'Cyrano' director reveals the crew had to pick up their cameras and run off Mount Etna when the volcano erupted during filming
- "Cyrano" director Joe Wright said that Mount Etna erupted while filming the movie on it.
- Snow had previously forced filming to relocate further down the mountain from a first location.
"Cyrano" director Joe Wright told Insider that while filming on active volcano Mount Etna "seemed like a good idea at the time," unusual snowfall and a volcanic eruption led to the crew having to improvise and switch locations before fleeing the mountain altogether.
"Cyrano," out now in the United States, is a musical adaptation of the Edmond Rostand play "Cyrano de Bergerac" starring Peter Dinklage as the titular character. Based on Erica Schmidt's 2018 stage musical adaptation, and with Schmidt herself penning the screenplay, the film also stars Haley Bennett as Roxanne and Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Christian.
Filmed during the pandemic in the Sicilian town of Noto, Wright said that he wanted a "strong visual juxtaposition" for the film's battle sequence. And "there was Mount Etna," he told Insider — the volcano, which is still active, is located just over 120 kilometers (about 78 miles) from the film's primary location.
"We went up there and scouted and we found a position near the summit at about 16,000 feet, and we said, 'It's not gonna snow, is it?'" Wright recalled. "And they said, 'No, it never snows in December, only in February it sometimes gets some snow."
Wright told Insider that the crew built a set up at the 16,000-feet location, complete with World War I-esque trenches, a large camera platform, and a 100-foot Technocrane.
"We had it all worked out very, very precisely, and then four days before we were due to start shooting that sequence, it started snowing," Wright said. "It snowed and snowed, and buried our set and buried the camera platform, the camera crane, and actually made the whole set completely inaccessible. We couldn't get there."
Production was then forced to "improvise a new location" and set up at around 8,000 feet, where the air was still thin, Wright told Insider. Furthermore, there was an equipment issue — the crew had no grip equipment, given the loss of the crane, which he told Insider in February had only been dug out recently.
At that point, Wright told Insider, they were filming with a tripod and a camera. Then, Mount Etna erupted.
"On the last day of shooting, the volcano chose to erupt," Wright told Insider. "We were having volcanic rock and dust and ash thrown at us, and so we picked up our camera cases and ran off the mountain."
Footage from NBC News published on December 14, 2020 shows lava and ash erupting from the volcano. Citing data from the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), the Smithsonian Institute's Global Volcanism Program reported that the southwest part of the volcano's cone had collapsed on December 13, 2020, and lava flows continued through the following week.
"I remember that night, it was the 18th of December, and it took off from Sicily and we looked down through the aircraft window and you could see this burning red eye of the volcano mouth staring at us," Wright told Insider. "And we're like, okay, we're out of here."