An unrecognisable Tom Cruise in Buckinghamshire: The filming location of Digger

The entire production was based at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, England – with filming in and around the studio complex running from November 2024 through May 2025. Six months. Under the working title Judy, which told the world absolutely nothing about what was actually being made inside the gates.

Pinewood is one of the world's great filmmaking facilities – the home of James Bond across nearly all of its sixty-year history, the studio that built the Millennium Falcon for Star Wars and housed the production of countless blockbusters. Its combination of enormous soundstages, extensive backlot, and production infrastructure make it the default home for exactly this kind of ambitious, technically demanding production. Riz Ahmed described the set as unlike anything he had experienced. The combination of Cruise's relentless commitment and Iñárritu's meticulous process created something that actors found intense, demanding, and by all accounts extraordinary.

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The deliberate decision to film entirely within the Pinewood complex – rather than shooting on location across America, which the story's energy tycoon premise would logically suggest – is itself revealing. Iñárritu films are constructed realities: controlled, visually precise, deeply deliberate. Birdman was built in a theatre. The Revenant was built in wilderness, but wilderness as a psychological environment rather than a geographical one. Digger, apparently, was built entirely on stages and backlot in Buckinghamshire. What that means for the visual world of the film – how a story about American corporate power and environmental catastrophe looks when made entirely on English studio sets — is one of the more interesting questions the film will answer on October 2.

Digger opens in IMAX on October 2, 2026.