TUKUMS, Latvia - There are a few disappointing things about the Cinevilla Backlot, a replica of Riga located about 70 kilometers away from the city. There are no giant models of Mikhail Eisenstein's distinctive architecture here. The Daugava River, such as it is, has been reduced to a small trench of water. Everything, including the wreckage of a supposedly bombed-out house and the well-placed garbage, looks eerily clean, more like a Swiss city than Riga.
Maybe every film set is like this. Andrejs Ekis started to build the backlot in May 2004 out of his own pocket for an epic war film he wanted to produce. Curious sightseers came to the set, which was well-placed in the "middle of nowhere" Tukums, so he decided to open the place up as a tourist site in order to help finance the film. Cinevilla Backlot opened officially in April and now, for less than 2 lats (3 euros), you can walk the streets of WWI-era Riga, in which Latvian-language store advertisements employ German script and grammar and a church is protected by small wooden barricades.
The film set has seen more than 10,000 visitors since it opened.
During the Soviet times when Ekis started work as a cameraman, "the houses belonged to everyone," he says. "It was easy to block a street for shooting."
"There were no signs, no advertisements, no sushi restaurants, no McDonald's, no anything," he says. "Now everything is privately owned."
Ekis is a youthful millionaire-next-door type of 42, who seems to enjoy casual dress at business meetings. He made his fortune starting LNT, the country's largest privately owned television station, where he now serves as General Manager. He then started traveling abroad to find inspiration.
He visited the Warner Brothers studio in Los Angeles, which he thought was inconveniently located in the city's downtown, which made it difficult to expand. He was far more impressed by a huge replica of 1930s-era Shanghai he saw well outside Shanghai that was owned by the top Chinese film studio. "I thought that's a good idea. I bought 150 hectares of land, 70 kilometres from Riga." So far, only 15 hectares of the land has been developed.
Historical footnotes
"Defenders of Riga" tells the true David and Goliath story of a renegade German officer who, in the aftermath of World War I, massed a 50,000-strong army in order to take control of Latvia and Estonia and of the 11,000 Latvians who successfully defended their city. This is why the backlot has a series of narrow trenches.
The set also offers glimpses of three now-extinct bridges, of which the remnants can still be seen by the Daugava River. One is a swing bridge, which would turn to allow the passage of boats. Though it is made of wood and plastic, it functions just like the original. There is also a copy of an iron suspension bridge, of which only half is finished, and a wooden bridge.
"We can use computer effects to fill in the rest of the bridge," says Kristine Jansone, a representative of Cinevilla Studio's marketing department.
The same is true for the buildings, which, unlike their much taller counterparts in Riga, are only two stories high here. "Effects will be used to fill in the upper stories," says Jansone.
Some things here feel much more real than others. The cobblestone streets are made of real cobblestones. The barbed wire around the trenches is real rusty barbed wire. But the gray stones underneath the bridge are made up of wooden slabs and painted plastic. A wagon part is made out of Styrofoam.
There are many stories of film directors going maniacal over historical detail. Akira Kurosawa employed master tailors who worked for two years to make the costumes in "Ran." David Lean ordered hundreds of photographs to be taken of flowers for use in only a few seconds of "Doctor Zhivago." Saner, bank account-conscious minds have prevailed here.
Ekis says that he dislikes the elitist, art-conscious approach taken by European directors. "Free money," in the form of artistic grants from governments or institutions, "is like drugs," he says. He likes the American system, in which it is assumed a movie should offer a "return on investment."
This is not to say that the set designers have ignored historical detail. "They spent many hours in libraries, researching pictures," says Jansone. The interior of a hotel contains an old giant music box, an original antique, that plays the theme from "Carmen." It seems to be a fun toy for the handful of construction workers employed to tend to the set during the months when there isn't much heavy building. In one vintage trolley car, you can find a description of the 10 trolley lines that existed in Riga 90 years ago, written, once again, in German script and grammar.
The Cinevilla Backlot can be very educational, and it gets quite a few school groups, running in and out of trenches, trying on costumes, walking into the trolley 's these things are meant to be handled and played with.
About 100 people were responsible for building the set. "The hardest part was the trenches," says Karlis Balodis, 21, who was piling some of the hotel lobby's chairs next to the army vehicles housed in the warehouse. "There was just a lot of heavy lifting."
Now, he spends most of his eight or nine hours a day, screwing things in, repainting or moving things.
Future plans
"Defenders of Riga" has been going in and out of production since September 2004. The final shooting stretch begins at the end of June. When it is done, it will have cost about 3 million lats, Ekis says, making it the most expensive Latvian movie of the post-Soviet era. Ekis plans to keep using and adding to the set for future movies. And he wants foreigners to come as well.
"When 'Cold Mountain' was filmed in Romania it became an advertisement for Romania as a film location." He hopes "Defenders of Riga" will do the same for Latvia.
"In Latvia we don't have many sunny days," he says. "We have a certain mood. We have rain." It would be a perfect place to film World War II movies.
There remains 135 hectares of land out in Tukums that Ekis has not developed. It's just giant fields surrounding the mini-Riga all the way to the woods that you can see in the distance. It's a giant Latvian Universal Studios waiting to happen.
