‘Gamer’s’ killing field: downtown Albuquerque

To create the grim and gritty battle-zone gaming environment of Slayer for the action flick “Gamer,” production designer Jerry Fleming drew on his early experience working for Robert Altman, where he was required to create fully dressed environments to allow the free-spirited director to shoot where he pleased. “Gamer’s” Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor “are the first directors I’ve worked with since Altman where I had to create a 360-world and assume that everything is always on camera,” Fleming says. The production took over a downtown Albuquerque intersection for three months, with permission to close the streets only on Saturdays. The environment also included three large parking lots on corners of the intersection. In one lot they built a massive city made from 60 large shipping containers that took two months and two construction cranes to put together. In another lot, they built an oversize wall of concrete and plaster, and in the third, they used 100 windows from a wrecking yard to create a faux terrazzo stone building facade. On Sundays, the production had to be cleaned up and quiet to accommodate the church on the fourth corner. Right next to the killing field.

-- Patrick Kevin Day