Director Ron Howard and some 400 people from his team are working from sunrise to sunset to complete the filming of the movie "In the Heart of the Sea", in the town of El Golfo. This Wednesday the permit granted to the production to film in this protected area of El Charco de Los Clicos ends, and the mayor of Yaiza, Gladys Acuña, has announced that the director has not requested an extension.
"They start working at 5 in the morning and are there until after 6 in the afternoon. They are working more hours than expected, so the area will be cleared on Wednesday," the mayor said. The director continues to work with his team under great security and also great secrecy and the press has not been allowed to visit the filming set.
However, Howard has published some comments and photographs on his Twitter account. Specifically, on Friday he posted an image of the waves hitting the coast of Lanzarote, while on Saturday he showed a moment of filming. On Sunday he also published another photograph in which several people can be seen placing a camera. Howard has more than 760,000 followers on Twitter.
Despite the mystery surrounding the filming of the movie, the mayor of Yaiza was invited to make an official visit on Saturday, in which she was able to be "very close" to the actor Chris Hemsworth and also his wife, Elsa Pataky, who has moved to Lanzarote with her daughter. "The truth is that it is amazing. It seemed impossible to think of an assembly of these characteristics and this deployment in El Golfo," Acuña said on Radio Lanzarote-Onda Cero.
She also explained that she found the actors in the movie "too thin", since the director has subjected them to a diet of several months in which they have only been able to consume 500 calories a day. And the movie is based on the work of Moby Dick and the actors have to get into the skin of the survivors of a terrible odyssey, so they needed to have a fragile and thin appearance.
"An invaluable publicity"
What has most impressed the mayor is the production company's respect for the environment. "They have immense dining rooms in tents and even there you can see how they had all the containers for recycling. The filming on the beach, in the Green Lake, is also being respected a lot," she said.
Therefore, the mayor has not only positively valued this movie as "an invaluable publicity for all of Lanzarote", but she also remains with the "peace of mind that people are aware that there are few spaces like El Golfo and we must take care of them".