“Shooting at Independence Hall was one of the huge treats in making this film; to stand where the Liberty Bell once rang, and to film our characters talking about it there,” says Turteltaub. Other Philadelphia locales included The Franklin Institute, the Reading Terminal Market, Philadelphia City Hall, Society Hill—where cobblestones from the 1700s still line the streets —and the Pine Street Church Cemetery, with its centuries old grave markers.
Not all of NATIONAL TREASURE unfolds inside the continental United States, however. When audiences first meet Ben Gates, he has gone literally to the ends of the earth in search of clues to the Knights Templar treasure. For the scenes that take Ben to the glacial arctic looking for a mysterious hint on the shipwrecked Charlotte, the production created a truly frosty interior set at the Union Ice Company in Los Angeles. “We based our set on the research we did on typical ships of that period, many of which were ultimately stranded in the frozen wastelands of the Arctic and Antarctica,” says Spencer. “Shooting in a real ice house gave us the ultimate in real cold effects,” he adds. “It was pretty harrowing for the cast and crew, but they certainly looked authentically cold. Best of all, the air was thick with their visible breath.”
The central clue that Ben Gates discovers on The Charlotte is a Meerschaum pipe. These beautiful, hand-carved 17th century smoking pipes are often elaborately sculpted from a rare mineral which appears like a white clay and adds a unique flavor to the smoke. To create a Meerschaum in the shape of the Charlotte, Norris Spencer asked his art department to design an elaborate replica along with a wooden carrying case which looks like it might have come from George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
For the exteriors of the icebound Charlotte, the production journeyed to Strawberry Reservoir, just outside Park City, Utah, which was previously used to film re-enactments of Ernest Shackleton’s famous shipwreck for a PBS special. Here the production began building the remains of the ship in summer, just in time for an early blizzard that buried part of the set in the perfect amount of snow. Later, all the crew’s hard work was blasted apart to recreate the near-disastrous explosion caused by Ben Gates’ attempt to escape from a deceitful Ian Howe.
The film’s climactic scenes take place in New York City which, though it represents the height of urban modernity, also holds a tremendous amount of American history hidden within its confines. For one of the film’s most spectacular sets, Norris Spencer recreated subterranean chambers much like those that actually exist beneath historical Trinity Church. The original Trinity Church, built at the corner of what is now Broadway and Wall Street, was founded in 1697 and was the sight of fierce fighting during the Revolutionary War. Though three churches have now been built on the same site, the original burial ground at Trinity still includes the graves and memorials of many historic figures, including Alexander Hamilton.
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