In “Blitz,” Steve McQueen’s powerful reconstruction of Germany’s World War II blitzkrieg attack on Britain, the most harrowing scene takes place underground. As London is attacked by Nazi planes, a bomb strikes a water main, which floods a subterranean subway station, trapping hundreds inside.
The scene is based on a real-life incident that occurred in 1940, drowning dozens of citizens who were sheltering in the train tunnels. The “tube set” for “Blitz” was engineered to simulate a catastrophic flood in the train tunnel, and it required the utmost caution: As the 9-year-old actor Elliott Heffernan walked around the vast subway station set, he was often shadowed by an important group of extras who had more than acting on their minds.
“They were all safety divers and stunt people, in full costume, to ensure that the entire thing was done incredibly safely,” said Oscar-winning production designer Adam Stockhausen (“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “West Side Story”). “We were re-creating a real event, so the whole sequence needed to be accurate and believable.”
He added: “The stunt team was portraying the terror and fear as extras, but they were also surrounding Elliott and making sure that he was fully protected at all times.” (Heffernan’s character, the focal point of the scene, does escape.)
When McQueen wrote the sequence in his screenplay, he was unsure if it would be possible to film, but he entrusted Stockhausen to find a way.
“Neither of us are fans of green screens or blue screens,” said McQueen, who worked with the designer on “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows.” “So Adam made that tube station as a real tactile thing and figured out the engineering challenge of pumping tons and tons of water into it. All the logistics that went into it – just extraordinary.”
After dismissing the possibility of staging the flood with CGI and visual effects,
Stockhausen and his team embarked on extensive storyboarding, breaking down the sequence into its component parts.
“In London, you’re four or five stories below ground, so the idea of this descent on a long escalator was a key part of it,” he said. “Then there are those small round tunnels which take you to the actual train tracks. We built those, too, with their twists and turns so that the audience could believe the geography of the place. We didn’t want anyone to say, ‘OK, I’m looking at a set.’”
The station was built in two big chunks. In a tank at Leavesden Studios in England, the tube station’s escalator was dunked like a straw into a giant pool. Then the station’s platform was built on a separate dry stage at the studio. “There wasn’t a tank big enough to put this thing in,” said Stockhausen. “From the outside, the set looked like a classic old roller coaster, with huge structural works holding it up. It was a set floating in mid-air, with everything designed to force an incredible pressure of water through it.”
Above the set were enormous steel tanks positioned to tip where the ceiling of the tube station had caved in. The tanks dumped the initial Niagara of water into the station; the water gushed tsunami-like through the tunnel and then was fed into a series of 12-inch diameter intake pumps and recycled back through the set.
As McQueen’s cameras rolled, a continuing swell of water, including from jets hidden in tunnels, surged through the set. The production spent five days flooding and then drying out the station (and the extras) to achieve the astonishing final result.
Stockhausen credits his collaborators on the sequence: art directors, set dressers,
engineers and construction crew. “There was definitely an element of, ‘Well, we haven’t ever tried this before,’” he said. “Every inch had to be pre-planned. There was no possibility of saying, ‘Oops, we made a mistake.’ One mistake, like if anything wasn’t properly waterproofed, and the whole system would fail.”
Stockhausen, who has designed six features for Wes Anderson and three for Steven Spielberg, noted that the tube station presented him with a fresh career challenge. “I hadn’t done anything like this,” he said. “In terms of working with water, I wasn’t familiar at all. It was the biggest set in the movie, and the whole thing was so special and unique and terrifying. But sometimes when it’s scary, professionally speaking, that’s where the fun is.”
This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line Issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
