The Deadpool star and fellow Canadian Shawn Levy filmed their sci-fi hit in Metro Vancouver. What locations did they use?
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Vancouver icon Ryan Reynolds has done it again for his beloved hometown.
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His latest movie The Adam Project just hit screens on Netflix, soaring straight to No. 1 in Canada and the US And the majority of the family-friendly time-travel adventure was filmed on location in British Columbia.
The dense rainforests of coastal BC figure prominently in both family scenes and video-game-like spaceship battles.
No spoilers there, by the way. The trailer reveals the premise: An adult Reynolds returns from the high-tech future to 2022 to join forces with his younger self to try to save the world and heal old family wounds.
Landmarks like the University of BC campus and the Vancouver Convention Center can be spotted along the way, as well as scenes on a picturesque waterfront with clouds hanging low in the sky — Mission area, maybe? — and street scenes along a classic Vancouver boulevard — could that be Change?
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It’s yet another Reynolds vehicle where Vancouverites can play “spot the location” throughout much of the movie.
Reynolds and director Shawn Levy — who worked together on last year’s hit comedy Free Guy, with deadpool 3 next up for the duo — sing the praises of Vancouver as a place to make movies in the promotional short Netflix in Your Neighborhood. Like good Canadians, they even get the “u” in “neighbourhood” right.
Levy says he fell in love with the forests along the BC coast and hiked them often on non-filming days. The director is a Montreal native, so he’s probably more familiar with maples than cedars and firs.
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In the featurette, Reynolds gives Levy a warning about trying to navigate those forests using old-school orienteering.
“I remember as a kid, they used to tell us that the moss on trees faces north,” he says. “So if you’re lost in the woods, look where the moss is on the tree — that’s north.
“But don’t follow” that advice, he warns Levy, “because it’s so dense in Vancouver, and there is so little sun, that the moss is all around the trees.”
A little like David Duchovny’s infamous slight about rainy old vancouverbut it’s not like Reynolds is complaining.
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“I like the absolutely diverse geography of British Columbia. It’s pretty much, I think, second to none,” he says in the Netflix interview. “You can be in the desert, you can be in a rainforest, you can be in the ocean, you can be in the snow. You can be in a metropolitan, sophisticated city.
“All of this is within an hour of each location, so it’s unrivaled as a shooting location.”
(Editor’s note: He might be fudging the geography here just a bit. It’ll take slightly more than an hour to get to a desert locale from Vancouver, unless you’re using one of those spaceships from The Adam Project.)
Levy gives a shout-out to the equally diverse eating experiences available in Vancouver, naming Cioppino’s for Italian, Vij’s for Indian and Tojo’s for sushi. Reynolds, for his part, praises Benny’s Bagels, which is an old hangout near his high school, and says his all-time favorite restaurant is Minerva’s on West 41st.
Levy and Reynolds also go out of their way to praise the talent and dedication of film crews in Hollywood North, saying they were part of a “family” that was deeply committed to the movie and its story.
The Adam Project is available now on Netflix, and co-stars Jennifer Garner, Zoe Saldaña, Mark Ruffalo and impressive newcomer Walker Scobell as the young version of Reynolds.
Did you spot a Vancouver location in the movie? Let us know in the comment section below.