26 February 2015
Newsdesk
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson has joked Jesus stepped in and rescued his San Andreas shoot.
The 42-year-old actor happily confirmed he finished filming the earthquake action-adventure just before the 87th Academy Awards took place.
It rained in Los Angeles on Oscars Sunday, but fortunately for Dwayne and his San Andreas colleagues, the weather didn’t adversely impact the last bits of scenes they were shooting on the day.
“It held out, I know Jesus very well, he held it out for me,” the star laughed to Access Hollywood on the Oscars red carpet. “Everything's great for San Andreas – I wrapped that yesterday, shot a little bit today. It's gonna be incredible."
San Andreas, which was made with an estimated production budget of US$100 million, is a disaster film directed by Brad Peyton. The plot centres around Dwayne’s character Ray, a helicopter pilot who flies with his wife to San Francisco from Los Angeles in search of their daughter after a devastating 9.0 magnitude earthquake rocks the region.
San Andreas became unwittingly involved in political and Hollywood history during its production for being filmed mostly in Australia. The fact that the feature is based in California but was shot abroad illustrates a larger Hollywood issue referred to as runaway productions: those movies made outside of the state because other localities offer more tax incentives to the project. Activists cited the film, in addition to other large-budget flicks like Godzilla and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, as a reason why California needed to incentivise major movie productions to spend their money.
Governor of California Jerry Brown signed bill AB 1839 into law outside the iconic TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood last September as a result of the runaway production activists’ work. AB 1839 will ensure an additional $330 million is set aside for the state’s film subsidies over the next five years, adding $100 million per year to what was previously at hand.
