Eddie The Eagle Director Dexter Fletcher Talks About Recreating ...

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Director Dexter Fletcher realizes those in the know will likely notice. 

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In real life, many of the climatic moments in Michael (Eddie the Eagle) Edwards’ feel-good Olympic tale took place right here in Calgary at the 1988 Winter Olympics: The jumps, the chants, the hero’s welcome at the airport. There was that closing ceremony speech, given at McMahon Stadium, by the Olympic president that name-checked our underdog hero despite his last-place finishes. It was all in Cowtown. 

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But in Eddie the Eagle, the dramedy based on Edwards’ story starring Taron Egerton and Hugh Jackman, the action was shot amid the mountainous splendour of south Germany.

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“I would have loved to have shot in Calgary, but we just didn’t have the resources,” says Fletcher, who directed the film. “We created our version of it in Germany. I think it works pretty successfully. Obviously, it’s not perfect. It’s not Calgary.”

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“We used aerial shots of the stadium in Germany and created it to look as much like Calgary as possible. The city itself is not Calgary. I’m sure any Canadians and people from Calgary will go ‘Oh my God! What the hell?’ But hopefully they will be so taken up by the story at that point that they won’t let it trouble them too much.”

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Edwards’ first optioned his story for a movie adaptation back in 1999, more than a decade after he won the hearts of Olympic watchers as the U.K.’s only ski jumper. Since then, various incarnations of the project have been floating around. In 2007, British producers descended on Calgary to scout locations for a film. Harry Potter’s Rupert Grint, Fargo’s Martin Freeman, Scottish actor James McAvoy, British sitcom actor Kris Marshal, pop singer Robbie Williams and Steve Coogan were all reportedly read to slap on the skis for the lead role at one point or another.

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But when the story was optioned by British producer Matthew Vaughn’s Marv Films two years ago, Germany’s Oberstdorf ski jump was quickly chosen as a location. Budget played a role, but the main problem with Calgary was that ski-jumping is no longer done there, Fletcher says.

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“We came to Germany, where Eddie ended up training,” Fletcher says. “That was the first place we looked, where he had trained. It presented us with so many great options immediately for our story I said ‘This is where we are doing it.’ We then set about making it work in and around Germany and Austria.”

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Fletcher says computer-generated imagery was used sparingly, mostly to fill in the crowds for the ski-jump scenes. Stock footage was also used of the opening and closing ceremonies.

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Other than that, much of it fell to costume designers to get the details right in recreating the look of the Olympic Games circa 1988.

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“Eddie was very good in that because he still has all his old equipment and ski-jumping kit that he wore,” Fletcher says. “He lent us that very quickly and we got it replicated. We tried to stay as true as we possibly could with the clothing everyone was wearing. We have a lot of Calgary ’88 baseball caps and jackets. We went back and got that original stuff as much as we could to make it look as much like Calgary as possible. We spent a lot of money doing it. They are all in storage somewhere. But they all look fantastic.”

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Eddie the Eagle is now in theatres.

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