the universe gives you,” he says. “When we stopped, we had most of the second half of the movie put together. So we were able to look at that and say, ‘Okay now what do we really want the first half of the movie to be?’ We were able to adjust the script. The art department had some more time to get this carnival right. The carnival had been sitting in the weather for six months, getting rain and wind and sun on it for authentic aging. The art department was happy with that, all those banners getting beat up.”
Listen to the entire conversation in the latest episode of the NOW What podcast, available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or playable directly below:
NOW What is NOW’s weekly news and culture podcast. New episodes are released every Friday.
