This article contains spoilers for the film “Civil War.”
When Alex Garland was writing the script for “Civil War,” he started with the ideas in the last moments. “In some ways the film was kind of reverse engineered from the ending,” he said during an interview in New York.
The path to that ending finds the rebel Western Forces reaching Washington, D.C., laying siege to the White House and cornering the president (Nick Offerman), all while the journalists at the center of the film capture it through their own lenses. It’s a relentless, loud 20 minutes of screen time, during which the Lincoln Memorial is blown up. Garland said he wanted the audience to feel “aversion to it and to feel dismayed.”
It also was an intricate production challenge, which involved digitally recreating Washington, shooting on sets throughout the Atlanta area, and executing detailed choreography that Garland likened to “football plays.” (Garland is British, but he noted that “football” could refer to soccer or American football. “It’s like little circles and triangles and arrows,” he added.)
From the start of “Civil War,” two journalists at the center of the story — Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a photographer, and Joel (Wagner Moura), a correspondent — want to get to the White House for an audience with the president. They reach it alongside Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a younger, novice photographer who idolizes Lee. In the end it’s Jessie who gets the most important shot.
But before that, they have to navigate a treacherous military operation on Pennsylvania Avenue and the surrounding streets.
The process of designing the sequence began with a trip to Washington with crew members including Garland, the cinematographer Rob Hardy and the visual effects supervisor David Simpson. The team walked the route of the invasion, Simpson said, mapping out how the troops would move from the memorial to the White House.
At first, the idea was to find locations in Atlanta that could double as Washington, but that proved too tricky, according to Simpson. Instead, they built three sets in a parking lot in Stone Mountain, Ga., that were surrounded by thousands of feet of blue screen. The exterior of the president’s residence was played by a replica that exists at Tyler Perry Studios, but Garland used only some of Perry’s interiors. Instead, they built out their own corridor, with rooms to the side, leading to the Oval Office. The production designer Caty Maxey said that the Oval Office itself was rented, so they could more easily adjust it to their specifications.
“We were very careful to get the right tone of the real White House,” Maxey said. “But because we didn’t want it to be tied to any political party or any president or any former president, we very deliberately stayed neutral.” The idea was to replicate the objectivity of the journalist protagonists.
For all departments, the goal was to make the assault on Washington feel as real as possible. “We deliberately steered away from anything that felt too Hollywood or too cinematic,” Simpson said. “We wanted it to feel like you’ve seen a news report.”
Simpson’s responsibility was creating an entire digital version of Washington as a war zone — from the Lincoln Memorial to the working streetlights and interiors of offices. When it came time to demolish the memorial, Simpson and his team found multiple examples of what a javelin missile would do, selecting an explosion before “painstakingly” recreating it.
Beyond the digital specificity, the logistics of the assault were mapped out in multiple ways. Garland did not storyboard, but he pulled out his phone during the interview to show the diagrams he used to plot the movement of vehicles and characters. Maxey said they used models laid out on a conference table to make sure all the disparate parts would fit together.
Garland shot the film chronologically, meaning Washington came at the end. As the time approached, Hardy said the anticipation grew. “You could feel the tension becoming palpable in a way, in a good way,” he said, adding, “there was this real sense of, this is it.”
Hardy wanted to immerse the audience in the fighting. That also meant getting the pictures the journalist characters are capturing, which are shown throughout the action. While the actors were shooting with the cameras in their hands, Hardy’s team was using a high speed camera from which they could grab stills.
Although the experience of watching the nation’s capital become a battlefield in “Civil War” is nightmarish, for Hardy it was more balletic.
“We prepped it so hard that by the time we got to shooting it, everybody knew where that Humvee was going to stop, everybody knew where the tank was coming, everybody knew when the Beast would break through the doors and where it would land. But then, my job is to then feel like it’s really happening then and there.”