“I Honestly Was Destroyed”: The Cost of Filming Civil War’s Most Horrifying Scene
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The post “I Honestly Was Destroyed”: The Cost of Filming Civil War’s Most Horrifying Scene appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Civil War.]
When Consequence spoke with the cast of Civil War about the film’s most memorable scene, star Cailee Spaeny perhaps spoke for all of them about the experience: “I was like, cinematically as a film lover, I think that that will be very effective. And then, as a human being, I really didn’t want to act that scene out. I really, really didn’t want to do that.”
The scene in question, filmed over two days in the hot Georgia sun, takes place more than midway through the film, as a small team of journalists encounter some heavily armed militiamen overseeing the filling of a mass grave. When their leader (Jesse Plemons) starts interrogating the journalists about their individual nationalities, the action dips into full-blown horror.
The cast knew from the script stage that this would be the toughest scene of the film to shoot. “Alex is a writer first,” Spaeny says. “That sounds like it would be obvious, that all the things that you see on screen would be on the page, in terms of emotion. But a lot of times you get scripts and it’s a long way away from what actually ends up on screen.” For Civil War, though, “the dialogue in itself is just so terrifying and chilling and haunting, and that was all there in Alex’s script.”
Knowing what was in store thanks to the script, Wagner Moura says, meant that “You start shooting the movie, and like a week before, you know that you’ll have to shoot that scene — and that starts to bring some sort of anxiety. Because when Jesse comes to me and says, ‘What kind of American are you?,’ it moved me in a very personal way — because I am an American citizen, but I’m Brazilian. I speak with an accent. I’ve been living here for less than 10 years. And that is a scene about xenophobia and racism.”
“So,” he continues, “I caught myself, before the film, already thinking about this polarized moment. Like, how would I react if I was someplace else, like in the deep south, and someone that saw me speaking with my accent came to me and asked, ‘What are you doing here? Why don’t you go back to your country?’ I don’t know what I would do. I don’t know how I would react to that. And I had to think about that for two days while they were shooting that scene — having Jesse Plemons asking that question to me, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times: ‘What kind of American you?’, pointing a gun at me?”
Plemons, beyond his own remarkable, Oscar-nominated body of work, is married to Civil War star Kirsten Dunst (they have two sons together). Originally, Spaeny says, a different actor was cast for the part, but “in the rehearsal process, the actor who was going to play it had to pull out for scheduling reasons. It was devastating, because we knew we needed someone who was really going to go there for this scene, and Kirsten in rehearsals just said, ‘Well, Jesse’s here being dad. I’ll ask him and see what he says.'”
Moura says that on set, he noticed that Plemons and Dunst “gave each other space while we were shooting that scene, especially because they were on opposite sides. And I can’t imagine anybody else playing that role now, he’s so good. He was so menacing — there were moments that are not in the film that he was improvising, he was in character like throughout the whole thing.”
Spaeny agrees, adding that “it was a scene circled in our calendar — we’re going, ‘Oh, okay. Two days until the mass grave.’ We all knew how important it was — it really is a tonal shift that leads us into the third act, so it was important to get it right technically and in terms of acting. He really did us a huge favor. I’m a huge Jesse Plemons fan. I just think every role he plays, he nails.”
Key to the sequence is a vehicular rescue made possible by Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson). “It was like nothing that I ever worked on before,” Henderson says. “I had never shot anything like that.”
In the film, Moura’s character does the bulk of the driving — stunt drivers kept the car on the road for most scenes, but Moura did actually get to drive himself occasionally. (According to Henderson, “If you’ve ever got to get away quick, that’s the guy.”) But Henderson did get his own stunt-driving moment in this sequence, swerving the jeep into the action, just in the nick of time.
“I got caught in a donut one time, just going around and around and around,” Henderson says. “The stunt guy comes running up saying, ‘Oh, man, that was great. Can you do that again?’ I said, ‘No, I can’t do that again, because I didn’t intend to do it the first time.'”
Because Henderson’s character follows his own advice at the beginning of the scene and doesn’t approach the mass grave, “I really lucked out. I tell them not to go and I don’t go, and then they had a day that I didn’t have anything to do with, that was just really intense, and then I got to come and do my portion.”
Civil War (A24)
For the other cast members, those were two very long days. “I didn’t really think about or plan out in my head what the reality of filming those scenes was going to be like,” Spaeny says. “And then you get there on the day and you have the mass grave right there, and you see the dead bodies…. To bring that alive was very… I don’t know how many words I can say, other than chilling and haunting and uncomfortable and devastating.”
Spaeny faced an additional challenge, one that came as a surprise during production: “Me falling into the mass grave was not in the script,” she says.
Instead, stunt choreographer Jeff Dashnaw approached Garland about the idea of the jeep, when it comes roaring onto the scene, accidentally knocking Spaeny’s character down amongst the bodies. “And then Alex came up to me and was like, ‘We should do this.’ And I was like, ‘Crap,’ because the scene is terrifying enough, and it takes such a toll on everyone, and I’m just trying to picture where I have to go, to then be crawling over these dead bodies and thinking, ‘You know, this might be the end.'”
Intensifying matters was that it was the last sequence they shot on that day, and as a result Garland told Spaeny that they would only have one take to shoot it. “I just went, ‘Okay, here we go. It’s now or never.’ I was pretty emotionally drained by that point, which might have been the right head space to be in. Our camera operators jumped in that pit with me on handhelds and said, ‘Action.’ And we just went for it. They tried to capture every moment — and that’s what’s on screen.”
If you’re curious, the bodies seen on screen were a mix of mannequins as well as members of the stunt team, “who were baking in the Hotlanta sun for two days straight, just laying in place,” Spaeny says. “I can’t express to you how warm it was out there. I always fall in love with the stunt teams. What they do is literally blood, sweat, and tears, but they’re like, ‘It’s fine. You can step on my head. Whatever. It’s cool. Just do whatever you need to do.’ It’s hard to describe. It’s very weird flashes of memories of me stepping on these real limbs. We had to have some real bodies in there. God bless the stunt team.”
Once the scene was wrapped, “Jesse was like, ‘I’m sorry.’ He’s such a sweet man, and we all got a drink afterwards and relaxed and got to unwind,” Spaney says. “We were just grateful to have him in that moment,” Spaeny says, “Because that line in particular, ‘What kind of American are you?’ — it says so much in that one moment.”
As for Moura, the actor says that once wrap was called, “I honestly was destroyed. I laid down in the grass, and I cried for 10 minutes, because it awakened some very deep fear in my soul.”
At this point in the interview, trying to hold back tears, I said I was sorry he had to go through that experience. “That’s the thing,” he says. “Hopefully, the power of the scene and the emotion — that’s going to say something to people when they see it, right?”
Civil War is in theaters now.
“I Honestly Was Destroyed”: The Cost of Filming Civil War’s Most Horrifying Scene
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