Alex Garland’s latest fire starter, ‘Civil War,’ builds and builds toward one harrowing crescendo: an uninterrupted 15-minute siege on Washington, D.C. Here’s how he and his team turned the nation’s capital into a war zone.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25400055/spoiler_warning_v2.2__1_.jpg)
Wagner Moura wanted to feel the sound.
Heading into the filming of Civil War’s explosive and visceral final sequence—a 20-minute, cacophonous, chaotic siege on the White House—the 47-year-old Brazilian actor understood his character Joel, a veteran Reuters journalist, on an intellectual level. He’d consumed a variety of documentaries (Under the Wire) and old-school war classics (Come and See) to absorb the impact of live combat zones. He’d read Jon Steele’s memoir, War Junkie, about the author’s adrenaline-fueled addiction to filming massacres across Africa and the Middle East. He’d even spoken to former combat journalists, gleaning the way that their perception of time could radically alter from moment to moment. But late at night, as writer-director Alex Garland began shooting at a transformed parking lot in Atlanta, Moura found himself surrounded by makeshift replicas resembling the Renwick Gallery and Eisenhower Executive Office, speeding Humvees, bulldozing tanks, and nonstop gun pops that ricocheted off the concrete. He was finally experiencing the terror of what he’d only watched and read about.
He refused to wear earplugs.
“It was fucking noisy. Very, very, very noisy,” Moura says. “I think it was always Alex’s goal to make us feel as if we were really in the middle of a conflict.”
Civil War is chock-full of tense, unnerving, and violent moments. Set in the near future and functioning like a road movie, the action-thriller follows a quartet of journalists—photographers Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), along with reporters Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Joel—from New York City to Washington, D.C., where a third-term president has barricaded himself from Western rebel forces who are inching closer to the capital. In the waning days of this vaguely explained conflict, which has reduced America to rubble, the press group races to secure one last interview with the divided nation’s leader, snapping photos of roadside horrors, abandoned public spaces, and unpredictable shoot-outs along the way.
But the movie’s most jarring sequence is its finale, when the journalists plant themselves in the middle of an all-out rebel siege that aims to breach the White House perimeter and assassinate the president. As the Western military infiltrates the capital, all hell breaks loose: Helicopters shoot missiles into the Lincoln Memorial, tanks roll through blockades and fire at security outposts, soldiers toss grenades and spray bullets, and SUVs crash into Humvees, leading to brutal executions. Throughout the commotion, Lee, Jessie, and Joel scramble for their lives, committed to documenting the attack as they dart across the North Lawn, shadow Navy SEALs into the Oval Office, and witness and capture the president’s death. It’s a disorienting, ear-ringing, blunt-force depiction of war punctuated by breathless, scoreless acoustics—made all the more debilitating by the fact that it’s a raid on our capital.
Bringing such ambitious and high-decibel shock and awe to the big screen was, understandably, a massive challenge—one that required months of precise stunt coordination, military consultation, and an unwavering devotion to practical effects. There’s a reason it became A24’s most expensive production. “We were, to use a technical term, blowing shit up,” cinematographer Rob Hardy says. “It had to be that way. Everything was about creating this authentic environment.”
Moura agrees: “I think it was the most immersive thing that I’ve ever done in my life.”
When Garland began writing the script for Civil War in 2020, the first thing he sketched out was the final sequence. As the director recently told CinemaBlend, he prefers to start his creative process with the ending, “and then I’m trying to figure out how we get there.” Though the pandemic stalled the project’s initial development (leading Garland to make Men in the interim), he and Hardy reunited in 2022 to start scheming and reverse-engineering the general ticktock of the siege and the way to shoot it. “Early on, we knew our approach was going to be the same as a war photographer,” Hardy says. “Specifically, the battle sequences needed to feel like we were giving [the actors] the space to do their thing. Our filmmaking would not get in the way of that.”
As a result, a lot of Hardy and Garland’s early conversations revolved around the movie’s aesthetic design. Intent on inhabiting the journalists’ perspective, the pair became attracted to the visual grammar, immediacy, and unpredictability of modern news footage; they wanted to tell the story through their protagonists’ own medium. Pivoting away from the more measured and pristine cinematography of Garland’s past films, like Annihilation or Ex Machina, Hardy preferred the purity and functionality of handheld cameras. They delivered a kinetic, verité, sometimes mistake-prone fluidity that a controlled shot list couldn’t. “When you watch [news footage], it’s almost like you’re trying to second-guess the next few seconds that are going to happen, specifically if it’s leading up to a tragic incident,” Hardy says. “Sometimes certain things are missed, an explosion happens outside of the frame. But because of its captured nature, the viewer immediately responds.”
Closer to the start of production, Garland and Hardy began a series of roundtable discussions with other members of the crew—namely, production designer Caty Maxey—to map out locations and choreography, as well as which shots would be built by a VFX team. They then translated their notes onto a 20-foot and three-dimensional scale model, labeling where and how each section of Washington, D.C., would be filmed. The aerial bombing of the Lincoln Memorial, for example, would contain real second-unit shots of the city that visual effects teams would overlay with fiery destruction. But as the sequence swooped down to ground level, production would move to Stone Mountain Park, where Maxey was responsible for furnishing the foreground of a massive assault.
“It was a puzzle with a lot of different parts,” Maxey says.
Though Maxey had previously worked as an art director on big action movies (Jurassic World, Jason Bourne, Greenland), she had little experience turning empty parking lots into metropolitan war zones in under a month’s time. Still, she says, “I’ve never had a problem doing big stuff. You just jump in and do it.” Starting on the asphalt, she built trenches throughout the lot to create a solid foundation for the White House walls. Meanwhile, on both sides of the street her construction and paint teams began piecing together 400-foot-long facades that looked like marble but were made of plywood, a time-consuming process considering the amount of demolition being planned. “When you build a column on a set and it’s going to get blown up, you’ve got to have multiples and duplicates,” she says. “You’ve got to be able to seam it back on five-second notice.”
Maxey estimates that about 40 blue screens were used around main intersections to fill in the city’s background. But the structures in the foreground that took cannon-launched projectiles still needed to have sharp details. In replicating the sturdy architectural style of D.C., “you can’t just put Styrofoam in there,” Maxey says. “There really aren’t any corners that you can cut because you don’t know what’s really going to get seen, you don’t know how close they’re going to get, and you don’t get to do it over again.”
Another benefit of the scale model was that every creative department could use it to pinpoint the location of tactical explosions, the height and width of certain vehicles or gates, and the general flow of the action. “We would have many, many meetings like, ‘OK, so this vehicle comes in here, they’re gonna approach here, but these guys are going to stop them, so then this is going to look like that,” Hardy says. Along with military supervisor Ray Mendoza, Garland even sketched out arrows and drew small cones to show where a camera would be positioned for the group of stunt actors. The calculus made Maxey’s job easier, so when her crew had erected the city block and production installed various tanks, Humvees, and broken glass, “we didn’t have to change anything,” she says.
“I remember walking onto that set, and by the time we got to it, it honestly did feel like the eve of the final battle,” Hardy says. “Everybody knew what they were going to do.”
Though it helped Garland conceptually to envision the White House siege first, he made the difficult but critical choice to film Civil War in chronological order. As production reached its waning days after following the course of the journalists’ road trip, cast members had become extremely close and comfortable with their personal cameras. They also felt the weight of the impending mayhem. “We had been through everything,” Moura says. “We were getting tired as the characters were getting tired.”
The scheduling also helped Hardy’s camera team, made up of around 20 people, who had previously filmed some gnarly vehicle scenes and determined the best ways to record gunfire and rapid movements from a low-angle perspective. “We’d already established ourselves as quite a nimble unit,” Hardy says. “We could create quite immersive film photography because of the way that we sort of honed our methodology.”
Once Western forces begin infiltrating downtown, Civil War makes good on its title. As Lee, Joel, and Jessie duck behind corners, climb rooftops, and dart across sidewalks behind soldiers, the aerial and ground assaults commence. Low-flying choppers spray bullets into heavily guarded streets, and tanks ram through barricades to fire explosives into parking garages. Eventually, the rebellion blows up an occupied outpost, nearly breaching the White House’s fortifications. As competing war correspondents jockey for broadcasting positions, the overwhelming soundscape forces Lee into a traumatized breakdown. “[The actors] were all reacting in their own individual ways to it,” Hardy says, “but you could just see in their faces. It was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re doing this. We’re really doing this.’”
The action feels impromptu, but Garland, Hardy, Mendoza, and stunt coordinator Jeff Dashnaw made sure the 50 stunt actors had their movements and sequencing down cold so that they could lead the way for Moura, Dunst, and Spaeny. Numerous rehearsals allowed them to run confidently underneath real helicopters and in front of Humvees, whose percussive whirring and revving overlapped with the pyrotechnics, flash-bangs, and air-pump gunfire echoing over the park. The noise got so loud on set that it even spooked neighboring Atlantans: The early-morning interruptions turned into a local news story. “It really did sound like you were kind of in a battlefield,” said one sleepless resident.
Later in the sequence, a throng of government officials emerges from the White House in two black Suburbans, hoping to flee the city. When they break through a gate, however, the drivers and passengers get cornered and sprayed with bullets. It’s a brutal and head-spinning moment, one that accentuates war’s extreme and inhumane nature. “It was fucking scary because the car was really passing right through us,” Moura remembers. “It was kind of crazy, man. You had to be doing your shit correctly in order for this thing to take place in a safe way.”
As he and Garland had discussed, Hardy used small Ronin 4D cameras throughout the siege, “which allowed us to be much more immersive, get right next to the journalists, and feel the noise and the chaos of everything,” he says. Though there were long takes, Garland wasn’t endeavoring to replicate the oners that are featured in other disaster dramas like Children of Men or Extraction, which meant Hardy could compartmentalize specific rehearsed plays and take each exclamatory beat step-by-step. “The illusion is it’s happening in real time, but we never took that sort of gung-ho approach,” Hardy says. “It was always quite precise about how we approached it.”
“As an actor, I love handheld,” Moura says. “I didn’t even know where the cameras were. At some point, I didn’t even care. You just do your thing, and you know that someone is going to be there shooting you.”
The final segment of the battle takes place inside the White House, where the president hopes to negotiate his surrender. As the Navy SEALs shoot down a press secretary and begin clearing out various historical rooms, the journalists get caught in a main corridor’s cross fire. In a sacrificial act, Lee pushes Jessie to the ground but is shot and killed in the process, a moment that Jessie snaps with her camera. As Hardy remembers discussing with Garland, all the military zigzagging through hallways had to facilitate “this one very specific moment.”
To pull it off, production first moved to Tyler Perry’s 330-acre Atlanta studio, which contained a replica of the White House. Garland and Hardy ended up using it for various exterior shots and a few interiors, but because Civil War had very specific action needs, Perry’s Oval Office and the hallway leading up to it didn’t work in a practical way. Instead, Maxey dressed up a separate rental set nearby, putting a chandelier into the newly made Oval Office and adding extended hallways for a longer buildup. “His hallways and colors and fixtures are a little different,” Maxey says of Perry’s studio. The additions, she adds, “just felt more real” for their imagined, futuristic time period.
Ahead of shooting, Garland leaned on Mendoza’s military expertise, giving him the freedom to choreograph the siege, which makes it feel like witnessing a real assassination operation (or at least like you’re playing Call of Duty). The team of Navy SEALs that Mendoza brought on had all experienced real combat before, enhancing the authenticity and cold-blooded methodology of the mission. “They would transmit some sort of confidence to us,” Moura says. “And they would shout things at us like, ‘Stay there! Come! Now!’ And I would be like, ‘Oh yeah, shit, I’ll do whatever this guy tells me to do.’”
Mendoza’s group also paid dividends for Hardy, whose constant goal was to relay a volatile energy with the camera as he followed everyone’s lead. The end result is a nerve-racking, pulse-pounding affair that lingers into the credits. “Even if some of the guys got repetitive about their movements or slightly lax, the camera had to make it feel like you’re moving through time and that each second is a new, unpredictable second,” Hardy says. “Everybody has to be working to the same beat.”
No element might be more crucial to the climax’s success than its sound, though. Rivaling any recent action movie, Civil War takes the volume up to 11 and never wavers from that concussive power. The piercing jets. The thunderous detonations. The screaming projectiles. The chest-pounding artillery. It all overlaps into an aural nightmare; it’s impossible to delineate its distance or directional origin. On set, “you could feel the vibration,” Hardy says.
But it wasn’t until postproduction that the movie received its ear-splitting identity. In charge was Garland’s longtime collaborator Glenn Freemantle (28 Days Later, Gravity), who was used to the director’s provocative storytelling and sci-fi environments. But upon watching the first cut of the movie, the Oscar-winning sound designer realized he had a much blunter and louder task ahead of him. Over a brief chat, Garland laid out the basic premise for the last 20 minutes: “Think of chaos.”
“Which meant: War isn’t clean,” Freemantle says. “There’s nothing sanitized about it. You don’t know what’s happening, and it’s complete confusion.”
What encouraged Freemantle from the jump was Garland’s interest in using polarized dynamics. In the movie’s first sequence, a suicide bomber runs into a political protest and blasts several dozen people. The noise from the explosion then goes silent for an extended and almost uncomfortable amount of time, setting a precedent for the film’s dramatically shifting acoustics. “When you’re going to be that outrageous with certain things early on, the audience comes with you,” Freemantle says. “I think that was basically the beginning of what we were going to do.”
On a base level, Freemantle says he enhanced the volume of “literally every single shot” with various sound beds of helicopter and military vehicle machinery, often mixing multiple elements together in Dolby Atmos. But as he scrolled through the movie’s footage, he discovered rougher sounds, like a “wump” noise collected from a gun’s discharge in the middle of the journalists’ road trip. Later, at an empty Pinewood Studios in England, he used the real reverb from his team’s gunshots to build a “square” explosive sound, in which “the pressure had nowhere to go but to come back.” The decision helped compact the noise, giving it a greater thump and differentiating it from other action movie artillery, which often gets drowned out by music. “The helicopters take you in on music, and then, nothing,” Freemantle says. “It’s very rare that films even dare to do that.
“I’ve done lots of films where we’ve had battles, and you want them sort of filmic in a way that’s shiny,” he adds. “This battle, we didn’t want shiny.”
After running through the sequence’s many layers, Freemantle returned to the cut a month later, when more visual effects had been implemented. The time away gave him new ears to find pockets that needed more volume and strength, but it also presented his team with another challenge, as the nature of the battle meant more computer-generated flash-bangs and explosions had been added and needed the requisite punctuation. “The biggest problem is keeping up,” he says. “You’ve got these tiny flashes and no one tells you where they are, and the guys have to go and look at every one.”
Upon completing an IMAX mix, Freemantle and his team went to see the finished product in London. Everyone was blown away by the final results, including the IMAX theater operator, Freemantle recalls. “I can’t believe that,” the operator told them. “I feel like I’ve been in a war.”
“We were all just smiling,” Freemantle says.
In many respects, Civil War is less war propaganda than an anthropological journey inside a plausibly polarized country. Even in the deafening conclusion, which flexes Garland’s action bona fides, the director keeps things centered on his journalists, their heightened craft, and their desire to document this abrupt transition of power.
It creates the foundation for the movie’s most unique stylistic choice, when Garland freeze-frames a handful of Lee’s and Jessie’s snapshots in the heat of the siege, muting the pandemonium for just a couple of seconds to highlight their skill and perhaps imagine the moment when these shocking images are dispersed over the wire. These brief pauses only underscore the level of sound and fury that has quickly become their new normal. “At the very beginning, Alex always described it as the sort of silence in the chaos,” Hardy says. “You dropped out of this kind of chaotic moment into something of pure elegance and stillness.”
Knowing the precise moments that Garland wanted these specific shots, Hardy switched over to high-speed cameras capable of firing off 300 frames per second. Then he’d move gently, mimicking the action of a photographer adjusting the camera to their eye, and lock in on a target. “You would just drop into whatever the image was that you were about to take,” he says. “Then afterwards, we would fine-tooth comb each frame and say, ‘That’s the one.’”
The rush of the movie makes it hard to process everything, but those abrupt snapshots—sometimes homing in on a gunshot wound, a look of panic, or the moment a bullet pierces the president’s chest plate—allow for some of the movie’s only chances for reflection. Are these videos and photos ethical or exploitative? What does it feel like to see authentic guerilla-style images—often associated with war-torn areas in South America, Africa, or the Middle East—inside iconographic American institutions? What if the battle lines were drawn at the intersection of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue?
Moura, who studied journalism and whose home country recently experienced a similar insurrection over election results, believes the movie—but in particular this final sequence—provokes the right feelings in advance of a polarizing presidential election. “The third act creates a cognitive dissonance in an American audience,” he says. “These are things that you’re used to seeing someplace else. When you see this happening with this amount of realism, I think it causes a very deep reaction to something that you’re not used to. It’s not like seeing aliens coming and fucking up Washington, D.C.”
Moura still vividly remembers getting lost in the emotion of the White House scenes. They took place on the final day of shooting. He was exhausted. As Lee gets shot, Joel, intent on getting a final quote from the president, forges ahead toward the Oval Office. Moura struggled to come to terms with what happened. “I was really feeling the pain of losing not only Lee, but Kirsten, someone that you’re working with all the time,” he says.
For one more adrenaline-fueled moment, he tapped into the harsh realities of combat.
“Things were very mixed in my mind,” he says. “I didn’t have to imagine anything.”