Moving heaven and earth: How Calgary and small-town Alberta became 1980s Utah in Under the Banner of Heaven

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Matt Palmer likens it to an invading army.

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Moving heaven and earth: How Calgary and small-town Alberta became 1980s Utah in Under the Banner of Heaven Back to video

The veteran locations manager is not being overly dramatic, nor is he suggesting the arrival of a massive film or television production in a community is threatening. As countless studies have shown, it’s economically beneficial. But he has learned over the years that it is best to be completely upfront about the impact productions can have on a home, a neighbourhood, a street full of businesses and even an entire town.

Last August, he began leading a largely Calgary-based team as locations supervisor for the true-crime series Under the Banner of Heaven, which took him throughout the city and into dozens of small towns and rural spots in southern Alberta. It was a massive, multi-faceted effort to transform these locations into Salt Lake City, American Fork, Miami, remote areas of rural Utah and even an isolated red-dirt religious compound in Colorado City. The project was deemed so ambitious and the results so impressive that it is the subject of a cover story in the spring issue of Compass, a magazine put out by the Location Managers Guild International.

It reveals how Palmer and his crew found a perfect house in Carstairs to stand in for the family home of  Detective Jeb Pyre, the protagonist played by Andrew Garfield. Palmer and his team had searched Beiseker, Crossfield, Didsbury and Strathmore among many other towns. The house in Carstairs and the street it was on were perfect for the 1980s time period. But the production had to convince the family who lived there to move out for six months and submit to having the interior of their home drastically altered.

“It’s important to be as transparent as possible about the process because it can be overwhelming for people,” says Palmer. “It starts with a location scout knocking on your door and taking photos to a visit with the location manager at the production centre to a group of seven or eight or 10 people coming with the producer and director and director of photography and then it just keeps expanding. So it’s really trying to help people understand what we do.”

It’s telling that, even among veteran industry pros, Palmer and his team’s ability to find more than 100 unique locations in Calgary and southern Alberta for the 90-day shoot was seen as nothing short of miraculous.

Now streaming on Disney+ Canada, Under the Banner of Heaven is an unsettling drama based on the true-crime book of the same name by Jon Krakauer. Pyre is a fictionalized character, a devout Mormon and family man investigating the brutal murders of a young mother (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her baby daughter. The investigation leads to her in-laws, the Laffertys, an influential family with deep roots in Utah’s Church of Latter-Day Saints community.

It’s a dark story that unfolds in different timelines, from the 1980s period of the crime to historical asides about the early days of Mormonism in the 19th century.

“Period is just getting harder and harder to do because things are being torn down,” says Palmer. “Particularly for a show like this where it was really important in the world-building to be as authentic as possible to Utah and Salt Lake City and American Fork, where the story takes place. These are all real places and we wanted to make sure we were honouring the story as best we could and allow people to immerse themselves in the story and not take them out of it because it didn’t feel like it was really Utah.”

This required not only a tireless search in Calgary and beyond, but also some heavy lifting from the production design team. A shuttered fire station in Didsbury was transformed into a police station. The town was also used as a quaint backdrop for a parade in the series. The aforementioned house in Carstairs had some walls removed (with the owners’ approval.) A home in Calgary’s Capitol Hill neighbourhood also underwent some construction. A snowstorm in late November and a drop to -25 C weather complicated the transformation of a house in Inglewood that was supposed to be in Miami. The production team brought in piles of red dirt to augment a site in Dorothy outside of Drumheller, which played a dusty, isolated religious compound in Colorado City, Az.

“We were a little nervous about that,” Palmer says. “You always want to leave places the way you find them and red earth can track around into people’s houses. But it all worked really well and at the end of the day it cleaned up well.”

Calgary viewers may or may not recognize other areas in the city that were used, including the Palace Theatre’s facade, Mount Royal University, the Lantern Church in Inglewood, St. Peter’s Anglican Church and the McDougall Centre. When a location fell through at the last minute, Palmer was able to use some connections to shoot at the yet-to-open Dorian Hotel for a scene in a construction zone.

Palmer began his career in Calgary but this was the first project he has worked on since returning after five years in Vancouver. He worked on the mega-budgeted HBO post-apocalyptic series Last of Us which wrapped up filming in Calgary this week. In Vancouver, he worked with Oscar-winning writer-producer-director Dustin Lance Black on the 2017 miniseries When We Rise. Black, who adapted Under the Banner of Heaven for television as creator and writer, said he trusted Palmer’s instincts when it came to finding appropriate locations in his home province. Black was adamant that the locations be able to withstand characters moving in and out of them without the need for green screens. Not only did a building need to look right, but everything surrounding it had to be right as well.

“It was remarkable, everything that we found,” Black says. “We could shoot on locations and actors could walk out of the front doors of structures and we could not only film that but the surrounding homes. There was plenty there that looked authentically ’80s.”

Palmer worked in the locations department for a number of films and series in Alberta, including Lonesome Dove, Legends of the Fall and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. But he said his more recent projects here, such as the 1979-set second season of Fargo, Under the Banner of Heaven and The Last of Us, are proving that Alberta can be used for much more than just a scenic backdrop for westerns.

“What I’ve seen after coming back after five years away is just the amazing depth of the locations we have here and different looks we have,” he says. “We have a downtown that is really unique and very modern, which I think is well-suited to lots of filming. The variety of what we have is excellent. It’s expanding what Calgary is known for.”

Under the Banner of Heaven is now streaming on Disney+ Canada.