Alaska may be the setting of Heart of the Beast, Brad Pitt's new survival drama, but it's New Zealand that does the heavy lifting on screen. Director David Ayer's film stars Pitt as Sergeant Major James Belmont, a former special forces officer who crash-lands in the Alaskan wilderness with his retired military dog Odin, 58 miles from the nearest road. Rather than shoot in the far north, the production recreated the Land of the Midnight Sun almost entirely on the South Island around Glenorchy and Queenstown, with a tight 45-day shooting schedule that Ayer says gave the film a documentary feel.
The aerial work came first. A real six-seater Cessna 185, matching the one in the story, was flown over the Earnslaw Burn glacier valley near Mount Earnslaw, chased by a helicopter-mounted camera. Ayer's favourite shot: a top-down view of the plane gliding over glacier cracks that look, in his words, like elephant skin.
Most of the iconic spots are easy to name-drop for a South Island itinerary. The lakeside campsite was shot on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, which laps at both Queenstown and Glenorchy, with Chinaman's Bluff doubling as the meadow where James plays with Odin and the Dart River as its bank. The wooded encounter with J.K. Simmons' character took place in Jordan Creek Forest near the appropriately named Paradise, while the plane crash itself was staged on a beach at Lake Gunn, with inaccessible Lake Sylvan used only for aerial plates and a studio tank in Auckland handling the water work. Pitt swam in the actual lake, which crews had to helicopter into. The snowy sections were filmed at Invincible Snowfields, a private ski field, which also hosted the bear encounter.
The trek sequences lean on some of the region's best-known hiking country: the Routeburn Valley and Routeburn River, plus boulder fields below the Earnslaw Burn peaks. The vantage point finale was filmed at Paradise Trust, where an overlook, open field and road all sit conveniently close together. Not everything happened outdoors, though — the nerve-shredding log-crossing over a river, the wolf attack and the swamp scenes were all built on soundstages, with background plates from Poutini's Gorge on the Arahura River. New Zealand's strict biosecurity rules meant no real wolves or bears could be brought in, so all the wildlife is CGI, and even the dogs, played by four different animals, had to pass wildlife training before working in protected areas.
For travellers, the takeaway is simple: the landscapes that stand in for brutal Alaskan backcountry are some of the most accessible scenery in New Zealand. Glenorchy is under an hour's drive from Queenstown, the Routeburn Track is one of the country's Great Walks, and Lake Wakatipu's shoreline is hardly remote. If the film makes you want to rough it, you can get remarkably close to the sets without a single plane crash.
