“One Battle After Another” is the new Warner Bros. movie written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
The film debuts this weekend, and it’ll highlight some San Diego landmarks. Last year, crews for the production spent about six weeks filming part of the movie on location across the region.
“Definitely when you see this on the big screen you're going to see a lot of San Diego in it,” said city of San Diego film program manager Guy Langman.
He said there are scenes shot around the border and Otay Mesa, Borrego Springs and downtown, including at the Westgate Hotel.
The county said filming for the movie added nearly $7 million into the local economy through expenses like lodging, food, wages for movie extras and technicians, and the cost of the goods used in filming.
The filmmakers also got a financial benefit from shooting here.
“It does have a California state tax credit. Which when the production moves out of what’s the traditional L.A. 30-mile zone they get an extra five to 10 percent tax credit back,” Langman said. “And our landscapes and a lot of our infrastructure here really appealed to them.”
Nowadays, the city and the county work together to act as a sort of concierge service to help filmmakers deal with the logistics of making a movie on location, including permitting.
“Especially in Otay, where one of the big set pieces is for the film, we also worked with Border Patrol, CHP. So it was really a cross departmental collaboration,” said Steve Lockett, San Diego County’s Deputy Director of Economic Development and Prosperity.
While the “Top Gun” movies, “Jurassic Park” and “Anchorman” have scenes filmed in San Diego, this is the biggest movie that's been shot in the region to this scale in quite some time.
“It gets it on people’s radar. And people will start to say ‘oh that film was shot in San Diego. I like the way it looked,” said USD professor of Communication Eric Pierson.
He said if San Diego is serious about revitalizing its film and TV industry, it needs to bring back the Film Commission, which was dismantled in 2013.
Pierson said that would streamline filming processes and help promote the region to filmmakers.
“We really do need a film commission. A city as beautiful and with as much to offer for film as San Diego that doesn’t have a working film commission, that should not be happening,” he said.
Jodi Cilley is founder and president of Film Consortium San Diego, which supports the local filmmaking industry and has worked with KPBS on projects like the G.I. Film Festival.
She said the county’s landscape diversity is a big draw for filmmaking.
“You can be in the mountains, you can be on the beach, you can be in the city, you can be in rural areas, you can be at the border, you can be in what feels like Mexico,” Cilley said.
She said this new movie could be a turning point for filmmaking in San Diego, by spurring more Hollywood interest here.
“Having big productions here brings jobs to our local film community. Which allows us to stay here and work and not have to move to LA or New York or somewhere else in order to expand in our career,” Cilley said.
More movies featuring San Diego are on the way. The city’s Langman said Apple TV’s “Way of the Warrior Kid” was shot in Mission Bay and could be coming out by the end of this year.
