When I was in film school we had a guest speaker who worked in the Locations department for Something Wild finding places in Florida for the shoot, and he taught me something head-smackingly obvious I never thought about before. In the sequence where Jeff Daniels is now stalking Melanie Griffith he follows her to a motel and parks across the street, next to a church. The motel is one location and the church is a completely different part of town. The moment is stitched together by some square-hedged bushes that Daniels hides behind. At the church location, the bushes are real, along with a garden hose. The greens department then added similar looking hedge bushes to the hotel. You can see how the ground is piled up to hide whatever holds them in place for the shot. Add a garden hose and you’ve got one location.
Five years later, Jonathan Demme and his team would make The Silence of the Lambs, one of my favorite films of All Time and a bit of a zag for Demme. Suspense is not a style of filmmaking he often worked in, but at the climax of this film you can clearly see the intense and exciting tone that would rock the world in 1991.
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