Alien: Covenant|Milford Sound Foreshore — Where the Lander Came Down on Planet 4

Principal photography on Alien: Covenant began here on 4 April 2016, on the flat gravel and tussock at the head of the fjord where the tour boats queue. The crew built a working section of the colony ship's landing craft on the foreshore — full scale, out in the open, with wet black rock rising behind it. Anyone who has stood at Freshwater Basin knows what the camera was after. Cloud sits low on the walls most of the year and the light comes down through it flattened, belonging to no particular hour. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, quoted by the New Zealand Film Commission, said the weather itself was the reference: "We took inspiration from the actual weather in Milford Sound, it's very cloudy, soft light." Nothing had to be pushed in the grade to stop looking like Earth.

The foreshore is public ground. Walk out from the car park past the cruise terminal and within two minutes the buildings are behind you and there is only water ahead. Rain is not an inconvenience here; the sound takes something like seven metres of it a year, and the cliffs answer with waterfalls that appear in an afternoon and are gone by morning. Stand at the shingle edge with your back to the terminal and you are looking roughly along the lander's sightline — a place that needed no set dressing to stop being a planet anyone had colonised.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.