'Lost' Found

[Sydney]

TV WEEK's Jenny Cooney Carrillo goes behind the scenes on the set of Lost

It’s fun to see them showing off the new cars they've bought since Lost became a hit show. Josh Holloway, who plays Sawyer, drives a new Mercedes; Evangeline Lilly (Kate) is in a jeep; Dominic Monaghan (Charlie) is in a hybrid-powered, energy-saving Prius; Naveen Andrews (Sayid) is driving a BMW and Yunjin Kim (Sun) pulls up in a white BMW.

"Sorry, I almost cut you off this morning," Matthew Fox, who plays Jack, yells to Evangeline, who laughs at the fact the pair almost ran into each other driving to the set from their homes.

The road to the beach set is so rugged that cars are not allowed through, so everyone rides in a shuttle bus. In the bus, I sit near Matthew, who admits that unlike the cast of Desperate Housewives – which is filmed on the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles, with all the comforts of private dressing-rooms and restaurants – they're roughing it.

"But this show and the story we're telling lends itself to having actors who are going to tough it a bit," he points out.



He insists that nobody is complaining. "We're working hard out here in the jungle doing some intense things, but we try to take care of each other."

At the beach, I discover that the cast and crew all share one very smelly portable toilet – the only structure brought onto the beach that's not part of the set. "Yeah, we try and hold on until we get back to base camp," laughs Aussie actress Emilie de Ravin, who plays Claire.

I take a closer look at the makeshift "homes" the characters have built themselves out of fuselage and branches under the shelter of trees lining the beach. Emilie sits on Claire's bed and admits, "It's not much, is it?"

Even though there's no filming on the set today, I'm surprised to see two strangers at the water's edge, walking their dog and hardly acknowledging their bizarre surroundings.

"A lot of locals can get to this beach by jogging or walking their dog, so they know what's here," Emilie explains. "The props people put away anything that needs to be protected when we're not using it, like the cradle my character gets from Locke (Terry O'Quinn)."

Bryan wishes the set was more remote. "We are often waiting for planes to fly overhead so the dialogue doesn't get ruined," he says, "and we sometimes have to change the angle of a shot to hide a cruise ship, or digitally remove a boat in post-production."

Maggie Grace, who plays Shannon, says interruptions are often frustrating for the actors, too. "The first set was right next to a glider airstrip and we had them coming over our heads all day," she said. "On the first day we were there, one of us yelled out, 'It's a plane – we're saved!' and we all laughed, but by the end of the day it wasn't funny anymore!"

Next, Bryan drives us half an hour further north past the local shrimp shacks and sea turtles sprawled on the famous surf beaches, to the tourist attraction of Waimea Falls, a beautiful waterfall where Kate and Sawyer were filmed diving for a briefcase in a recent episode.

"Most of our show is shot on that beach and the cave scenes are shot on a sound stage," Bryan explains, "but our location scouts have come up with some amazing places for us to shoot the other stuff on the island."

When they're not working, everybody lives on the island (except Emilie, who commutes from Los Angeles where she lives with her actor fianc?, Josh Janowicz, and her dog).

"We spend a lot of time at Matthew Fox's house because he has the mansion on the beach with his wife and kids," says Ian Somerhalder, who plays Boone. "So for the first four or five months, almost every Sunday we'd have barbecues there with all the kids swimming."


Turning off the main highway, about an hour's drive north of Honolulu on the island of Oahu, a dirt road leads us to the set of TV’s hottest drama, Lost.

"We're not allowed to pave the roads," explains Lost executive producer Bryan Burk, who is in the car with me, "but we spend a fortune on gravel."

We park at "base camp" and watch the cast arrive one by one and head for their mobile homes.



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