Production
Most of the filming used locations in Berlin, due to its unique mixture of fascist and modern architecture. According to the visual effects supervisor Tim McGovern who worked alongside Kurt Wimmer, the fascist architecture was chosen "to make the individual feel small and insignificant so the government seems more powerful." In addition, the modern architecture that is also found in Berlin emphasizes the futuristic and stolid appearance of the city state of Libria. Moreover, while the city state of Libria has thick walls represented by an abandoned fortress-like East German military base, the exterior of the city is filmed in the decrepit neighborhoods of East Germany, where many of the surviving rebels reside. In addition to the geographic location, a few European art directors also made substantial contributions to the production.
Equilibrium's locations include:
- Olympic Stadium (Berlin), built for the 1936 Summer Olympics.
- Deutschlandhalle, also built for the 1936 Summer Olympics.
- Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
- Berlin Tempelhof Airport, which was built before the Nazi era, but completed during and carries lots of the Nazi trademark architecture World War II.
- The modern subway station under the Reichstag Building, as well as the long tunnels: Berlin U-Bahn.
- The decrepit East German neighborhoods, as well as an abandoned massive East German military base.
- The EUR, Rome fascist district, built by Mussolini.
Although a science-fiction movie, Wimmer intentionally avoided using futuristic technology that can become obsolete, and he also decided to set his story in an indeterminate future. “I wanted to create more of an alternate reality than get caught up in the gadgetry of science fiction,” he explains. “In fact, there’s no technology in Equilibrium that doesn’t already exist. It’s more like a parallel universe, the perfect setting for a parable.”
Read more about this topic: Equilibrium (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film, Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (18181883)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (18091882)