For a few blissful seconds, the small town of Picton, Australia was Hollywood royalty. Here’s what it’s like to have a big film like The Wolverine shoot in your area…
Seven minutes and 38 seconds into 2013’s The Wolverine, Hugh Jackman walks down an icy street in the Yukon. Rugged as the mountains behind him with an unkempt beard and wild hair, he fights the cold with hands shoved into his warm jacket pockets. Guarded and cautious, he makes his way through a sparse intersection and into a street lined with logging trucks and boisterous hunters before entering Faro Hardware store.
I’ve been there.
Not to the Yukon or into any shop called ‘Faro Hardware’, because that’s not where this 25 second shot was filmed. On Friday, the 3rd August 2012, a film crew rolled into Picton, Australia, a small town an hour outside of Sydney where I lived during my high school years. Traffic was stopped around the town’s main road at the intersection of Argyle Street and Menangle Street.
Artificial snow was dusted along the roads at a time of year where daily temperatures normally average around 18 degrees Celsius. Semi-trucks with North American licence plates were positioned outside the disused K&V Corbett’s hardware store that set decorators had re-faced with the ‘Faro’ name. Crowds gathered on the flanks of the set just outside of the eye of the camera lens as Hugh Jackman walked through the street with the Picton Hotel on his right and a brown-bricked strip of local stores on the left.
That’s where I’ve been.
In 2024 there have already been many opportunities to see Australia identifiably reflected on the big screen. You can see Ryan Gosling in a car chase over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, follow Furiosa’s race through the outback, and watch Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney kiss outside the Sydney Opera House. But not every film location can be the major set piece, and it’s in these smaller, fleeting locations that unbelievable stories lie. The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cinema locations.
There was buzz around town on the day of shooting. There were reports of people climbing on rooftops to catch a glimpse of Jackman running through take after take. The town library, which sat right on the edge of the set, took to Facebook with a pun at the ready and posted ‘we are expecting that the urge to visit the library will be HUGH’. Buzz picked up again when the film’s launch trailer was released.
Though turned by movie magic into a remote, wintery nook of Canada, my little town was there on screen right after the 20th Century Fox and Marvel logos flashed by. Reactions to this moment from the MP of the region were captured in the local newspaper, in which he is quoted saying the trailer ‘puts Picton on the world stage’.
But it didn’t, because to moviegoers this wasn’t Picton. This was a nameless Yukon town. A distorted and repurposed Australian landscape featured for only a few seconds longer in the film than it was in the trailer.
I’ve lived in and visited other towns with quirky cinematic tie-ins. When I first moved to the UK I lived in Norwich where the Wikipedia page for the historic Elm Hill notes that it was featured in the 2007 film, Stardust. I’ve visited the Pier Hotel in Great Yarmouth, a recognisable seaside feature in the final act of Danny Boyle’s Yesterday. I now live in Brighton, where Harry Styles wandered the streets a few years ago filming My Policeman. But the obscurity of Picton’s feature in the sixth X-Men franchise entry will always be my favourite film location story.
This moment isn’t listed on Picton’s Wikipedia page. The special effects and set dressing already mean you have to squint to really recognise the town on screen, and that is becoming even harder to do if you don’t remember the Picton of 2012. The facade of the Picton Hotel was refurbished following the flooding of the town in 2016. A real estate agent moved in on the other side of Argyle Street a few years ago and re-painted the brickwork. The long-disused K&V Corbett’s Hardware opened its doors for a brief moment earlier this year to sell off its remaining stock in preparation for new ownership and a new shop front.
Podcast: Twister (1996) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
The 25 seconds of Picton featured in The Wolverine is a warped snapshot of the town I used to know. It’s reflective of a moment held only in the memory of those who lived there at the time. The local news reported on it and pictures were posted to social media, but I would put good money on those pages having very few recent views until I started flicking through them to research the finer details of this article. There are sure to be countless stories like this across the little towns and villages of the world. Inconsequential places that briefly hosted Hollywood for a reason inexplicable to locals.
Of course, if you scratch the surface to find the logic in these studio decisions, there is likely some obvious reasoning around tax breaks, cost savings or government financial incentives, but that’s not a very magical explanation to dwell on. When I bring this story up and people ask, baffled, ‘why did they film there?’, I’m more than happy to say, ‘I don’t know. Weird eh?’.
