THOUGH STAR WARS takes place in a galaxy far, far away, some locations are much closer to home.
Principle filming for The Force Awakens took place at Pinewood Studios, located near London, but the cast and crew travelled to several locations around the world to film scenes for different fictional planets.
In a new video released by Discover Ireland, director JJ Abrams talks about the importance of filming in real locations.
“When I saw Star Wars for the first time, it was all practical and real,” he said of the 1977 original film and its impact on The Force Awakens.
You knew it when you saw the movie, so I felt that the standard had to be authenticity. The standard had to be reality.
One of the locations featured in the new “Star Wars” is Skellig Michael, a rocky island off the western coast of Ireland.
“I can’t believe they let us shoot there,” Abrams said of the island in the video. ”It was so beautiful.”
See some of the other filming locations for The Force Awakens below:
The desert home planet of heroine Rey (Daisy Ridley)
This former RAF airbase was used as the setting for a Resistance airbase.
Puzzlewood is a woodland site in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, England. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy told the BBC that the filmmakers were searching for the ”most magical forest on the face of the earth” and Puzzlewood “defined everything that we were looking for”.
Some of the snowy scenes for the icy Starkiller Base were shot in Iceland, as confirmed by “Good Morning America.” Though most specific locations haven’t been confirmed, Iceland Magazine reports that the ice cap Eyjafjallajökull was used.
One of the film’s standout scenes was shot about eight miles off the coast of Ireland on Skellig Michael, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the larger of the two Skellig Islands. A sixth-century Christian monastery is located on the island and can be reached after a climb up 618 steep steps.
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