Green Zone
Paul Greengrass and production designer Dominic Watkins’ team created the look and feel of Baghdad, 2003 'both inside and outside the bubble' on location in Spain, Morocco and England.
Filming began January 10, 2008, at Los Alcázares Military Air Base, situated on the Mediterranean Sea in southeastern Spain’s Murcia province.
It was a relatively easygoing start of production, with well-secured locations and a winter climate much like Southern California’s.
The ramshackle Los Alcázares training facility, operated by the Spanish air force, provided locations for Saddam’s pillaged Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters, as well as exterior scenes at the Republican Palace and a smaller Green Zone palace.
Also in Spain, the unit filmed the MET D convoy rolling under a highway overpass and getting stuck in a traffic jam on a four-lane highway as panicking throngs fled Baghdad.
The traffic shots were staged on a brand-new Murcia motorway, which had not yet been opened to the public.
Most of Green Zone’s exteriors, however, were filmed on streets in and around Rabat, Morocco, where the company encamped for seven weeks. A coastal city on the Atlantic Ocean, Rabat has served as Morocco’s capital since 1956.
The Bou Regreg river empties into the Atlantic alongside Rabat. Across this estuary, Rabat’s 'twin' city, Salé, hosted many days and nights of filming for the production.
The Moroccan portion of the shoot began February 2 in Kenitra, a city 25 miles north of Rabat. Kenitra provided the location for the Diwaniya WMD site. Instead of discovering weapons of mass destruction here, Miller’s MET D convoy arrived to find Diwaniya overrun by hundreds of looters.
The looting sequence was controlled pandemonium, performed with joyful abandon by the Moroccan extras hired to portray the plunderers. Costume designer Sammy Sheldon and her team outfitted approximately 200 male extras for this rubble-strewn shot.
"The overview of the movie is that it needs to be grounded in reality for every character involved, whether Iraqi or American," says Sheldon. "Paul likes grimy, sweaty realism.
"The looters were a mix of young and old guys, very dirty and quite wrapped up so that you wouldn’t recognize them if they were seen on the telly. We went for the older sportswear look mixed with traditional dishdasha [male robes] and head scarves to hide their faces."
Sheldon, the costumers and the webbing team were as grateful as the cast to have former members of the military on the production. "I’ve done other movies of this nature where most of the main team were actors," Sheldon offers.
"You put all this kit on them, and when they take a break, they put something down and forget about it. The MET D boys never lost anything," she notes, "and they’ve helped us a lot with how it’s worn."
The MET D convoy’s push through a Baghdad traffic jam was filmed over a two-day period in Kenitra. CBS News had aired footage of a similar Baghdad incident in 2003, shot for the network by British cameraman Nick Turner and then-CBS News producer Bronner.
Greengrass and his team used the network’s 2003 material for reference in planning the film’s traffic sequence. Completely by chance, cameraman Turner was part of the CBS News crew that visited the Green Zone set when the traffic jam was filmed.
This sequence, referred to as 'bump street' on set, was a big undertaking for action vehicles coordinator Alex King and first assistant director Chris Carreras. Their teams sourced approximately 150 vehicles, which had to be dressed, then dirtied down and made to look as if they belonged in Baghdad. They also had to prepare the cars to be hit by a four-and-a-half-ton Humvee.
Kenitra Military Air Base, a former U.S. Naval Air Station, provided the exterior location for scenes set at Saddam International Airport. The visual effects team completed the transformation of Moroccan locations into Iraqi landmarks, including the airport, Republican Palace and Assassins’ Gate.
With fewer iconic locations, Rabat was appropriately atmospheric. "Rabat was chosen because it best resembled parts of Baghdad," says VFX supervisor Peter Chiang. "The architecture and flat roofs provided a good foundation for our needs."
Night shooting in Salé provoked further déjà vu for Chandrasekaran. Says the journalist: "It looked and felt like a hard-scrabble part of Adhamiya, a Sunni-dominated neighborhood on the eastern side of the Tigris River."
Salé also accommodated the dust and din of three Special Forces helicopters swooping in and out of a woebegone football pitch (soccer field). The helicopter of choice for Briggs and his men would be the Black Hawk, but ongoing military needs made Black Hawks unavailable.
The Huey, a staple of the Vietnam War, most closely resembles the Black Hawk’s shape. Therefore, three Hueys were filmed and transformed into Black Hawks during postproduction.
Not every day in Morocco was so gritty. For several days and nights, an upscale area of Salé depicted Baghdad’s Mansour district, also known as 'the Beverly Hills of Baghdad.'
Production moved to its London base in mid-March and availed itself of a wide variety of locations. Most of the film’s interiors were shot in the London area and in the neighboring county of Surrey.
Scenes set in the grand rooms of the Republican Palace were filmed at Freemasons’ Hall, an imposing Art Deco landmark on Great Queen Street in London’s Covent Garden. The indoor betting parlor at Sandown Park Racecourse in Surrey underwent a metamorphosis to portray the interior of Saddam International Airport, which was transformed when Coalition Forces set up camp there in 2003.
Updown Court, a never-occupied luxury manor house in Surrey, stood in for a ravaged Green Zone palace, where Miller and the MET D briefly lodged. Green Zone filmed at the Renaissance Hotel, steps away from Heathrow International Airport’s infamous Terminal 5, on the very day that the new terminal so disastrously opened.
Huge construction sheds at QinetiQ, a former tank factory in Surrey, housed another would-be WMD site and a Camp Cropper prison.
The interior of General Al-Rawi’s house, mounted on a ton of pneumatically inflated bellows by the special effects team, was also built at QinetiQ. The bellows’ heaving gave the set a violent shake, simulating the effect of bombs falling in the near distance.
Saddam’s long-rumored maze of underground tunnels and bunkers, also alleged to be rife with hidden weapons, inspired the setting for a climactic firefight in Green Zone.
The desolate Millennium Mills site in East London’s Docklands was chosen for the sequence. "We researched the tactics Iraqi soldiers would be geared up for, if attacked somewhere like a safe house," offers stunt coordinator Markos Rounthwaite.
"They would know the place like the backs of their hands, and U.S. troops wouldn’t know where to start chasing them."
Green Zone is out now.
Paul Greengrass and production designer Dominic Watkins’ team created the look and feel of Baghdad, 2003 'both inside and outside the bubble' on location in Spain, Morocco and England.
Filming began January 10, 2008, at Los Alcázares Military Air Base, situated on the Mediterranean Sea in southeastern Spain’s Murcia province.
It was a relatively easygoing start of production, with well-secured locations and a winter climate much like Southern California’s.
The ramshackle Los Alcázares training facility, operated by the Spanish air force, provided locations for Saddam’s pillaged Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters, as well as exterior scenes at the Republican Palace and a smaller Green Zone palace.
Also in Spain, the unit filmed the MET D convoy rolling under a highway overpass and getting stuck in a traffic jam on a four-lane highway as panicking throngs fled Baghdad.
The traffic shots were staged on a brand-new Murcia motorway, which had not yet been opened to the public.
Most of Green Zone’s exteriors, however, were filmed on streets in and around Rabat, Morocco, where the company encamped for seven weeks. A coastal city on the Atlantic Ocean, Rabat has served as Morocco’s capital since 1956.
The Bou Regreg river empties into the Atlantic alongside Rabat. Across this estuary, Rabat’s 'twin' city, Salé, hosted many days and nights of filming for the production.
The Moroccan portion of the shoot began February 2 in Kenitra, a city 25 miles north of Rabat. Kenitra provided the location for the Diwaniya WMD site. Instead of discovering weapons of mass destruction here, Miller’s MET D convoy arrived to find Diwaniya overrun by hundreds of looters.
The looting sequence was controlled pandemonium, performed with joyful abandon by the Moroccan extras hired to portray the plunderers. Costume designer Sammy Sheldon and her team outfitted approximately 200 male extras for this rubble-strewn shot.
"The overview of the movie is that it needs to be grounded in reality for every character involved, whether Iraqi or American," says Sheldon. "Paul likes grimy, sweaty realism.
"The looters were a mix of young and old guys, very dirty and quite wrapped up so that you wouldn’t recognize them if they were seen on the telly. We went for the older sportswear look mixed with traditional dishdasha [male robes] and head scarves to hide their faces."
Sheldon, the costumers and the webbing team were as grateful as the cast to have former members of the military on the production. "I’ve done other movies of this nature where most of the main team were actors," Sheldon offers.
"You put all this kit on them, and when they take a break, they put something down and forget about it. The MET D boys never lost anything," she notes, "and they’ve helped us a lot with how it’s worn."
The MET D convoy’s push through a Baghdad traffic jam was filmed over a two-day period in Kenitra. CBS News had aired footage of a similar Baghdad incident in 2003, shot for the network by British cameraman Nick Turner and then-CBS News producer Bronner.
Greengrass and his team used the network’s 2003 material for reference in planning the film’s traffic sequence. Completely by chance, cameraman Turner was part of the CBS News crew that visited the Green Zone set when the traffic jam was filmed.
This sequence, referred to as 'bump street' on set, was a big undertaking for action vehicles coordinator Alex King and first assistant director Chris Carreras. Their teams sourced approximately 150 vehicles, which had to be dressed, then dirtied down and made to look as if they belonged in Baghdad. They also had to prepare the cars to be hit by a four-and-a-half-ton Humvee.
Tagged in Paul Greengrass