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"View Slideshow\n\nPity the poor production designer of a grand cinematic epic. The task of recreating Egypt during the time of Cleopatra, for instance, or Atlanta on the eve of Sherman's arsonous raid, is herculean in scope and unforgiving in its demand for complete accuracy of historical detail. It's not enough simply to avoid anachronism. The production designer is responsible, more than any other individual on the set, for ensuring visual verisimilitude by generating the movie's external reality: buildings, street scenes, furnishings, signs, props, vistas\u2014all of the cues necessary to make audience members believe that they've traveled to another time, another place.\n\nSo imagine the frustration of the production designer whose goal is, essentially, nothing\u2014just untouched wilderness\u2014and who can't find it anywhere. Such was the plight of Dante Ferretti when he began scouting locations for Cold Mountain, the recently released movie based on Charles Frazier's best-selling 1997 novel of the American Civil War.\n\nThe story of a disillusioned Confederate soldier returning home to his beloved during the war's waning days won Frazier the National Book Award. Director Anthony Minghella's film, starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and Ren\u00E9e Zellweger, seems destined to win some awards of its own, and it should come as no surprise if one of them ends up in the hands of Ferretti, who has worked alongside legendary directors like Fellini, Pasolini and Scorsese and who has been nominated for no fewer than six Academy Awards over a career spanning more than three decades.\n\nLaw plays Inman, the wandering soldier, a beleaguered American Ulysses whose odyssey takes him across the entire state of North Carolina, from the coastline through the central piedmont to the mountains near Asheville, in the far west. Minghella and Ferretti both knew that finding the right landscapes was absolutely key to the telling of the story; as in Frazier's book, the North Carolina we see in the movie is practically another character, a mercurial force that alternately challenges and shelters Inman over the course of his long walk. Nearly everyone involved with the film agreed that shooting had to take place in the Tar Heel State. There could be no substitute.\n\nThe lone dissenter, alas, turned out to be North Carolina itself. While much of the state is still gorgeously pristine, modernity\u2014in the form of everything from overlogged forests to suburban sprawl to power lines\u2014has encroached just enough to make impossible the kind of sweeping, panoramic cinematography that Minghella and Ferretti envisioned. Dispirited but determined, they traveled to Canada in search of totally untouched natural beauty, but they were thwarted even there.\n\nThe quest for a shooting locale was looking grimmer by the day when, appropriately enough for a film with such mythic overtones, a deus ex machina arrived to save the day. While on a walking vacation in Transylvania's Carpathian Mountains, one of the movie's executive producers was struck by the uncanny resemblance of the Romanian countryside to western North Carolina\u2014or, more significantly, to western North Carolina as it must have looked almost 150 years ago. He took some photographs and excitedly sent them off to Minghella and Ferretti.\n\n\"It was fantastic,\" says Ferretti, recalling the day he first saw the pictures. He and the director knew they had to experience the place for themselves, so they boarded a plane and headed out. \"We arrived a week before Christmas, and it was full of snow. But we saw the shape of the mountains, and we thought it would be perfect for the end of the movie.\" (The climactic final scene takes place on a snow-covered hillside.) Then, when we saw pictures of the same mountains in the summer, we knew that we were in the right place.\"\n\nFerretti immediately corrects himself. \"Of course, the right' place would have been North Carolina,\" he acknowledges. \"But the North Carolina we needed didn't exist anymore. Over there, you still find large sections of land that are totally preindustrial. You can shoot 360 degrees around you and not photograph anything that's modern. All the old trees are still there. It really does look exactly like the area around Asheville in the middle of the 19th century.\" The deal was cinched when, upon returning to North Carolina, Ferretti discovered that one particularly bucolic county south of Asheville was actually known as Transylvania County. \"To me, that was a sign from God,\" he explains. \"We didn't have any more excuses.\"\n\nThe locale thus secured, Ferretti and his crew\u2014which included a large number of Romanian carpenters\u2014began to construct the buildings in which so many of the movie's pivotal scenes take place: the church in which Inman and his young friends first learn that war has been declared; Junior's cabin, the site of a mid-journey respite that turns out to be anything but for Inman and his traveling partner, a defrocked minister; and Black Cove Farm, where Ada Monroe, played by Kidman, anxiously awaits Inman's return. The crew's Romanian contingent, steeped in centuries of craftsmanship, was bewildered as to why anyone would want them to construct fake buildings when they could build real ones just as fast.\n\nSo, to the delight of Ferretti\u2014not to mention his director and the producers\u2014they went ahead and did what they knew how to do best. Instead of a Hollywood-style Potemkin village, Ferretti got the genuine article: almost three dozen structures, including a general store, a bank, a rooming house and a dentist's office. \"They're fantastic carpenters,\" says Ferretti. \"They still make the cabins just like they made them two centuries ago. Everything you see in the movie was built from scratch, and it's real, not just a collection of fa\u00E7ades. It's like we built a real town.\"\n\nFerretti is famed for his obsessive attention to detail; for director Neil Jordan's Interview with the Vampire (1994), he built 65 different sets representing six distinct time periods over two centuries. For Cold Mountain, he studied hundreds of books and thousands of photographs depicting Civil War-era architecture. But in the end, printed sources were no match for the real thing. Fortunately, the American South is awash in lovingly preserved sites that offer history buffs\u2014or production designers\u2014the chance to step inside life as it was lived in the 1860s. With a friend he met during the film's production, Dante Ferretti made just such a trip.\n\n\"Charlie Frazier took me to the church that he said had inspired him when he was imagining the church in his book,\" Ferretti recalls. \"When we got there, I thought I'd ask to see if the original drawings for the church still existed. They did, and I was able to use them to build the church in the movie.\n\n\"In the beginning, Charlie was disappointed that we had to shoot in Romania,\" he says. \"He didn't want to move the set from the real place. But then he came over with his wife. It was just the three of us looking around at all the sets. He was amazed. He looked at everything we'd done, then turned to me and said: We're in North Carolina.'\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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