I was born and raised in Yonkers New York. Depending on who you talk to, Yonkers is considered the lower Hudson Valley. Now I live still in the Hudson Valley, about an hour north. There has been a lot of filming activity going on here, so I asked Laurent Rejtö, the director of the Hudson Valley Film Commission, to talk to me about the different movies and TV shows that have been made here. Hopefully, by the time you’re done reading the interview, you’ll plan a visit to the area when all the pandemic stuff lifts and you’re allowed to get out.
I actually live just a couple of miles away from the Hudson River and there are some amazing historic places to see while you’re here checking out your favorite film locations and great places to eat.
What do you do and what is a film commission?
Our mission has been to basically secure local film productions in our area, which is seven counties. And to help them hire local crew members, cast members, rent local locations, and find vendors that can provide lodging, catering, construction, and everything else where money is spent. So basically, what we’re trying to do is create a labor pool and help with regional economic development.
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What’s making the Hudson Valley such a big hotbed for film development?
Hudson Valley has always been a recluse for artists and for creatives and it was just a matter of time that people would start bringing it home to this area. The entire industry has seen an uptick and production in New York City has been overwhelmed, so it was only natural that it would start pushing out away from the city. Then the biggest move really was that in November 2016, there were additional 10% film tax credits that were initiated. They’re not massive film credit tax credits, they’re 10% below the line labor, but it really helps to get some of the larger productions, especially some of the bigger studios to consider moving out of what I call the film zone, which is basically the 25- to 50- mile area around Columbus Circle where basically there are restrictions. If you go past that area, the 10% additional tax incentives helped to offset those costs a little bit.
I read that one such show had a local economic impact of more than $15 million. And that was spending on hotel rooms and restaurants and things like that, so people don’t realize that this is huge when your area’s chosen for a show, right?
Yeah, it’s enormous. In 2019, we tabulated data, all of the productions we work with, and we asked them to fill out a form for us so that we know how many rooms they rented, how many production days they had, how many local crew members they hired. In 2019, there were 42,250 hotel rooms rented, over 500 local crew members were hired and over 4000 local actors and experts were hired. So it’s huge and there’s an impact on vendors when people have to build.
There’s a lot we don’t tabulate, like when an actor moves here, like Jeffrey Dean Morgan did after Peace, Love & Misunderstanding. That’s enormous. Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Paul Rudd ended up buying a candy store (Samuel’s in Rhinebeck) that was going under and kept it alive, All of those things bring further economic development to the region. Jeffrey Dean Morgan moved here because he loved riding his motorcycle. He said it was the most beautiful place that he’s ever ridden this motorcycle.
(On a side note, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is married to actress Hilarie Burton-Morgan (One Tree Hill), who wrote about her experiences of falling in love with and moving to Rhinebeck, New York in The Rural Diaries. It’s a sweet read that I highly recommend.)
Let’s talk about A Quiet Place.
A Quiet Place was really interesting because they reached out to us basically a year before it started and they needed to find a farm so they could grow 100 acres of corn. They needed a farmhouse with a series of barns and silos. So we provided, I think, over 100 different farms that they could visit. We also helped out with the bridge, the Wallkill River Bridge, and permit info for the store at the beginning of the movie. They ended up finding a place in Pawling.
It had everything that they needed right there in one location. There was a horse arena right next door that they turned into their administrative studios. They built three replicas of the silos inside the horse arena, and they built the flood room for the scene where there’s the flooding in the basement and then a green room for the fog wheeling. It’s actually the best use of a soundstage I’ve ever seen.
Is there anything that they can go see that’s still up?
The farmhouse is very easily noticeable from the road. It’s probably 100 feet from the road and the barns and the silos.
Can we talk about Mark Ruffalo’s HBO Series I Know This Much is True? I saw a lot of different sections of Poughkeepsie, which is where I live, where he did some filming? What can we expect to see as fans if we wanted to find where he filmed?
We started working with them in October 2018, which, and they started production in late March. So they were really on the ground very early. We recommended a whole bunch of places that we thought would be fitting. It’s pretty spectacular when you actually watch them, you see Mark Ruffalo running across the 209. And you see all these vehicles from the 1970s 1980s. And that was all those vehicles were based at Tech City, this former IBM world headquarters.
Hospital scenes in that movie were all done at Benedictine, or the Health Alliance in Kingston, and also Ellenville Regional and the waterfall scenes in the last episode really starts with this amazing scene at the Montrepose Cemetery, which is followed by these beautiful scenes at Minnewaska State Park.
I’ve received countless emails asking where those waterfalls are. They also use the same bridge that was used in A Quiet Place, the Wallkill Valley Trail Bridge, where there’s a scene where a monkey is thrown off the bridge. They use a robotic monkey inside the bag so there’s movement. Then for the psychiatric facility, they use an old school psychiatric facility that was a development center.
When it came out there was a scene in The Avengers filmed in the Hudson Valley. I mean, the fans were going crazy.
They really needed a grassy slope that went down to the river, uninterrupted, and that’s very difficult. You know, people say that’s easy, but it’s not because most of the slopes are interrupted by a train line. There’s only like two or three places where that doesn’t happen. And one of them is one of the locations we recommended, which is the Mills Mansion.
For more information
Laurent talks about so much more in the podcast. Hope you enjoyed this! For more information about the Hudson Valley Film Commission, visit https://www.hudsonvalleyfilmcommission.org. Come see the Hudson Valley!
