The place Was Jake Gyllenhaal’s Highway Home Filmed? Each Main Location, Defined

Of all of the legacy sequels and remakes to spring up within the age the place IP is king, the “Highway Home” remake was one of the crucial underwhelming. Jake Gyllenhaal was actually the one cause to look at the anemic remake of “Highway Home,” which arrived on Amazon’s Prime Video service again in March 21, 2024 following its South by Southwest premiere earlier within the month. The movie left a lot to be desired, including one more aspect to the argument in opposition to Hollywood’s obsession with regurgitating and repackaging present materials.

Compared to the unique, the “Highway Home” remake took numerous artistic liberties that separate it from the 1989 movie, and never essentially in a great way. For starters, the story performs out within the Florida Keys slightly than Missouri. And as a substitute of Patrick Swayze’s New York Metropolis bouncer, Gyllenhaal performs a UFC fighter who’s lured to the titular bar by proprietor Frankie (Jessica Williams), who gives him an escape from his lifetime of scamming fighters and considering ending his personal life. After all, that is “Highway Home,” so the central premise of a bouncer warding off all method of undesirables stays in place, with Gyllenhaal’s Elwood Dalton stoking the ire of the native motorbike gang as soon as he takes up the place of head bouncer at The Highway Home.

Switching the situation to the Florida keys makes for the obvious visible distinction between this and Swayze’s motion traditional. However it seems little or no of this film was really shot within the Sunshine State. In actual fact, little or no of it was shot in the USA, as our have a look at the filming areas for “Highway Home” will reveal.

In “Highway Home,” Elwood Dalton strikes to the fictional city of Glass Key, an space within the Florida Keys that is presupposed to be positioned near Marathon, Florida. This modification of location dictates a lot of the story in director Doug Liman’s remake, which options as its central antagonist Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), a criminal offense boss intent upon forcing Frankie to promote her bar so he can construct a luxurious resort on that land. The native motorbike gang is in league with Brandt, who’s mainly liable for flooding the Keys with medication and overseeing the illicit drug empire he inherited from his father; it maybe goes with out saying that the “Highway Home” remake is way darker than the unique. Nonetheless, the Florida Keys as a location is central to the plot of “Highway Home” 2024.

Which is why it is attention-grabbing to notice that just about not one of the movie was really shot in Florida. In actual fact, when filming bought underway on August 23, 2022, it did so in a wholly completely different nation. The Dominican Republic stood in for Glass Key, with the Caribbean nation offering an identical panorama to that of South Florida however with the form of tax breaks that Amazon MGM was evidently on the lookout for. From August to November of 2023, “Highway Home” filmed within the nation, utilizing cities equivalent to Santo Domingo and Punta Cana as stand-ins for the Florida Keys setting. Scenes in Charlie (Hannah Lanier) and Stephen (Kevin Carroll)’s bookstore, on the seashore, and on the Highway Home bar itself had been all shot within the D.R., making it the primary location for the film. As Florida Keys movie commissioner Chad Newman advised KeysNews, “99% of the film is filmed within the D.R.”

As Stephen notes within the movie, The Highway Home bar is positioned “simply up the freeway, previous mile marker 77.” That refers to an actual Florida location, however there is definitely no bar there in actual life. For the movie, the bar was designed by manufacturing designer Greg Berry and constructed from scratch on a Dominican Republic seashore in Guayacanes, San Pedro de Macorís.

Regardless of the entire thing being fabricated, director Doug Liman wished the bar to really feel as sensible as potential. (He took this identical method to the brawls in “Highway Home,” utilizing pillow fights to make the punches look actual.) The director revealed within the movie’s manufacturing notes (through Decider) that he’d visited a number of bars within the Florida Keys and strove to recreate sure design parts in his set, equivalent to an absence of doorways. “I actually wished to embrace that,” the director stated, “and one method to do it was to construct the bar for actual in a spot that is immediately between a freeway and the ocean. It was probably the most ultimate method to shoot this film as a result of the scenes can stream from inside to outdoors.”

Manufacturing designer Greg Berry described his method to The Highway Home design as “mid-century fashionable, Tiki Polynesian.” No matter Berry and the crew did, they actually constructed the fictional bar properly because it managed to outlive Hurricane Fiona, which swept by way of the Dominican Republic in September 2022 throughout the second month of filming. Whereas on a tour of restoration efforts, President Luis Abinader even stopped by the set to take a fast have a look at the sturdy development, which, in response to dr1, had been constructed by Dominican craftsmen.

“Highway Home” is not going to go down in cinematic historical past as considered one of the very best motion pictures set in Florida, and a part of which may properly be right down to the truth that hardly any of the movie was really shot there. Whereas the whole lot of “Highway Home” takes place within the Florida Keys (barring Elwood Dalton’s battle in opposition to Jax “Jetway” Harris in Las Vegas, which we’ll get to momentarily), solely a handful of photographs had been really captured within the Sunshine State. Most blatant is the Seven Mile Bridge, which is depicted in an aerial shot near the beginning of the movie. This Florida Keys bridge connects Knight’s Key (a part of Marathon, Florida, the closest city to the fictional Glass Key) to Little Duck Key within the Decrease Keys. The bridge seems after Dalton boards a Greyhound bus certain for Glass Key, and is proven solely briefly.

As famous by KeysNews, the “Highway Home” crew additionally captured a shot of Fred the Tree, a lone Casuarina tree positioned on the outdated Seven Mile Bridge which has attained movie star standing amongst Florida locals. Sadly, not all these locals took kindly to the characterization of the Florida Keys in “Highway Home,” with KeysNews noting that there have been “many liberties taken that had been outright inaccurate or unflattering to the Keys.” Amongst them had been “rampant drug issues” and a “Monroe County sheriff, nicknamed ‘Huge Dick'” who was depicted as “being ‘on the take,'” which I suppose is a good criticism from individuals who do not need to see their neighborhood tarnished on display screen.

Except for these establishing photographs, the one different scenes to be shot in the USA had been Elwood Dalton’s weigh-in and battle in opposition to Jax “Jetway” Harris (performed by former UFC fighter Jay Hieron). This flashback scene required Jake Gyllenhaal and the “Highway Home” crew to journey to Las Vegas in March 202​​​​​​3 earlier than taking pictures the battle throughout the UFC 285 occasion at T-Cell Enviornment in Paradise, Nevada.

After filming a faux weigh-in on the UFC 285 weigh-ins in Sin Metropolis, Gyllenhaal and the crew shot the large battle flashback. The scene required Elwood Dalton to stroll out and face off in opposition to Harris, nevertheless it appears really filming the required scenes throughout the massive UFC occasion was by no means assured. As UFC president Dana White, who seems briefly within the film, advised Novastream (through The Impartial), there have been apparently “5 alternate plans” for filming this massive flashback, relying on how the timing labored out on the day.

Nonetheless, in response to Enterprise Insider, issues went off with out a hitch, and even the commentators appeared “surprised” by the brutality of Gyllenhaal’s faux battle. Lamentably, “Highway Home” is unlikely to be remembered as considered one of Gyllenhaal’s greatest motion pictures, however you may’t say the person did not get into form for the position, with even White commenting on his physique following the Vegas shoot, saying, “I do not assume he is been USADA examined, however he appears nice.”