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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah has been and continues to be a destination for filmmakers. This year, 27 feature film and television projects were shot in Utah, bringing more than 1,900 jobs and nearly $60 million to the state's economy.
Nine of those were independent films and a record number will soon be front and center. In the past year, filmmakers from around the country have used Utah's varied landscapes as locations for their movies. Four of them will premiere in this year's Sundance Film Festival.
The Davis County Courthouse in Farmington was the backdrop last summer for the film "Brigsby Bear." Director Dave McCary said the movie is about a young man named James, played by Kyle Mooney, who is obsessed with a children's television show. When the show ends, James’s life is suddenly changed and he decided to head out and finish the story himself. Claire Danes, Greg Kinnear and Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies, are all part of the cast.
The Heber Railroad was the location for "Deidre & Laney Rob a Train." The movie is about two teenage sisters who start robbing trains to support themselves after their single mother has a breakdown in an electronics store and ends up in jail.
"They ended up shooting a little in Heber and Summit County and they shot a little bit in Ogden and in Salt Lake," said Virginia Pearce, the director of the Utah Film Commission.
Last winter, the snow in Summit and Wasatch Counties appealed to the production company making "Wind River." It stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen and the story is about an FBI agent who teams up with a town's game tracker to investigate a murder on a Native American reservation.
Taylor Sheridan, screenwriter of "Sicario" and Golden Globe-nominated writer for "Hell or High Water," wrote and directed "Wind River."
The makers of "Snatchers" used a lot of creative film locations for the series. The Sundance Film Festival will premiere eight short episodes of this horror-comedy series, which is part of Sundance’s Midnight Episodic Showcase.
"They just really took advantage of some of the more, what you would think of as 'Why would you want to shoot a film in that warehouse?' And then you see, it's actually a great place for a film location," Pearce said.
The story line features Sara, a status-obsessed teenager who, after her first sexual encounter, wakes up nine months pregnant with an alien. She and her nerdy ex-best friend, Hayley, apparently the only person she can trust, together try to put an end to all the carnage.
You can see these films and more than a hundred others at the Sundance Film Festival, which opens in Park City Jan. 19 with a Salt Lake City premiere on Jan. 20. It runs through Jan. 29.
