Sometimes a production location requires you to travel. It may be the only way you end up visiting places you’ve dreamed of going to, or perhaps never heard of. Such is the case with Bruges, located in Belgium about an hour outside Brussels. They don’t have regular production and an infrastructure to support production, so Cast and Crew were sent out by the travel coordinator to an unusual place integral to the story. Bruges’ historical buildings were beautiful during the day, and became shadowy and sinister at night.
It’s a trip to Bruges that first inspired filmmaker Martin McDonagh, who found himself having two opposing reactions to the locations and its tourist trade. Those opinions became the characters of Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell), two hitmen cooling off after a job gone wrong. The stars made the low-budget film easy to sell, but producers Graham Broadbent and Pete Czernin were also thinking of how appealing the distinct visuals from the location would add to drawing in an audience.
Within a year of McDonagh’s initial pitch meeting, the crew descended onto Bruges, and were given complete access to its locations, thanks to the Tourism Office and the town Mayor, Patrick Moenaert. The film was shot entirely on location, so Production designer Michael Carlin played a major part in finding the right locations for the story, drawing from what existed for anything that needed to be created. Christmas had just passed when production arrived, and the city agreed to leave the decorations up until filming wrapped in March.
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