Sartaj Singh
A crime action thriller by director Phillip Noyce, ‘Fast Charlie’ takes us to Biloxi, Mississippi, where Charlie (Pierce Brosnan), serves as the fixer for mob boss Stan Mullen(James Caan). Charlie is sent on a hit as a favor to a New Orleans Mobster, Beggar Mercado and things don’t go as planned. Beggar wants a partnership with Stan in Biloxi, but the aging gangster has a code of ethics and doesn’t want someone like Beggar to be involved in his territory. Enraged, the New Orleans gangster attacks Stan and his gang, leaving Charlie on the run. He finds an unlikely ally in Marcie Kramer (Morena Baccarin), a tough taxidermist, and together they face the invading mobsters to enact their revenge.
The film is sprinkled with plenty of hilarious moments and scenes, in between sequences of gruesome violence and tense firefights. As the deadly duo battle through various action set pieces, you may wonder if the events taking place were actually filmed in Mississippi and New Orleans, as is claimed by the narrative.
Fast Charlie Filming Locations
Fast Charlie has been filmed almost entirely in New Orleans, Louisiana. The city banking the Mississippi River also played the role of Biloxi and Mississippi. Principal photography began on April 18, 2023, and was wrapped up in 25 days by May 13, 2022. Allow us to take you through the filming locations and behind-the-scenes challenges of ‘Fast Charlie.’
New Orleans, Louisiana
The historically vibrant capital city was used as the primary filming location for ‘Fast Charlie.’ New Orleans’ captivating backdrop infuses a sense of grit and intrigue into the film. The city’s diverse landscape, from its urban areas to its placid fringe locals, offered filmmakers an array of settings to craft a thrilling and adrenaline-pumping narrative.
Interestingly, New Orleans may not have been the initial filming location intended for the action flick. Five days before shooting was set to begin, Phillip Noyce was told that the movie’s financing fell through, leaving it with no money and making for a seemingly hopeless situation. About thirty producers and executive producers stepped up and began to gather funding, adding up to a budget that was substantially less than its original. This resulted in screenplay writer, Richard Wenk, reworking the project to replace larger action sequences, with a greater emphasis on characters and humor. Consequently, twenty pages were eliminated from the script and the film’s runtime became 90 minutes instead of 110 minutes. The crew cut 10 days of planned filming and shifted to the new shooting location a week before the cameras started rolling.
Talking at the Mill Valley Film Festival 2023, Noyce confesses to having no money the day before they started shooting, “The bridging finance had fallen through and they said we can’t start. So we lost the original Marcy at that moment, the actress who was going to play Marcy, because we couldn’t pay the deposit on her.” He further revealed, “We eventually started filming, but it wasn’t for two weeks into the movie that we knew who was gonna play Marcy. We were shooting without Morena, and then she joined, what a great actress she is, she came in cold and she caught up so quickly.” Morgan Freeman was initially set to be cast in the film as well, but the part was taken up by James Caan, who played his final role as Stan Mullen and passed away a few weeks after filming.
The movie still retains impactful action sequences and makes good use of its filming locations around New Orleans, from a junkyard Charlie wakes up in, to shots of a fishing cabin overlooking a lake, and Beggar lounging in his Nightclub. The famous French Quarters of New Orleans also feature in the film with a hustle of tourists milling about the historic street as shop signs and lamps lit up the night. The city’s iconic locations such as Jackson Square, and the Mississippi River along with its marshy terrain, offer dramatic backdrops for intense scenes. As such New Orleans has been a location used for filming several prominent movies such as, ‘The Killer,’ ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s,’ ‘Django Unchained,’ ‘65,’ ‘American Horror Story,’ and ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.’
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