The Dog Stars filming locations: Hig's hangar is a real working airfield, dressed to look abandoned
There's a specific flavor of movie magic I refuse to shut up about, and it's this: the loneliest place in Ridley Scott's The Dog Stars — the hangar where Jacob Elordi's Hig lives out the end of the world with his dog and Josh Brolin's trigger-happy roommate — is not a ruin at all.
It's a functioning general aviation airport in Italy, where actual planes do actual takeoffs, and a very well-paid art department spent weeks making it look like nobody had swept the floor since the apocalypse.
Colorado, brought to you by Italy
The film is set in Colorado. Almost none of it was shot there. Scott parked his $100-million-ish pandemic western in Italy for nine weeks in spring 2025, and the geography breaks down roughly like this:
- The hangar homestead — L'Aquila–Preturo Airport in Abruzzo, a real, working airfield serving the province of L'Aquila, temporarily aged into post-humanity shabbiness.
- The mountains around it — the Sirente-Velino Regional Park, whose limestone ridgelines around Secinaro and Ovindoli do a shockingly convincing Rockies impression.
- The abandoned Colorado airport of the wider story — the village of Bordano in Friuli, plus the Cansiglio plateau in Veneto.
- Interiors — Cinecittà in Rome, with some pickup work at Pinewood in the UK.
And before you ask why an 88-year-old knight of the realm didn't just fly everyone to Denver: he did consider North America. He scouted near Calgary and noped out, because, in his words, "there are wolves and bears." He also noted the food is better in Italy. Sir, same.
"Good enough" is a whole filmmaking philosophy
Scott has been refreshingly unprecious about the swap. Asked about passing off Abruzzo as the American West, he told Hotpress:
"The peaks aren't quite the Rockies, but they're good enough."
Guy Pearce, who plays Pops, went further, calling the scenery stunning and crediting the landscape with doing half the mood-setting before anyone says a line. Which tracks: when your movie is 40% a man looking sadly at mountains from a 1956 Cessna, the mountains are basically a co-lead. Give the Apennines a supporting-actor campaign.
The fun part: the airfield never stopped being an airfield
Here's the detail that lives in my head rent-free. Preturo wasn't shut down and abandoned for the shoot — it's an operational airport that got dressed down. Weathered signage in, safety gloss out, decades of fictional dust applied by hand. Somewhere in Abruzzo there are pilots who taxied past the set of a Ridley Scott apocalypse on their way to a perfectly normal Tuesday flight.
The production ran nine weeks across four Italian regions with over 400 local crew, and in Friuli alone it dropped several million euros dressing one village as the end of the American world. The result, in theaters since August 28: a Colorado that never existed, built out of places you can visit this weekend. The end of the world, it turns out, has excellent espresso within driving distance.
Previously we wrote: Is Disclosure Day based on a book? Where the script came from, and the novel it borrows exactly one word from
