Welcome back to Movies from My Hometown, a recurring feature where one of our writers will be sharing movies that were set and/or shot near where they have lived as a personal lens into these films…

by Caitlin Hart, Staff Writer

When I was 11, Brad Pitt filmed a movie in my hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I cannot understate how The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford dominated the local news while it filmed in our city. For all of September 2005, Brad Pitt mania gripped Edmonton. All we could talk about was the big movie star in our town. 

Despite filming in Fort Edmonton Park, the movie isn’t set here. No movies are. But Alberta has long been a popular location for shooting movies. From War for the Planet of the Apes to Little Big Man, Alberta stands in for various American landscapes, from Montana (Brokeback Mountain) to Smallville (Superman). Alberta’s diverse terrain makes it the perfect stand-in for just about anywhere from a wholesome midwestern town to the rugged frontier. But, perhaps more than any other state, Alberta plays Texas in the movies. No coincidence when Alberta is pejoratively nicknamed “Texas of the North” by our fellow Canadians. 

Alberta, for the uninitiated, is the country’s conservative stronghold, bubbling with resentment for political and cultural elites out east. Agriculture and oil fuel our boom-and-bust economy. All that, along with the vast open prairie, make my home province an obvious Texas analog. I can always clock a film set in Alberta. The rolling foothills, the rippling prairie grass, and the craggy Rocky Mountains stir recognition in my subconscious. I long for summer road trips through southern Alberta and vacations in the mountains. 

It’s not merely the setting calling to me. The kinds of stories told here speak to my inherent Albertan-ness, my interest in the mythology of the west, and the power of art to pull those narratives apart. John Ford shot part of The Searchers here. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians were both shot entirely in Alberta. Each of these films questions and reifies the myth of the frontier, which is as relevant in Alberta as anywhere in the American west. Alberta’s history is the product of violent colonial domination and the construction of that narrative through cowboy mythology, a story to justify who we are and why we are here. Films like Buffalo Bill and the Indians that so expertly skewer the stories we tell in creating national myths ring true to me as an Albertan grappling with the true history of this place, in tension with Canada’s own national mythology. 

Almost any Texas-set film resonates with me, even if the movie wasn’t made here. Whether it’s Last Picture Show’s deserted oil boom town, the open highways of Easy Rider, the rural nightmare of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or the ambling pace of teen life in Dazed and Confused, these stories ring true to me. But there’s something about films shot in Alberta that cuts deeper. Terrance Malik’s masterpiece Days of Heaven captures Alberta-as-Texas better than any other film.

The open spaces of Days of Heaven and the vast prairie skies suggest both opportunity and isolation, endless possibilities and endless silence. Texas on film is where man meets wildness, industry meets the untouched land, and conflict inevitably follows. Texas offers freedom – but it’s a freedom that must be won, labored for. For Richard Gere’s Bill in Days of Heaven, a conflict between men and their violent nature is played out in the mills of Chicago and the fields of the Texas panhandle. 

Days of Heaven might be my favorite made-in-Alberta feature. Néstor Almendros’ cinematography expertly captures the vibrant blue of the skies I grew up under, conveying how open and endless the prairie feels, the simultaneous hope and fear the openness instills. Days of Heaven has a distinctly Old Testament tone, of plagues and lovers pretending to be siblings in a strange land, Abraham and Sarah on the American plains, confronting harsh landscapes and economic reality. In Malik’s vision, Texas is a place where economics, religion, and nature are all materially real. The clash of industry and nature, the restlessness of humans, and the biblical fire that rips across the prairies ring true to me as Albertan motifs. 

Films and television set in New York often claim the city as a character of its own, to the point of cliche. Texas is a wild and uncontainable character in Days of Heaven. The vast prairie skies, rivers running through valleys, and open fields that stretch forever say more than narration or dialogue. The setting suggests transience, movement, a meeting of the vulgar and the divine. A movie set in New York says you’ve arrived; this is it, and nowhere else exists. Texas is seldom a destination on screen; it’s a place one longs to leave, as in Dazed and Confused, Last Picture Show or Bonnie and Clyde. For Bill, in Days of Heaven, Texas offers him a place to be anonymous and escape his past. But, inevitably, the past follows you. Like in Bonnie and Clyde, the only way out of Texas is to be gunned down by the law. Life is lived on the run in Texas, but that also means one can never stop there. Buffalo Bill picks up his show and heads to the next town; Bonnie and Clyde hurry over the Oklahoma state line, and Bill tries to outrun his crimes. 

Each of the films I’ve mentioned that were shot in Alberta – Unforgiven, Days of Heaven, The Searchers, Superman, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians – concern themselves with American mythology and the meaning of being American. Figures like John Wayne, Superman, and Buffalo Bill represent America as it sees itself. There’s a certain irony to these films being shot in Canada, a country that often defines itself as not-America. Yet, raised on a steady stream of Hollywood films and Nashville country, I feel culturally American, if not literally or geographically. And that’s what Alberta has come to be on film – not quite America, but close enough. The towering mountains and empty plains of my childhood look just enough like Texas to trick an audience into believing not only that Alberta could be Texas but that Texas could be what it is in the movies – a vast land waiting for American mythology to be written upon it.