Un­til re­cent­ly, Ro­ma­nia was known to the world main­ly as home to the leg­end of Count Drac­u­la, whose birth­place is said to have been in the province of Tran­syl­va­nia.
But the coun­try's re­cent will­ing­ness to wel­come the West­ern film in­dus­try means it’s time to for­get about scary vam­pire sto­ries.
Ma­jor Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions are now be­ing made in Ro­ma­nia, fea­tur­ing stars like Nicole Kid­man, Wes­ley Snipes, Don­ald Suther­land and Ar­mand As­sante.
US film stu­dios pre­fer to shoot films in Ro­ma­nia rather than in the States or else­where in Eu­rope thanks to the coun­try's low costs and beau­ti­ful, un­spoiled land­scapes.
Pro­duc­ers can al­so em­ploy ex­tras in Ro­ma­nia for far less mon­ey than they would pay their coun­ter­parts back in the US.
Lo­cal peo­ple who act­ed as ex­tras in Cold Moun­tain, di­rect­ed by An­tho­ny Minghel­la and shot in Poligra­fu, a small vil­lage in Tran­syl­va­nia, got a mere $150 each.
This amount was not on­ly for ac­cept­ing to ap­pear in the movie but al­so for rent­ing out their fields that were used as bat­tle scenes in the pro­duc­tion.
A mod­est sum of mon­ey, but con­sid­ered “a gift from God to us”, as the vil­lage may­or put it. Most peo­ple in the re­gion make a liv­ing earn­ing lit­tle more than $30 a month.
Cold Moun­tain has giv­en the Tran­syl­va­ni­an vil­lage an eco­nom­ic boost, just as has hap­pened with oth­er Amer­i­can movies shot in dif­fer­ent lo­ca­tions through­out Ro­ma­nia.
Di­rec­tor An­tho­ny Minghel­la faced crit­i­cism back home for choos­ing East­ern Eu­rope as a set for his movie about the US Civ­il War.
In an in­ter­view giv­en just be­fore the start of last year's Berlin film fes­ti­val, the di­rec­tor said he was dis­mayed by the charge that he "stole" the film from the US.
Minghel­la ex­plained that shoot­ing in Ro­ma­nia saved more than $30 mil­lion on pro­duc­tion costs.
The $14 mil­lion film Modigliani with Andy Gar­cia in the role of the Ital­ian painter was shot at Me­di­apro Stu­dios, one of the largest me­dia and en­ter­tain­ment groups in East­ern Eu­rope. The $25 mil­lion film High­lander –Endgame, star­ring Christo­pher Lam­bert and Adri­an Paul was pro­duced at Cas­tel Film.
Buts it’s not on­ly Amer­i­can celebri­ties that come to Ro­ma­nia to shoot movies, the Eu­ro­pean film mak­ers are al­so be­ing at­tract­ed.
France’s most fa­mous liv­ing male ac­tor, Ger­ard De­par­dieu, has just ar­rived at Bucharest to be­gin the film­ing of a TV movie called Les Rois Mau­dits.
For its part, the BBC has cho­sen Ro­ma­nia too in or­der to pro­duce Mary Queen of Scots this year, be­cause it could not af­ford to shoot in Scot­land, as planned.
While a Ro­ma­ni­an tech­ni­cian has an av­er­age salary of $2,400 a year, Scot­tish tech­ni­cians can earn more than $40,000 a year.
Some film­mak­ers turn to Ro­ma­nia as an al­ter­na­tive to the Czech Re­pub­lic, whose beau­ti­ful ar­chi­tec­ture and well-​pre­served cas­tles have long at­tract­ed film­mak­ers.
hol­ly­wood par­adise in Ro­ma­nia