Return to Virginia Business - October 2002

"Cold Mountain" comes to Virginia

If you were filming a Civil War novel in which critical scenes occur during bloody battles around Petersburg, you’d want to film it in Virginia, right? The folks at Miramax thought so, or sort of.

Filming of “Cold Mountain,” a tale about a wounded Confederate soldier’s travels to his mountain home during the last days of the Civil War, began earlier this year in Romania. Apparently the filmmakers thought that backward Balkan country is a good substitute for the Old South. But they did pick the Old Dominion for some filming last month.

The film features two of today’s hottest film stars. Jude Law is Inman, who sneaks out of a hospital and hobbles back home. Nicole Kidman plays Ada, the proper Charlestonian and Inman’s lover who ends up managing a wilderness farm with no men around to help out. The movie is based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Charles Frazier, a North Carolina writer who drew on his family folklore for this story of war and love. Filmmakers picked the Williamsburg and Richmond areas to film parts of the movie, and in August held an open casting call at the Williamsburg Outlet Mall looking for extras.

The Virginia Film Office has wanted to have a part in the making of “Cold Mountain” ever since the book first came out in 1998, says Mary Nelson, communications manager. Talks lasted two years. “We track films that are in development that we think would be good in Virginia,” she says. “Virginia is a wonderful state for filming, because we can film almost anything here. In the case of the Civil War, we have to have locations that were here during the Civil War and that look like they were here in the Civil War.”

Hundreds of movies, documentaries and television shows have been filmed here, Nelson says, and the film industry has had more than $1 billion in economic impact for the state over the past 20 years. “Cold Mountain” will be released in December 2003.

— Leila Marija Ugincius