Being out there in the yard looking out across at the Adirondacks, it’s almost like haunting freedom.”īut officials weren’t interested in how the North Yard would serve the narrative - especially a story that highlights an embarrassing piece of history for the facility and its workers. “It represented the strange reality of living in this place as a prisoner. “The North Yard was just impossible to re-create,” Stiller says. Stiller and Carraro debated filming instead at a prison facility in Pennsylvania, but as with using visual effects to create the border wall, they decided it just wouldn’t work. “It is its own environment or ecosystem that is considered the most dangerous place in the prison.” “It’s a place you look at and go, ‘I can’t believe this actually exists,’” Stiller explains. During the warmer months, inmates can garden within the courts. Each court has wooden furniture and contains sheet metal stoves for grilling. (For safety and security reasons, officials won’t release the actual dimensions.) Hovering over the yard’s expansive flatland is a hill that is divided into 163 courts, or little slices of turf. With its spectacular views of the Adirondacks, the North Yard is the size of two or three football fields. Computer effects wouldn’t ring true to the series’ “very real” tone.Īs for re-creating the surreal North Yard, Stiller knew it would be hard to find another location because nothing like it exists. To re-create the multi-mile border wall, he and executive producer Bill Carraro considered using visual effects, but gave up on the idea. With the start of principal photography looming, Stiller and his team tried to come up with an alternative approach. “The reality of shooting outside Clinton was that if we didn’t have the cooperation of New York State Department of Corrections, we would basically just be out there on our own,” Stiller says, “and anything could really happen if they weren’t wanting us to be there.”
But without official consent, filming in and even around the prison, including the manhole just outside it that Matt and Sweat popped out of on June 5, 2015, would be impossible. He wanted access to the North Yard, where the inmates devised their plot, as well as the outskirts of the facility, which is surrounded by a 30-foot concrete wall and armed guard towers. Stiller’s devotion to capturing the story accurately drove the director on a quest to shoot on the grounds of Clinton Correctional. Patricia Arquette, who plays Mitchell, was the first to commit to “Dannemora.” Soon after, Benicio Del Toro and Paul Dano boarded the project to play Matt and Sweat respectively.
Then in June 2016, the New York State Office of the Inspector General released a 150-page report detailing the specifics of the escape, which the writers worked into the script, and Stiller agreed to sign on. “I was interested in what really happened, but at the time, didn’t have that much actual information.” “I felt like I didn’t know enough about the reality of what happened, and I didn’t want to do something that was based on speculation,” Stiller tells Variety during filming at an abandoned Brooklyn warehouse that has been transformed into Clinton Correctional’s tailor shop. The first time he got the directing offer for “Dannemora,” Stiller passed due to lack of facts in the script. Those tawdry details explain why “Ray Donovan” writing team Brett Johnson and Michael Tolkin started working on a script about the incident even before Matt and Sweat were respectively killed and captured.
Mitchell was sentenced to up to seven years for her part in the escape, which included smuggling hacksaw blades and other tools to the two inmates via frozen hamburgers. A sentence of three to seven years was added to his original life term, and he was ordered to pay $79,841 in restitution.
Ultimately Matt was shot and killed by authorities, while Sweat was captured and returned to prison. Their escape spawned a massive, costly three-week manhunt. The duo’s elaborate plan, which involved squeezing through a catwalk and crawling through dimly lit underground tunnels and pipes, was aided by a married prison employee named Joyce Tilly Mitchell with whom both had been sexually entangled. Matt, who was serving 25 years to life for dismembering a man, and Sweat, who was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for killing a sheriff’s deputy, were the first inmates to escape from the maximum-security prison in more than 100 years.
#Escape from dannemora movie
The story of the men’s escape in the summer of 2015 reads like it was ripped from a Hollywood movie script.
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