Two newspaper articles today describe new movies that take place, at least in part, in Charlottesville.
The San Francisco Chronicle writes about “Don’t Tell,” an Italian-language film:
In a chilling foreshadowing, the distress Sabina feigns in a sound studio later turns out to be all too real when she travels to Charlottesville, Va., to see her brother, Daniele (Luigi Lo Cascio), a college professor. She’s hoping to glean some understanding of her recovered family memories. But Daniele is more inclined to be a tour guide, going on at length about Thomas Jefferson’s neoclassical buildings, than sympathetic kin.
And Newsday writes about Donald Sutherland’s “American Gun”:
Avelino said that during their two-day shoot at the gun shop owned by Sutherland’s character (the story takes place in Charlottesville, Va., the Oregon suburbs and Chicago), Sutherland had to do a crash course in pistol assembly.
I wonder if either of these were actually filmed here. I imagine it would be difficult to fake UVa.
You can fake anything as long as you keep the scenes indoors. If they needed exterior establishing shots they could’ve just as easily sent a 2nd Unit director and crew to shoot a few establishing shots, without actually needing any of the actors to actually set foot in town.
From IMDB it looks like “Don’t Tell” the italian film did shoot in Charlottesville and Lyncburg as well as a few other places. You can find that info here.
The film American Gun listed on IMDB as American Gun (2005) since’s there’s another different movie with the same title doesn’t have any shooting location info. However Yahoo lists it’s shooting location only as Los Angeles. And since it’s an IFC film (which most likely means low budget) I can believe they probably cheated the locations. If any of the actors in that film ever showed up in Cville for a shoot it would’ve been a big story in the local news.