Production
Most of the outdoor scenes were filmed on location at the small Greek island of Skopelos (during August/September 2007), and the seaside hamlet of Damouchari in the Pelion area of Greece. On Skopelos, Kastani beach on the south west coast was the film's main location site. The producers built a beach bar and jetty along the beach, but removed both set pieces after production wrapped. A complete set for Donna's Greek villa was built at the 007 stage at Pinewood Studios and most of the film was shot there. Real trees were utilised for the set, watered daily through an automated watering system and given access to daylight in order to keep them growing.
The part of the film where Brosnan's character, Sam, leaves his New York office to go to the Greek Island was actually filmed at the iconic Lloyd's Building on Lime Street in the City of London. He dashes down the escalators and through the porte-cochere, where yellow cabs and actors representing New York mounted police were used for authenticity.
The "Fernando" Bill Anderson's yacht (actually a ketch) in the film was the Tai-Mo-Shan built in 1934 by H. S. Rouse at the Hong Kong and Whampoa dockyards.
Meryl Streep had taken opera singing lessons as a child, and as an adult, she had previously sung in several films, including Postcards from the Edge, Silkwood, Death Becomes Her, and A Prairie Home Companion.
Read more about this topic: Mamma Mia! (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)