Landing on Mars: Visiting the Set of Andrew Stanton’s ‘John Carter’

In 2010 I visited Mars. Well, not exactly the red planet 63 million miles away, only the set of John Carter, the live-action Andrew Stanton-directed adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic sci-fi stories. The actual location was in Big Water, Utah, right on the northern Arizona border. They had found natural red locations in the rocky, desert region that looked a lot like Mars already and built big sets to look like stone-carved buildings that had been there for hundreds of years. That was where we visited, and this was nearly two years ago in April of 2010, when Stanton and his crew were hard at work actually shooting the movie. It’s always odd looking back at a set visit that occurred so long ago as the movie is being released, but that’s exactly what’s so fascinating about the process. Andrew Stanton, a Pixar director making his live-action debut, had started …