Lost On Location
Think you know the island? Think again. Locations manager Jim Triplett, along with his entire team, reveal the thrills and spills of knowing the best places to capture Lost’s saga.
Lost Magazine: While Hawaii is one of the most gorgeous places on Earth, it is still an island with limited resources. With the worldly location backdrops integral to Lost, how do you make Hawaii seem like anywhere in the world?
Jim Triplett: Being on an island, there are only so many places to go. Part of the location department’s job here is to have a good relationship with the public. With these locations, we need to be able to go back to these same places. We are always developing new locations, but we have to take care of the ones we have. We stress that more than other states, or other places that seem to have endless options of places to go to. That said, Hawaii has a lot of different architecture. We have a great Chinatown and an interesting downtown. We have military bases and plantation style homes that we use. We are a diverse island.
Are Hawaiians happy that Lost shows that their home is so diverse?
I think our State is proud of what we have been able to accomplish here. Most shows come to Hawaii to be Hawaii – like Hawaii Five-O, Magnum P.I. or Pearl Harbor by Michael Bay. But we’ve done movies like Tears of the Sun, which was supposed to be set in Africa. We showed movement from one end of the continent to the other in that film and we did that by showing a dry climate and then a wetter climate. And so in the episode where Charlie was kidnapped and presumed to be dead hanging in a tree, we tried to emulate what [director] Antoine Fuqua did in Tears of the Sun, to show that same type of movement with our group looking for Charlie.
Have you ever ventured off Oahu?
We basically stay on Oahu. We’ve only gone to one of our neighbor islands. We went to the big island [Hawaii] to do a scene with the polar bears in a cave. It was actually a lava tube. We went out by the volcano in an old lava tube and shot it just outside of Hilo. We took a two-day trip with a small camera unit. They’ve taken a few scenes to Los Angeles like the interior of the plane on a soundstage, and the 6th Street Bridge scene with Jack. And a small team went to London last season. But we’re proud that everything else has been shot here.
Are people aware that your worldly locations are really Hawaii?
One of the neatest things for me is for my producers to go back to the mainland on hiatus and have industry peers come up to them and go, “How do guys travel all over the world and country to shoot these scenes?” They go, “We shoot it all in Hawaii!” We’re fooling our peers in the industry – and that’s a real compliment to us.
Read the full article in issue #20 of The Official Lost Magazine. Click here for more information.
