The ‘Comic Book Movie’ site which carried the news of Thor said that
‘Although the ancient landmark of Wiltshire county has appeared in many movies, BBC’s fifth Doctor Who series’ big finale is most notable for shooting at the location.[1]
This started me thinking about other movies which include scenes shot at Stonehenge.
I thought of Polanski’s ‘Tess‘ – his version of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’. Even ‘Whovians’ might see this as being as notable as Doctor Who.
After a bit of Googling I found that the Stonehenge in ‘Tess’ wasn’t the one on Salisbury Plain but a replica built in France.
The American Cinema Papers website quotes Polanski:
We built our own Stonehenge specially – just for those last scenes – because the real Stonehenge has changed so much since Hardy’s day. The grass is all worn away by tourists, for instance. And many stones have been put upright, which before were lying flat.[2]
I think Polanski might be making a virtue out of a necessity here, if that’s the right phrase. Wikipedia says:
Although the film is set in England, it was filmed in Locronan, Brittany, France. Polanski was wanted as a fugitive in the United States, and he could have been extradited from the United Kingdom.[3]