A Man Apart began principal photography at a private residence on Malibu’s Zuma Beach, which serves as Sean Vetter’s beachfront apartment. What starts off as a backyard party for Sean, his family and friends, soon turns deadly as a new drug cartel boss known only as Diablo targets him and his wife. The house, located on Pacific Ocean beachfront property, made for a beautiful sequence where Vin Diesel and Jacqueline Obradors dance a slow salsa at sunset, in a scene choreographed by Alex Da Silva, an acclaimed Los Angeles salsa instructor.
Over the next ten weeks, filming continued at various locations in and around Los Angeles County.
In San Pedro, adjacent to the Port of Los Angeles, the parking lot for local fish restaurant Utro’s is the site for a drug bust gone awry between the agents and Hondo and Pomona Joe, leading to a deadly shoot out.
Pasadena’s stately City Hall building, designed with Spanish colonial architecture accents, is the site of a political assassination.
The nightclub Fais Do-Do, in L.A.’s historic West Adams district, provided the location for a major confrontation and machine gun eruption involving Vetter, Hicks, and their fierce-but-friendly hoodlum friend Big Sexy, played by character actor George Sharperson.
A residential neighborhood and home in South Central Los Angeles was the site for informer Overdose’s house.
A multi-block stretch of Avalon Avenue in the city of Wilmington, California, was transformed into the retail shops and commercial enterprises that create a replica of Tijuana, for the film’s early scenes depicting the takedown of Memo Lucero and portions of the film’s climax. Hundreds of Latin American background performers were utilized nightly to portray the busy Tijuana streets’ merchants, residents and vendors.
Focusing on a color scheme of turquoise, orange and purple, the design team created signs, painted buildings and put up billboards, and in the end, production designer Ida Random was very pleased with her department’s work. "It really did look like Tijuana," she enthuses.
Demetrius Hicks’ house was filmed on a residential street in Echo Park in the eastern part of Los Angeles near Dodger Stadium, while Big Sexy’s house was located in a high-income residential area of Baldwin Hills.
The site where Lucero’s wife is killed was filmed in Los Feliz, at the Convent of the Immaculate Heart, on a glorious hill overlooking the entire city.
For two weeks of filming, both the Lone Star and Delfino Sound Stages in Sylmar were utilized to construct both the maximum-security prison where Lucero is held, and the grand Lucero compound, replete with nightclub and underground tunnels.
For Lucero’s club and compound, production designer Ida Random came up with the idea of a club in the round. "It was inspired by hot climate areas like Bolivia and Columbia," she recalls. "Then I started researching Tuscany and Roman villas – marbleized columns, fresco walls, stone."
Movie Database
In Theaters
