Hooray, it’s time for another BIGDoer.com movie Then and Now. In this one we visit a location seen in the film Brokeback Mountain, specifically Brokeback Meadows and in the real world it’s a grassy swath on the flanks of Moose Mountain just west of Calgary. This site, with a bit of huffing and puffing, can be accessed by a popular hiking trail whose destination is a nearby fire lookout.
In the scenes used here we’re about thirty minutes into the picture. We see the main players, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar (Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger respectively) tending to sheep. It’s a hopelessly mundane and thankless job if there ever was one, even if the setting is gorgeous. There’s bursts of hard work interspersed with looooong periods of utter boredom. It’s here that a relationship hatches between the two men.
Brokeback Mountain – Brokeback Meadows (x3): a movie Then and Now! Fun with Chris Doering & Connie Biggart (BIGDoer/Synd)
Let’s thank our own “Johanna (Connie) Biggart” for sponsoring this and many other articles here. Be like Connie…
This post was lost to a horrible database crash some months back and with some reworking is presented here as new. It’s from 2016. It needed some updating anyway and doing this was preferable over simply restoring from a back up. Many older articles were affected by this event and over time those still relevant will get a similar treatment as this one.
Scroll down for photos and to comment.
For this Then and Now, we simply picked random samples from that chapter of the movie to use as fodder. Notice that little has changed since they shot here but then again, in the mountains time tends to move differently. The producers had to make sure they left nothing behind so it was like they were never even here, but that’s standard practice these days.
The movie premiered in 2005 and filming occurred the year earlier. They shot all over Southern Alberta and Moose Mountain was just one location in used in the production. Others include Calgary, various parts of Kananaskis, Cowley, Fort Macleod and Beiseker.
The setting in the story is Wyoming and Alberta does a good job of doubling for the state. The general topography and even that “cowboy feel” is pretty similar between the two.
While Moose Mountain is said to be the namesake Brokeback Mountain, in some scenes a different peak, Mount Lougheed further west, doubles for it. The odd things they do in movies and one looks nothing like the other.
If you wish to visit Brokeback Meadows, hike the Moose Mountain Fire Lookout Trail, accessible off Highway #66 in Kananaskis and west of Bragg Creek. It’s a popular route and is easy to find. Refer to any number of hiking guides. We’ve visited it a couple times. Come for Brokeback, stay for the views. The latter are stupendous and get even better as you climb above Brokeback Meadows.
You might as well continue on the fire lookout at that point, which is further west on Brokeback/Moose Mountain.
We’re often asked how we line up the Now shots. When first starting we weren’t so good, but years of practise has helped a lot. It’s all done in-camera using a grid system that’s hard to describe really, that allows us reproduce the angle of the original with great deal of accuracy. It’s also dreadfully simple and almost old-fashioned in execution.
We review an original on paper, plot specifics point(s) and move around until things seem to match up. Then we’re done. Click! Usually we need only take three or four Now photos, each from a slightly spot, to get it right. It’s not done in post production, which would be far easier, but zero fun. Might as well challenge one’s self.
In hindsight, we should have posed ourselves in the same positions as the actors in the duplicated scenes. It didn’t click until afterwards and would have made the photos all the more interesting (more fun too). We’ll set a reminder should we ever revisit Moose Mountain and reshoot the piece.
Images from the movie are thanks to Focus Features.
“Thank you so much for your fantastic articles and photos. Alberta and BC are dear to my heart. I could spend 24/7 here with you!” Joanne Winchester Honer (Thanks! We visit SK too).
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