How ‘Civil War’s White House Battle Came Together

SPOILER ALERT: This contains major spoilers for the ending of “Civil War,” now playing in theaters.

“Civil War” production designer Caty Maxey was tasked with building a dystopian America that showed bombed-out buildings and abandoned cars that stretched for miles on the freeway. It was all part of her creative brief for Alex Garland’s latest film.

Garland drops audiences into the middle of “Civil War.” America is no longer united and there are warring factions. At the center of it all are four journalists who travel from New York to Washington, D.C., where the Western Forces of Texas and California are battling the Federal Government. Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a photojournalist. She is joined by colleagues Joel (Wagner Moura), Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson). When Lee, Joel, and Jessie arrive at a Western Forces base in Charlottesville, another reporter, Anya (Sonoya Mizuno) informs them that the rebels are preparing to storm the capital and execute the President (Nick Offerman). When they make it to D.C, Western Forces and Rebel Forces engage in an all-out battle before the White House security perimeter is breached.

The perimeter sequence was shot in Georgia with real tanks, Humvees, military helicopters and a presidential limousine. While visual effects were used for set extensions and to enhance gunfire flashes, Maxey says everything else was done in-camera, with some vehicles weighing over 20,000 pounds.

“There was a lot of hardware. When they shot at the president’s limo, they shot the heck out of it. I wasn’t on set that night, but when I went to set the next day, I saw the car with all the holes and thought, ‘They’re not fooling around here.’ It never felt over the top,” Maxey says.

Maxey and Garland wanted to keep things as accurate as possible. So, they used Tyler Perry’s three-story, stucco replica White House set at his sprawling 330-acre studio in Atlanta.

“We used the exterior, the two rooms on the upper floor, the Dolley Madison room and the press room,” Maxey says. When it came to the shoot-outs and explosions, Maxey chose to rent a replica White House set with slightly wider hallways. “We didn’t blow up or shoot his walls because it would have been prohibitive to do so. We used Tyler’s space and got every bit of production value out of it, and then we cut to our hallways for the final scenes,” she explains.

Musically, composers Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury chose one very simple cue to set the scene up.

In their previous collaborations with Garland, the duo has used music to make a moment “hyper-cinematic. We did that in ‘Annihilation,’ says Barrow. This time, the film needed to be fully immersive. “The idea was you’re supposed to feel as if you’re there, and the score has a way of taking you out of the movie,” Barrow explains. “We used an acoustic-electric guitar. It’s a bit of Lee’s theme, but it’s incongruous with what you’re seeing — helicopters flying over Washington and the start of this incredible battle sequence.”

The guitar cue, Barrow explains, was “emotionally neutral that lulls you into this sense false sense of security and suddenly the sound kicks in.”

Making that decision to pass the baton to supervision sound editor and sound designer Glenn Freemantle came down to finding the right emotional temperature for the film, says Salisbury. “We could have overplayed, dramatized and made things emotionally charged, but for me, it’s a cold film, and that’s what it came down to.”

It needed to be a sound moment.

“It was big, loud and full-on with helicopters, beast-like cars which were armored, and there’s a sense of urgency,” says Freemantle of the battle sound outside the White House. With that, he had to consider the hard sounds and distance between how vehicle fire and gunfire sounded, distinguishing the two. “When you go inside, you’re in a completely different environment. There’s no concrete and the reverb changes because now you’re in rooms and there’s furniture. So, it’s a different concept.”

Freemantle’s biggest challenge came when he had to make the helicopter sound “dynamic.” He needed it to have a piercing sound as it spins in the air before crashing. “In my mind, I was thinking of things that go round and round. So, we used dentist drills and washing machine cycles,” he says.

As for costumes, Meghan Kasperlik turned to former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza , whom Garland had enlisted as the film’s military advisor.

Like her fellow artisans, Kasperlik was diligent in making sure everything was realistic and accurate. In addition to Mendoza guiding her on military wear, Kasperlik pored through photos of war journalists and photographers. Lynsey Addario’s books were helpful. “With Kirsten, she’s seen it and done it. She’s traveling light. Everything about her was practical.”

With the jacket, Kasperlik wanted a vintage-looking jacket and she needed multiples of it. “I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I was in Target and I saw placemats and I thought that would be my take on an RRL Military Jacket and piece it together,” she explains. When she went back to get more, she found Target had stopped making the placemats. Her team ended up turning to eBay and ETSY to source more. “The base of the jacket is the placemat, and the sleeves are a table runner, and we dyed everything and aged the pieces.”