Production Companies Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, DC Comics (Vertigo), Lonely Film Productions GmbH & Co. KG., Donners' Company, Branded Entertainment/Batfilm Productions, Weed Road Pictures, 3 Art Entertainment, Di Bonaventura Pictures
Based upon the director’s premise that heaven and hell exist as parallel dimensions occupying the same space and that there is a heavenly and a hellish version of every spot on earth, Shohan explains, “I imagined the hellish transformation to any landscape would be a state of constant cataclysmic shifting – exploding, imploding, blowing, burning, decaying. Happily, Francis and I agreed that if you were in Los Angeles the quintessential hell version of the city would be a section of its infamous freeway.”
As Constantine attempts to confirm the afterlife fate of Angela’s sister, Isabel, he must visit hell to look for her, a treacherous journey on which he embarks from Angela’s apartment. The instant he crosses over he appears in a scorched and gutted version of Angela’s room, and from there climbs out onto the street and up to the highway, buffeted by fierce winds swirling with ash, with fire and chaos all around. “You can’t beat the image of Constantine walking down the center of a decomposed 101 Freeway in hell,” says Lawrence, and, going for the irresistible joke, “most people who live in Los Angeles think the 101 Freeway is hell already.”
Meticulously designed to look like the real thing, the section of road was built to nearly standard specs, with the exception of narrowing lane width from 10 to eight feet and laying three lanes instead of four. “Rails, dividers, lamp posts and signage were all built to highway department standards,” Shohan confirms. “The surface is concrete poured over wooden scaffold and dividers are concrete over carved foam.”
Among the set’s most striking details are the approximately 40 vehicles, racked up in various states of disintegration. As Shohan explains, “The cars are wrecks purchased from collectors. We wanted certain models for their particular shapes. These were then cut-up, re-configured and embellished with foam carving to make them appear mutated. We added wire and foam-formed stalactites to look like melted metal and everything was covered in latex-and-hemp pieces we made to have the appearance of skin with roots or veins growing in it. Finally, the whole set was age-painted in rust and brown to complete the look of waste, decay and constant diabolical transformation.”
Coordinating with Shohan to use this detailed practical set as a foundation and starting point, Visual Effects Supervisor Michael Fink replicated and extended it digitally. Wrecked cars were remodeled in the computer so that each one could be further eroded or blown away by acrid winds and so that digitally created demons and lost souls in hell could be moved around and through them.
Fink describes the look he was striving for, as “an incredibly harsh environment, like the aftermath of a nuclear blast except that instead of lasting nanoseconds it lasts forever.” A visual effects supervisor since the early 1980s on a range of high-profile feature films, Fink counts among his credits an Oscar nomination for his work on 1992’s Batman Returns and more recently oversaw effects on the blockbuster hits X-Men and X 2, where he collaborated with Constantine producer Lauren Shuler Donner.
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