FEATURE BY ALISTAIR McGOWN
A CGI shot of the colony world Gliese 581 D in Smile (2017).
It’s doubtful that many viewers realised that the colony world Gliese 581 D, as imagined in Smile, came courtesy of a Spanish location shoot. Smile’s key location recording took place in Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city (after Madrid and Barcelona), near the east coast of the country. On the south-east outskirts of the city, stands the Ciudad de las Artes y de las Ciencias – the City of Arts and Sciences, a cluster of futuristic buildings of bright white, ceramic-covered concrete and steel, surrounded by shallow lakes of water.