The bad news is that ninjas have taken over NASA. The good news is that they look really, really cool doing it.
In late 2011, ComingSoon.net had the privilege of visiting the Louisiana-based set of director Jon M. Chu’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation which, in addition to quite a bit of exterior set ups, made use of New Orleans’ Michoud Assembly Facility. Up until 2010, the facility — one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world — was used to build space shuttles. Spread across 40 indoor acres, the plant is so large that certain rooms actually end up developing their own weather.
The first film production to make use of the facility, G.I. Joe: Retaliation constructed multiple full-scale sets including the snowy exterior of a Nepalese Monastery where Ray Park’s Snake Eyes, Byung-Hun Lee’s Storm Shadow and Elodie Yung’s Jinx do battle admits an army of brightly-colored ninjas. Not far away is the monastery’s full-realized interior as well as a massive artificial rock wall where impressive acrobatics will be cut together with previously-shot footage of actual stuntmen performing on ziplines high atop an actual mountain.
How Chu keeps track of it all is anybody’s guess as, not far away, the second unit mounts a chase chase along a grassy beach bordering the water. In the scene doubling for South Carolina’s Fort Sumter, Dwayne Johnson’s Roadblock and D.J. Cotrona’s Flint are in hot pursuit of Ray Stevenson’s Firefly, a villainous mercenary in the employ of Cobra.
Throughout the day, we had the opportunity to talk with quite a few of the film’s cast and crew about the March 28 release and, in the spirit of Joe, we’ve created special file cards that you can click on to access each of the interviews. Check them out below!
Click on the file cards to check out the interviews!
