Let’s say a movie about London in the 30′ wants to have a scene about driving car, how they make it? It’s all CGI? Or they have some tricks? How they use historic artificats?
In addition how they make complex places like a scene inside a nuclear reactor is it all CGI? Or they build a fake place?
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For outdoor scenes, several big studios have large backlots with the outdoor sets already set up. Universal Studios in California, for example, is used by a lot of Hollywood productions, because they have fake streets and city squares that are built to look like different cities and time periods – New York Street, Colonial Street, Little Europe, London Square, etc. With just a little bit of set dressing, they can pretty easily turn those streets into nearly any city or time period.
So if you’re shooting “London, 1930’s” you could just stock one of those streets with period-appropriate cars, create a few fake shopfronts, throw in some extras wearing 1930’s clothes, and you’re golden. For more specific sets or for interior sets, they’d just build them somewhere else, basically from scratch. Many movies these days will use CGI in place of more complex sets, but it’s generally cheaper and easier for many shots to still use practical sets, where possible.
There are companies that rent out cars. They have everything, or they can get it. So generally you would use old cars. Yes, it gets expensive, but when you have budgets from 10 million to 100+ million, you can afford things like this.
They can also change signs on a street and change decor to make it match the time period. Some things may have to be edited, for example, nobody is going to tear down utility poles if it doesn’t fit the movie time frame or location. They might try camera angles to avoid them though. (or maybe scout a different location if it works better)
As for something like a Nuclear reactor, they would probably just build a set. But they could find an actual nuclear reactor if they really wanted to.
(For example, Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant was commissioned, but never opened and has been in a few movies: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?locations=Zwentendorf,+Austria
It really depends on the movie, but it isn’t *that* hard to recreate a historic setting.
You have to remember that many movies are filmed on sets. Those films may appear to be filmed in the real world, but they are not. So, when you see a set of a 1930s London, all those houses you see might be complete shells. They might be the same houses shown from different angles and so they look different. That 1930s car might only look like one (and sometimes it is an actual car from the era), but it could be a recreation that looks real on film. If you looked at it in real life, you could tell that it is a fake care, but the camera only shows the real-looking part of it. One thing they do in more modern movies is CGI remove some more modern buildings. For example, they may want to film something like that looks like a 1930s house on farm. In reality, that house has a satellite dish on the roof and is next door to a superhighway, but they can CGI those things away to make the house look older.
In terms of nuclear reactors and what not, yeah, the set designers build those sets. Again, the computer control station of a power plant set probably does not have a real computer in it, but it *looks* like it does. You have to remember that film crews have carpenters, riggers, electricians, and a bunch of other people that can build just about anything that looks real enough to convince an audience. Sure, it might be a dying art due to CGI, but it is still done.
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