Behind the Scenes: On the Set of We Are Marshall

Wild, Wonderful West Virginia

I can already hear you groaning: Another football movie? Is Hollywood totally out of ideas? You're right to ask; there have been a lot of football flicks this year -- and we even have Friday Night Lights on the tube. But these actors will be the first to say that it's not just another football movie. It's a movie about the people left behind after a tragedy, and a town and its school. The city of Huntington, West Virginia, is as important as the boys wearing green and white.

"I insisted that we shoot all the exteriors and everything that feels like Huntington, West Virginia, in Huntington, West Virginia," says the ever-energetic director McG."We can get away with shooting interiors in Atlanta because they're an infrastructure to do so. But everything that was exterior -- from the campus and memorial and obelisk to the Greyhound bus station on Fourth Avenue, Keith Albee Theater [pictured] and the Tri-State Airport -- was shot there. It was financially undesirable to shoot there, but the town is a character in the picture, so we did."

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