SAN DIEGO – Last year, as Comic-Con unfolded over several days inside the San Diego Convention Center, Leonardo DiCaprio and a crew from Warner Bros. were sneaking around East Village and the Gaslamp Quarter in the middle of the night filming “One Battle After Another.”
Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest movie, which debuted Friday, filmed all over San Diego County, bringing together hundreds of cast and crew over several months. The two-hour, 50-minute action-comedy-thriller, which also stars Benicio Del Toro, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall and Sean Penn, is about a “washed-up revolutionary” who “exists in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited, self-reliant daughter, Willa,” according to the studio.
While it focuses on a fictional revolutionary group called French 75, viewers will recognize real-life themes and issues, starting with an opening scene where the words “Otay Mesa Immigration Detention Center” are shown on the screen over a view of migrants sitting on space blankets in a fenced-in area. The creators really filmed this in Otay Mesa, and built a major set there for about three weeks to depict a scene where the French 75 help the detained migrants escape…