Though the film follows the rise of Factory Records and the bands that were attached to it, the other major focus of the story is about the emergence of rave culture, the beautification of the beat, the arrival of dance music, and the birth of one of the most famous clubs in the world. The brainchild of Rob Gretton, the dubber’s mecca: the Hacienda.
On Friday, March 2, 2001, 1500 revelers returned to the Hacienda to help film the penultimate scenes of the movie. Original Hacienda DJ’s Dave Haslam and Mike Pickering were bought in once again to mix the decks. Old faces were there to enjoy the party. Barney Sumner and Hooky joined the Mondays’ Bez and a host of original regular Hacienda-goers who danced the night away into the early hours.
The infamous club was passionately and intricately recreated down to the last bolt by Production Designer Mark Tildesley and his team.
"Initially I was hoping that we could use the original building," Tildesley says. "When I was brought on board, the actual Hacienda was still in place, but it had been sold to a property developer. Though we tried some early negotiations about keeping the place alive until we could finish filming, that crumbled into nothing." They set about rebuilding the club then, and had to work out how much they’d need to replicate to shoot the script. Tildesley says, "we decided we really had to build the main area, the mezzanine, the Kim Philby bar, and the street entrance."
With not much to go on, the team scaled up a small plan of the Hacienda, and they were able to get onto the original plot to take some final measurements before it was finally demolished. However, much of the recreation was done from a set of photographs from a Manchester post-grad who had done a thesis on the club. Tildesley says what they have created is "a replication of the Hacienda when it first opened in 1984."
To maintain the authenticity of the set they used some original fixtures and fittings in the reconstruction. "We’ve got some original light fittings in here," Tildesley says. "We bought some stuff from the sale — a lot of furniture, some of which we we’ve used, some of which we’ve replicated. We have the original shutter doors back at base. But a lot of the stuff we got we bought for reference purposes rather than for construction use."
Some original fixtures were too precious to risk using on set. As Tildesley explains, "We were going to use the original doors. They’re owned by Peter Hook. He gave us two and the other two are on his garage doors. But because we were smashing into them, we decided to use replications. We also sourced some original Phil Diggle (Hacienda artist) paintings in a gallery, but they’re quite valuable. So the nice thing is Phil himself came here and repainted a set of the paintings. That was really cool."
Though you would never know when walking on to the set, Tildesley does admit to a few artistic liberties in the replication. "The width of the building (housing the set) was slightly wider," he says. "In order for us to make our Hacienda work, we had to proportionally spread out some of the things, so you’ll find that the thrust on the front of the stage was four feet longer than the original one. The dance floor is seven feet wider and the mezzanine nine feet wider. We don’t have the flat ceiling in as low as they did, as in terms of filming purposes it wasn’t actually very good."
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