The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas - Filming on location
Adapted from John Boyne's best-selling novel, The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is a fictional story told through the eves of an eight year old boy largely shielded from the reality of World War II.
The entire behind-the-scenes creative team, including cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, production designer Martin Childs and costume designer Natalie Ward was committed to bringing authenticity, respect and attention to detail to capture one of the darkest periods in history.
The emotional resonance and impact of the shoot, particularly for the Hungarian crew, can not be underestimated. “The crew was constantly and acutely aware of Hungary having supported Germany during both World Wars, and understood the specificity of the story to the 1940s,” says producer David Heyman. “They have lived through officious, authoritarian regimes, and I think they were very sympathetic to all the contemporary echoes of that era. I always sensed the passion that our crew had for this particular job."
Cinematographer Benoit Delhomme had read the book at one sitting, and had a passionate commitment to bring the story to life. “This is not a film about pretty pictures,” says David Heyman, "and Benoit brilliantly realized the moments of discomfort, the awkwardness as well as the beauty. Sometimes the frame’s a little messy; you’ve got the head of a character in the foreground, blurred. It’s not always very neat, but at the same time, it’s appropriately, eloquently shot.”
“When I began this picture,” says production designer Martin Childs, “Budapest had already been selected and I made my first trip there to see what kinds of locations were available to us. It was a very reassuring visit. I knew we had a lot of work to do to get it right but the city has an innate, Middle European ‘rightness’ already. 'In the script, the sets seemed to design themselves; the story has a very clear geography, with contrasting places, which worked out the architecture for me; which worked out the relationship of all the spaces, how they worked with one another.'
For example, the opening scenes in the film are part of a montage of Bruno and his friends running through the streets pretending to be Messerschmitts. They’re seduced by the ‘glamour’ of the war and they are on their way home from school. I wanted their journey to be through several different neighbourhoods - the wealthier parts of Berlin and the parts that their mothers wouldn’t approve of. We didn’t want a montage of heritage sites, but rather we wanted to get several social strata into the opening sequence of the film.”
“Early on, I knew I’d have to build the camp house,” says Childs. “You go through the motions of trying to find something that works, but in the end we built it from the ground up, by a forest, which is what the story needed. The concentration camp itself needed to be carefully researched because you discover that there was a great deal of variety from one to another – although all with the same purpose. We were very careful in our design for the fence where Bruno and Shmuel meet, with the brown and grey background behind Shmuel and the bright, green forest behind Bruno. As the story was told from Bruno’s point of view, I spent a lot of time at his level, getting down on my knees to imagine the sets.”
“It had to feel real, it had to feel genuine so that the viewers believe they are planted firmly in that world,” says costume designer Natalie Ward. “It’s not something that needs an imaginative slant to it because you want the audience to recognize these people. This period has been filmed a lot but even though you think you know what it looks like, you want to get it completely right. Once you start focusing on the details, and you realize you don’t know as much as you thought you did. Consequently, I asked thousands of questions and did a lot of research.”
Regarding the sets for the final scenes in the film, designer Martin Childs knew he required the highest degree of authenticity. “For the set of the anteroom to the gas chamber and the gas chamber itself, I had to do a forensic amount of research, and some very unpleasant research,” he says. “There’s a famous photograph of the gas chamber at Auschwitz which bore an uncanny superficial resemblance to the basement underneath the studio where we were shooting a few scenes. We were able to modify it and – mercifully – we did not have to build a gas chamber from the ground up.”
“There’s a huge amount written now, and a lot of documented evidence collected by archivists and Jewish groups trying to put the Holocaust into some kind of context. As a subject and a period in history, a great deal of accurate reference material exists,” says supervising art director Rod McLean. “Alain Resnais's 1955 documentary “Night and Fog” made a particularly strong impact. Nothing prepares you for that. So while there is a lot of research material available, the images and descriptions have lost none of their power to shock; you needed to leave it for a few days to re-group. ”
Budapest, the capital of Hungary, was chosen as the location for the film primarily because the geography of the city and the surrounding suburbs suited the visual and cinematic needs of the story and the production. The budget incentives and the availability of top-notch local crew members and studio space cemented the deal. What the filmmakers hadn’t anticipated was the extremely visceral emotional reaction of many of the cast and crew members to filming this particular story in a country where the atrocities depicted and referenced actually took place, when the chaos of WWII overtook the country and its populace in horrific ways.
Situated on both banks of the Danube River, Budapest unites the hills of Buda and the boulevards of Pest. Although some 30,000 buildings were destroyed during World War II and later during the1956 Revolution, the past lives on in the architectural detail of the structures that remain. The city has served as a location for many international productions, doubling as London, Paris, East and West Berlin, and even Buenos Aires.
After an extensive search, it was director Mark Herman, returning from a recce, who happened on the location for the Berlin house exterior on a busy road in the Budapest district of Zugló. The interiors of the house were filmed in the restored Sacelláry Castle, situated in Budapest’s XXII district, in Budafok.
A complex of tenement buildings, effectively a city within a city, was used for the Nazi round-up of Jewish residents in the opening montage. The schoolboys, pretending to be bomber pilots, fly through an elegant square directly behind the Kempinski Hotel and pass through the area adjacent to the Opera House.
Having scoured the immediate area looking at everything from hunting lodges to train stations, director Mark Herman and production designer Martin Childs decided to build the exterior of the commandant’s camp house on the grounds of the orphanage at Fót, known as the “Children’s City”. The woods of the “Children’s City” were used for Bruno’s passage to and from the fence where he meets Shmuel.
The barracks where the scenes in the concentration camp were filmed were originally built as a set for John Houston’s “Escape to Victory”. Since then, they have been modified many times to suit the needs of various Hungarian and international productions.
Sets for the children’s bedrooms were built in the newly renovated Lloyd Studio. The final weeks of shooting took place on the sound stage at Mafilm’s Róna Street Studio.
The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas will be released in UK cinemas on 12th September 2008.
