“In 1984, when I began pre-production on ‘Anne of Green Gables’ I was driving along a concession road and out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a wave of rolling fields, crested with pines into which was nestled a rambling whitewashed farmhouse. It all looked remarkably as if the ocean were located just on the other side of the hill. I adapted the farm building and barns, then successfully shot them for all of the reverse scenes of ‘Green Gables’ in the final film. Five years later when I decided to construct an entire maritime village, with lighthouse, schoolhouse, a cannery, woods, ponds, lanes and even the exterior of a hotel perched on the Atlantic, there was only one property that I knew had the vista. So I returned to the farm near Coppins Corners in Uxbridge, Ontario and began construction of the set for ‘Road to Avonlea’.”
Kevin explains that building exterior sets in Ontario, while shooting interior scenes in his Toronto studio, was a much easier prospect than having to move the entire production to the island, where he would have to build exterior sets anyway. He explained his decision to stay near to Toronto to the press by saying, “If David Lean can create a spectacularly authentic vision of Winter Moscow in the heat of summer in Spain for the exteriors of his epic Doctor Zhivago, Sullivan Films can find P.E.I. outside Toronto”.
Coincidentally, the location he picked, just outside Leaksdale Ontario, was only 15 minutes away from the place L.M. Montgomery lived with her minister husband and sons after leaving P.E.I.
The production team used original features of the land and turned them into the series’ well known locations. The King Farmhouse, for example, was actually the whitewashed farmhouse Kevin first saw while driving along the road. They just painted it blue. And the roads were painted red and covered in crushed brick so that they looked like the famous red roads of P.E.I.
“Finally after seven years of filming and seeing the property through over two dozen changes of seasons, I realized the farm at Coppins Corners had become a character unto itself,” Kevin writes. “Through sun dappled colored leaves to spectacular snowfalls a more convincing environment of a 19th century small town has rarely been captured on film.”
More information on the many filming locations used in Road to Avonlea and other Sullivan productions can be found in Beyond Green Gables. And stay tuned for a future post about the attachment that citizens in neighbouring towns felt for the set at Coppins Corners.
Source: Beyond Green Gables
Road to Avonlea: The Making of a Series Limited Edition Brochure
