by Ian Elliot
Northern News Services

NNSL (Oct 03/97) - There is a little bit of Yellowknife in The Edge.

The movie, starring Anthony Hopkins, Elle McPherson and Alec Baldwin, is now playing in Yellowknife and a local pilot took part in the filming, although little of his part made it past the cutting-room floor.

Ron Lee, co-owner of Circle Air, was asked if the movie company could use one of his planes in a scene that was shot in Alberta last October.

The scene is purported to take place in Alaska and so Lee's high-performance plane was repainted to match that state's aircraft identification code and was used for a flyby of a lodge where some of the action takes place and as part of the backdrop on the Spray Lake set.

He says he got the job after the film company started asking around for pilots who had airplanes capable of taking off from high altitudes like the lake. Lee winters in Kelowna, B.C., and someone in Banff who knows him gave his name to the movie company as a likely prospect.

Lee quickly discovered it was more interesting to watch movies than to watch them being made.

"There were two or three days of shooting," he recalled this week.

"It was the same scene. They just kept shooting the same scene over and over."