What was the appeal in making "The Claim"?
The appeal was partly the idea of doing a story set in the Gold Rush without it necessarily being a Western. One of the attractions was that when gold was discovered in California, the state had just become part of America and it was populated by Mexicans and Native Americans. It seemed just as legitimate for us to make this our subject matter as it was for an American film maker. And borrowing from Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge" also gave a sense of generational change to the story. We could take the Gold Rush, its pioneers, and immigrants as one generation, and then the young generation could be represented by the coming of the railroad and the beginning of civilisation in California. Hopefully in the film you get a sense of transition from an immigrant mining culture to an American culture.
Was it difficult to get the film funded?
Getting the finance was the hardest part. Initially we were going to make the film with Polygram in France. We spent six months searching for locations in the Pyrenees and we built the set of the frontier town in London. But we lost the money at the last minute because the financiers didn't think we had a starry enough cast.
What happened then?
When we came back to the project with PathΓ©, we decided that Canada would be the safest bet from a weather point of view as it was hard to find somewhere with guaranteed snow in France. We started looking in the Rockies and found somewhere relatively accessible: Fortress Mountain is one hour from Calgary, 7000ft above sea level, and the valley there didn't show much sign of the 20th century. The construction crew then spent three months up at the location building the sets that we had shipped out to Canada.
