‘Spirited’ was filmed entirely in Mass. Here are all the Boston-area locations. – The Boston Globe

Forward of the movie’s Apple TV+ launch on Friday, the Globe caught up with longtime Massachusetts-based location supervisor Mark Fitzgerald, who’s labored on numerous traditional Boston movies together with “Good Will Searching,” “Mystic River,” and “The Departed.” Fitzgerald, an Emerson grad and Framingham native, helped the Globe pop the hood open on “Spirited,” scene-by-scene.

“The entire thing was shot inside 30 miles of Boston,” Fitzgerald mentioned. “There have been three ginormous places on the film the place a lot of the scenes have been shot.”

The primary large location was the Saunders Citadel at Park Plaza on Columbus Avenue in Again Bay. This web site’s excessive ceilings, large home windows, and brick and wrought-iron element are featured all through the movie, and it’s the place all of the “spirits” socialize and plan their haunts. On the set, the solid and crew referred to as it Ghost World.

“We would have liked an enormous area with no columns,” Fitzgerald mentioned of the Citadel at Park Plaza. “Constructing Ghost World was a big enterprise. . . . We shot there for 3 weeks.”

The second foremost location used all through the movie was the cobblestoned Marshall Road in downtown Boston, which was reworked into old-world London.

“I actually needed to make 57 offers with homeowners and tenants and companies,” Fitzgerald mentioned of securing that location, including that the Union Oyster Home, the Inexperienced Dragon Tavern, and Bell in Hand Tavern have been among the many many companies he needed to get approval from. (The Inexperienced Dragon’s inside can also be featured in a scene between Ferrell and Reynolds.)

To get the sunshine good on Marshall Road, they constructed “a rig on the rooftops of all these buildings that consisted of three,000 kilos of steel to carry up a sheet to cowl the road,” he mentioned. “We now have to manage the sunshine down there, which is kind of a feat.”

The third main location used within the movie was Devonshire Road within the Monetary District, the place Ferrell, Reynolds, and the entire ensemble sing and dance a large-scale musical quantity within the streets.

“Each night time at 6 o’clock, we’d flip Devonshire Road into New York Metropolis,” Fitzgerald mentioned, including that they’d work by the night time. “We have been on the market for six nights, making snow, singing and dancing, dancing on scaffolding. . . . The truth that we did what we did on an actual metropolis avenue? It’s wonderful this was completed.”

Different corners of Massachusetts have been additionally featured within the movie. The closed Marion Excessive Faculty cafeteria in Framingham was used for a scene depicting a homeless shelter; a suburban house in Melrose was was Octavia Spencer’s home (the actress performs Reynolds’s assistant and Ferrell’s love curiosity); and a hilly Everett neighborhood seems in one other scene when Reynolds revisits his childhood.

“The snow is all pretend,” Fitzgerald mentioned, explaining that manufacturing makes it from some combination of potato and water. “It’s simple to make and simple to unfold. Cleansing it up is a special story. There are most likely nonetheless flakes kicking round Boston someplace.”

Fitzgerald mentioned the crew made offers with residents and storeowners to place up vacation lights and decorations of their home windows.

“We are saying, ‘Right here’s $500 to place a Christmas tree in your window,” Fitzgerald mentioned. “It might flip right into a block get together. . . . We attempt to get everybody on board and make it an excellent time for neighbors.”

Different places embrace the foyer on the Fairmont Copley Plaza, Mechanics Corridor in Worcester, and the South Shore Plaza in Braintree.

“Loads of [the] time with these things, you [have] obtained to bat 1.000,” Fitzgerald mentioned. “You possibly can’t have one retailer within the center that received’t play ball. It limits your director, and also you don’t wish to restrict the director. That’s rule primary.”

All mentioned, “Spirited” shot in Boston, Braintree, Devens, Everett, Framingham, Lynnfield, Melrose, Weymouth, and Worcester over the course of 4 months.

Fitzgerald, who’s wrapping up work on the Liam Neeson film “Thug,” additionally filming in Boston, mentioned town makes his job simple: “They’re past useful in each method. We go to them with these concepts, and so they come again with an inventory of issues to do to determine it out and make it work. . . . 2023 and past ought to simply be getting greater and greater.”

Brittany Bowker will be reached at brittany.bowker@globe.com. Observe her on Twitter @brittbowker and on Instagram @brittbowker.