Alien: Covenant|Lake Te Anau — The Town the Unit Scouted First

Every shot Alien: Covenant took in New Zealand was staged out of here. Production records put a scouting party on the ground at Te Anau on 28 March 2016, a week before cameras rolled, and reports from the shoot describe the unit working the Te Anau–Milford Sound corridor: crew accommodation, helicopters, trucks and the long daily run north on State Highway 94.

The lake is the reason the town exists and the reason it can absorb a film crew without noticing. It is the largest lake in the South Island, 344 square kilometres, with three long fiords clawing west into country that has no roads at all. Stand on the lakefront in the early morning and the Murchison Mountains sit across the water in flat grey light — the same light Ridley Scott's cinematographer went looking for an hour and a half up the road.

There is a specific pleasure in starting a pilgrimage here rather than at the fjord. Te Anau is unglamorous: a supermarket, a row of tour desks, a bird sanctuary with takahē in it, boats pulled up on gravel. The film's version of this landscape is a planet that kills everyone who visits. The town's version is the last place to buy sandwiches. Do both. Then drive the 119 kilometres north and watch the country stop being hospitable somewhere around the Eglinton Valley.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.