An exterminating force has arrived. They come from below, kill without prejudice and cannot be destroyed by traditional means. The one thing that’ll stop them dead in their tracks is any elevation above 8,000 feet.
“Well, the script was originally written for above 6,000 feet,” director George Nolfi says. “I was looking at relief maps, and that [elevation] allows for whole parts of the country to be safe.”
So Nolfi bumped the altitude demarcation up a couple thousand feet, which turned safe havens into disparate zones, and the sci-fi survivalist movie Elevation was born.
“It is much more interesting if it can be like islands that are separated,” he says. “You can get to the other island, but you have to risk the raging sea.”
Out now in theaters, Elevation stars Anthony Mackie as Will, a father of a son with a respiratory illness. The child requires pure oxygen to live, which exists thanks to the filtering machine Will and the small band of survivors living in the mountains west of Boulder have on hand. But they’re running out of filters. The child will die unless Will descends to what’s left of the People’s Republic to restock.
Standing between Will and his son’s life are the monsters, called Reapers, living below 8,000 feet.
“[In] a lot of movies, humans can survive if they’re just careful,” Nolfi, 56, explains. “Here, we’re saying: ‘If you go below 8,000 feet, you might survive for a few days, but then you are going to get killed. But if you stay above, then they’re leaving you alone.’”
‘The real space’
Hence why Elevation was shot primarily in Boulder County: “Once you get to 8,000 feet, you’re talking about the Rockies,” Nolfi said on a recent return trip to Colorado to promote Elevation at the 47th Denver Film Festival and to screen it for CU’s football team. “I always like to try and film in the real space, or the closest thing to the real space.”
That’s what brought the production to Boulder. The refuge in the movie, where the survivors have been living monster-free for three years, was shot in Gold Hill. When Will leads a small team down the mountain to retrieve the air filters — their ultimate destination is the now-demolished Boulder Community Health — they employ a chairlift, filmed in Loveland, and an underground mine: Idaho Springs’ Edgar Mine.
Each adds a visual flavor Nolfi was driving to get into his movie. “Otherwise, I’m doing all CGI mountains,” he says. And though “the state and the Boulder community made that easier,” shooting any movie in Colorado is a difficult proposition.
“You’re really pushing a rock up a hill,” Nolfi says. “Nobody in Hollywood wants to do that. Because they can’t estimate what the costs are. And the reason you can’t is because you don’t know how big of a crew base there is.”
‘A different rhythm’
As Nolfi explains, since there aren’t many movies or TV shows shot in Colorado, available crews are more experienced with commercials.
“Movies are a really different rhythm,” he says. “We need you for three months. The salary per hour is not what you get if you’re doing a commercial for two days. You can’t take three-day weekends. … You just don’t know who you’re going to be able to get, who has the requisite experience.”
That meant Nolfi had to fly the crew in — “and those people are wildly expensive just because of hotels, flights, per diem, weekends, off days” — as well as equipment.
“You have to bring cameras in from Atlanta or LA. You have to bring any kind of specialized equipment in. Specialized trucks to go up into the mountains, you have to bring in from New Mexico,” the Boston-born filmmaker says. “For various reasons, we lost those trucks, so we had to bring them in from LA. So you can see how the costs can spiral.”
If Nolfi shoots another movie here, and he wants to, he’ll have to ask the Colorado government for help increasing the tax incentive — which was 20% when he started financing Elevation.
“I’ll have to say, ‘Here’s the two budgets. And they’re pushing me to go shoot in New Jersey,’” Nolfi says. “Because New Jersey has a 35% tax credit, you can rent everything from rental houses in New York and a lot of actors live there.”
“Luckily, this one, I could make the case,” he says. “For the movie to look distinct … you gotta be here.”
ON SCREEN: Elevation is currently out in theaters.