Less than 20 years ago, the UAE decided to promote itself as an important destination for film and TV production. Today it works with Hollywood, Bollywood and many Arabic language productions.
One recent milestone is the Hollywood sci-fi epic Dune, whose director Denis Villeneuve selected the emirate of Abu Dhabi for both Part One and Part Two as the desert planet of Arrakis. The second film had a 27-day shoot in the UAE that included several locations in the Liwa desert and a mixed crew of locals and internationals.
Explaining Abu Dhabi’s success as a filming location, Abu Dhabi Film & TV (ADFC) commissioner Hans Fraikin pointed first to the 30% cash rebate, “a huge attraction when you consider the size of budgets today.” He noted that “Abu Dhabi provides year-round sun,” though temperatures are most manageable from mid-September through May. Also appealing is the infrastructure, professional services and facilities that the region has worked hard to develop.
Another major production that overlapped with Dune was Gran Turismo, Sony’s big-screen feature inspired by the PlayStation game. It was shot in Dubai, a modern city appreciated by film crews for its stunning locations like The Palm and the Burj Al Arab that are just 20 minutes apart by car. Abu Dhabi, on the other hand, stretches out to include the garden city of Al Ain and the “empty quarter” of untouched sand dunes, Liwa.
Of course there are also excitingly modern city skylines rising up from the desert, along with roads and highways stretching to the horizon. They have appeared in Michael Bay’s action thriller 6 Underground, in which Abu Dhabi locations doubled for California, Afghanistan and Nigeria. In Fast & Furious 7, the Etihad Towers stood in for Las Vegas. George Clooney’s Syriana used Dubai to represent the Iranian desert, while Baby, a Bollywood production, had the city stand in for Turkey.
And how to forget the scene in which Tom Cruise climbed Dubai’s Burj Khalifa Tower, then the tallest building in the world, in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol?
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