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About the Production |
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| Seventy grueling days of night shooting began on December 11, 1995. Carpenter brought in some of the crew from his previous films, including Directory of Photography, Gary B. Kibbe (Village of the Damned, In The Mouth of Madness) and Film Editor Edward A. Warschilka (Village of the Damned, Rambo III). Production Designer Lawrence G. Paull (Blade Runner, Back to the Future) and Costume Designer Robin Michel Bush (Village of the Damned, In The Mouth of Madness) created a visually stunning world for Carpenter’s vision. Supervisor of Visual Effects Kimberly K. Nelson, Special Effects Coordinator Marty Bresin, and Buena Vista Visual Effects supervisor Michael Leesa provided spectacular effects for the film, including a groundbreaking tidal-wave-surfing scene down Wilshire Boulevard. Nearly every corner of the city was covered in the filming, with landmark locations such as the Queen Mary, Union Station, Biltmore Hotel, Griffith Park, and the L.A. Coliseum serving as backdrops for this futuristic tale. The producers also took advantage of the many areas still damaged from the 1994 Northridge quake. In addition, they constructed a massive, three-quarters-of-a-mile-long set to represent a destroyed Sunset Boulevard. "We did in Los Angeles what we did in New York," says producer Debra Hill. "We took the most obvious tourist locations that are the symbols of L.A. and used them in the film. The San Fernando Valley becomes the San Fernando Sea. Snake lands at The Hollywood Bowl, walks down Sunset Boulevard past The Chinese theater, refuses a map from Map To the Stars Eddie at Sunset and Doheny, goes to the Beverly Hills Hotel and ends up at a basketball game at the Coliseum. Snake even surfs down Wilshire Boulevard." Principal photography began on the top of Mt. Hollywood Drive in Griffith Park in Los Angeles where Snake Plissken arrives on Mulholland Drive. "The first night of shooting felt very strange," remarks Hill. "Kurt and I felt as though we had just finished shooting Escape from New York on Friday night and had a long weekend. Although, I think the three of us brought back a maturity to the process which we probably didn’t have 15 years ago. Kurt was even wearing the same costume in the beginning of the film that he wore 15 years ago, and it fit him perfectly. It’s the only costume of his career he ever kept." Production Designer Lawrence G. Paull, who was nominated for an Academy Award and won the British Academy Award for Blade Runner, brings his spectacular imagery to the earthquake ravaged Los Angeles of the future in which the only currency is the will to survive. The jumble of huts and shanties located along a deserted landfill in Carson, CA were inspired by photographs obtained by Paull of the Mexico earthquake and an earthquake in China that killed 600,000 people. The area was transformed into a squalid mile-long strip of lean-to’s and scrap metal shanties where a narrow road was carved between huge chilling Sunset Boulevard after a 9.6 earthquake. "People are basically living on the streets on this island of Los Angeles. Therefore, I had to create a world of night markets and survival housing that spoke to the ingenuity of mankind," said Paull. "It became a textured, multi-layered concept, which began with giant piles of rubble and evolved into the look and style of the exterior of the streets." "Since most of the film was shot at night, the challenge was in keeping the artificial lighting out of the exterior shots. We were constantly on the lookout for any street lights, traffic signals and the need to shut off people’s lights way off in the distance. I had to design rubble cut-outs to block out neon sign throughout Los Angeles." "We assumed the earthquake occurred during rush hour so we had a scene along a wrecked Santa Monica freeway, continues Paull. This scene was shot in another part of the land fill in Carson where over 200 trashed vehicles were brought in from an auto demolition yard and dumped in a jumbled maze. These battered vehicles became a city of cars where people were forced to live." Happy Kingdom, where the film’s finale is lensed, was shot in on the back lot at Universal Studios, which was dressed as a decaying and earthquake damaged theme park. Buena Vista Visual Effects helped to create a tsunami wave rolling down Wilshire Boulevard and a futuristic one-man submarine speeding underwater through a submerged San Fernando Valley, as designed by Lawrence Paull. "The problem in working with miniatures and water is scale, says producer Hill. If a wave hits a miniature beach it’s obvious and you cannot make miniature water. Hence, the tsunami became a challenge. We found a perpetual wave machine, called Wave Loch, in a theme park in Texas. We combined stunt doubling on this machine with a green screen and matte paintings o assemble a really exciting tsunami," explains Hill. Academy Award winner for best make-up, Rick Baker (Ed Wood, Harry and the Hendersons, An American Werewolf in London) created specialized prosthetic make-up for many of the characters in the film, particularly The Surgeon General of Beverly Hills. World renowned for it’s great cosmetic surgeons, Beverly Hills was taken to it’s ultimate extreme. The Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, as played by Bruce Campbell, is an example of cosmetic surgery gone too far. "Bruce Campbell’s make up was close to four and a half hours long, says Baker. We made bad hair plugs, pulled up his face and nose, stuck his ears down and put stitches on his face like fresh surgery. The make-up is all based on real plastic surgery technique, only done more crudely. We did some horrifying images of people with too much collagen in their lips and overdone cheekbone implants and weird tubes of flesh with clamps and stitches. John Carpenter requested creepy and that’s what we gave him." Although Snake Plissken is wearing his old costume when we first see him costume designer Robin Michel Bush changes him into what was called the Stealth costume, which is a kind of updated version of what one should be wearing in the year 2013. "Robin Michel Bush had the daunting task of recycling the City of Los Angeles imaginatively to make the costumes for this picture," says Debra Hill. "If you are living in East L.A. and survive after an earthquake for 20 years and want a fancy dress, you’re going to rip off some brocade curtains in Bel Air and make one. That’s the kind of thinking Robin had to do." |
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