In new movie comedy, NoDa looms large — and so does a BIG (fake) mountain just beyond it
The “Saturday Night Live” comedy trio Please Don’t Destroy’s new R-rated movie — a goofy buddy adventure filmed in and around Charlotte last year and streaming on Peacock beginning Friday — features an array of outrageous visual effects shots.
There’s a hawk with a bad attitude, a menacing hairless bear and a prosthetic, um, private part.
But for anyone familiar with the NoDa neighborhood, the most bonkers scene in “Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain” comes just a few minutes in, when stars John Higgins, Ben Marshall and Martin Herlihy dance on roller skates along North Davidson Street to the beat of Justice’s disco-pop song “D.A.N.C.E.”
It’s not the fact that Herlihy’s face has been digitally placed over a stunt double’s in some of the shots (although we’ll tell you more about that in a minute).
It’s that off in the distance, behind recognizable joints like Boudreaux’s Louisiana Kitchen and The Blind Pig, is an enormous mountain flanked by a couple of smaller peaks. All of which jut up from, oh, roughly where downtown Concord is in real life.
“We were like, ‘Oh, we need to have the mountain in the beginning so you see it, like, looming in the distance so it makes sense,’” says the director, Paul Briganti, an “SNL” veteran whose film follows three 20-something pals’ search for a priceless French artifact believed to be hidden on a mountain just outside of their North Carolina town. “But there was none of that,” he continues, chuckling,“ in NoDa, or Charlotte, or anything — so we just had to build that. But it worked out great.”
In all, Briganti spent about five months in Charlotte and the surrounding areas in 2022, including the roughly seven-week shoot that started in mid-July and generated a fair amount of buzz as the production sprawled across various locations. (Observer reporter Chyna Blackmon identified several of them in this story.)
Here’s everything we were able to learn about the making of the movie in a 20-minute video interview with Briganti this week.
At one point, there was talk of shooting the film in upstate New York. “What we needed was very specific,” Briganti says. “We needed a place with studios, a place with real locations — houses and restaurants — and then we also needed outdoors, and then terrain that was rocky. ... And we also needed to be close to a hub of crew.” But after mapping everything out, his production team decided the mountainous areas of New York that they were looking to shoot in were way too far from New York City. Meanwhile, Charlotte is only 60 miles from South Mountains State Park and just 30 from Crowders Mountain State Park. Atlanta — less than four hours away if traffic cooperates — is a massive production hub for the movie industry with plenty of crew willing to drive up to work the shoot. The $7 million rebate grant the movie got from the state of North Carolina didn’t hurt, either. “That,” Briganti admits, “was a big part” of the reason N.C. wound up making more sense than N.Y.
Shooting in North Carolina’s mountains wasn’t quite as simple as he imagined. Briganti shares a story behind a scene, which comes about 45 minutes into the movie, that’s set in a rocky area with a dramatic view as the three friends share eccentric fantasies about how they’d spend the money they make off the treasure. “My thinking,” he says, “was, If we get one scene that’s on a high peak and you see off the horizons ... if we do one day doing that, then you don’t have to do anything else like that. ’Cause then people will be like, OK, they’re actually on a mountain. And everything else can be in the woods and surrounded by trees.” But getting that shot, he describes, “was insane.” To get to that location, “it was like a 30-minute Gator ride up the mountain, and then once we were out there, I think it thunderstormed two hours later, so we had like a half-hour of shooting time. ... It ended up looking great. It was so good,” he says, pointing out that — unlike the raptor with the ’tude — the hawk seen flying in the background in that scene was real.
It was — shocker! — hot last summer in North Carolina. “That was tough, shooting outside (in) the dead of August,” says Briganti, who sweltered with his cast and crew in NoDa but also at Crowders, South Mountains and on a farm in Concord (which we’ll tell you about in just a sec). And speaking of thunderstorms and weather delays: “The only time it’s not extremely hot is when it’s about to thunderstorm, or when it is thunderstorming. That was an interesting thing. Every day, the gaffer or one of the grips would have this lightning device, where they could tell how far or close lightning was. And if it gets to a certain distance, we had to shut down for like an hour.” He says there was one week where lightning suspended shooting every day. “You’re trying to direct an action-comedy scene, and some guy’s just yelling like you’re on a ship approaching a wave,” he explains, chuckling. “It was next-level.”
He says the most memorable shooting location, for him, was that aforementioned farm — at Bost Grist Mill. By day, it’s a historic site and tourist attraction in southeast Concord, not far from Reed Gold Mine. For the production, the mill gave over the farmland to Briganti and his team, who used the property to create the commune belonging to a cult that is revealed to be inhabiting the mountainside in the second half of the film. (Other forest scenes were also shot there, including a wacky one involving several characters trading vicious throat punches.) “This enormous farm,” he says, “basically became our back lot. ... This guy was so accommodating and so nice to us and helpful. I mean, he was like, ‘Yeah, you can do whatever.’”
Another favorite was the former Dick’s Sporting Goods store at Northlake Mall, which the art department and props team outfitted with boats, motorcycles, ATVs, fishing poles, camping equipment, clothes, jackets and boots to create the Bass Pro Shops-esque Trout Plus store owned by Ben Marshall’s character’s dad (played by Conan O’Brien). “It was one of those classic things that you love in the film industry, where the production designer’s just like, ‘I can’t do it! It’s impossible!’ And you’re just like, ‘Ya gotta do it!,’ ” Briganti says, laughing, referring to production designer Bruce Curtis. “And then he does it, and he pushes himself, and he’s so happy at the end of the day. But, yeah, it was massive. Even when we were watching the first edit, I remember Judd” — that’d be producer Judd Apatow of “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” fame — “he was just, like, ‘It’s so big.’ He was like, ‘It’s hilarious how big this store is.”
Conan O’Brien was the biggest star on the set. But by and large, he came across as just one of the guys. Briganti recalled one day shooting at Northlake when his sister and his niece visited the set, and O’Brien joined them for lunch at Chick-fil-A in the food court (and happily posed for a photo with his sister). Briganti says he also dined with O’Brien as part of a group a few times at Firebirds Wood Fired Grill; that O’Brien once went with Marshall to buy a backpack at a Northlake store in what Briganti characterizes as “a very cute bonding experience”; and that the legendary late-night TV host also sometimes “would just kind of go and wander” around the mall.
A few more thoughts about working with Conan: “It was incredible,” Briganti gushes. “I mean, he’s so funny, and he’s kind of this folk hero of comedy, you know? He’s a legend. What I really was so happy with is that he was so motivated and excited to work really hard and to give this everything. He really didn’t have an ego at all. He was very much like my favorite people are — people who work so hard, and they’re humble, and they can make fun of you, and you can make fun of them. That’s what the (Please Don’t Destroy) guys are, and that’s who I am, and that’s who he is. So it was really a profoundly positive experience working with him. He’s so smart and so funny.”
About Martin Herlihy’s roller-skating stunt double: The day they were shooting those scenes in NoDa, CharlotteFive sent a photographer out to take some pictures — and wound up capturing an image that has been published alongside a number of stories about the production over the past 15 months or so. When this is all explained to Briganti, he laughs. “That’s really funny. I think I remember that actually, seeing that (photo), and just thinking it was so funny.” As for why Herlihy needed a stunt double where the other two didn’t? “Well, Martin, he just wasn’t as good at it, and he knew that and I knew that. Basically, I didn’t want him to fall and hurt himself. But I think he’s in half the shots, and then the other half is a stunt double with face replacement.”
Wait, there’s one more location in Charlotte that Briganti really, really liked: Circle G Restaurant on Rozzelles Ferry Road, a few miles northwest of uptown. He says it was recommended to him by his director of photography, Isiah Donté Lee, a North Carolina native who graduated from the UNC School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. It’s the setting for one of the closing scenes in the movie. “I love diners. I love old diner-restaurants and old-school places. It’s always so dramatic. It’s always in these mob movies, or, like, ‘Better Call Saul’ or something, and that was really fun to shoot there. That was a really special location.”
And finally, just a few more thoughts about that fake mountain in Charlotte: “There was no mountain that was exactly the external look that we needed,” Briganti says. “It was like, Oh, it needs this really high peak, but it needs these smaller ones to get there. So we did this thing — we had a map of our fake mountain that we built, and we wrote where each scene would happen on this mountain. It was fun to imagine it and build it, and specify.” As for how tall “Foggy Mountain” might be, in his imagination? “We thought it was like one of those Colorado peaks. ... But it’s a funny thing, ’cause it’s like just this very flat town, and then this giant mountain,” he says, laughing. “It’s an odd geographical thing. ... Perfectly flat town, and then the biggest mountain you’ve ever seen 20 miles away.”
Local spots you may recognize in ‘SNL’ comedy trio’s new movie filmed in North Carolina
