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LOCATION

As the title implies, the locations for the black comedy "The Big White" required snow, and lots of it. To find the right backdrop for the shoot, Director Mark Mylod, cast members Robin Williams, Holly Hunter, Giovanni Ribisi, Allison Lohman, Tim Blake Nelson and company traveled to the Yukon to begin principal photography in White Pass. In addition to being fully blanketed with snow, White Pass has spectacular dramatic vistas, and just the right kind of cliffs off which to drop a frozen dead body.

Director Mark Mylod admits the conditions took him a bit by surprise. "Talk about naive," says the Englishman, "I imagined that if we went up this huge mountain pass and started shooting one scene over four days, the weather would be totally constant and everything would match perfectly. It didn't occur to me that it might be a whiteout for two of those days, which made it impossible to shoot anything. Because of our budget limitations, that was deeply stressful. Phones didn't work, and we were practically using mirrors on hillsides to communicate. There were loads of locations you could only get to by snowmobile. I became a snowmobile king, at least in my little head."

Despite the harsh weather, Williams found the locations vital as an actor. "To shoot there was really important," he says. "It really gives you a sense of the necessary pioneer spirit it takes to live there, because you really could freeze to death. There's a stark beauty that's so breathtaking. You realize that wilderness is really important, and it's kind of a humbling thing: you're all of a sudden not the biggest thing in any way, and nature doesn't care, really."

Mylod had his own brush with nature while in Alaska. "Being in Alaska was an amazing experience," he says. "We were out in the middle of the night shooting on a cliff one night when the Northern Lights started, which I'd kind of seen in Skagway, and my reaction to this slight green glow was, 'Is that it?' And then they started this dance thing in the sky, and that was pretty good, but then - and I had no drugs or alcohol, I promise - they started dancing along, and then they were caving in on us, coming down, and it was just jaw-dropping. I'll never see anything like it again in my life."