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
As the intrepid Angela, Rachel Weisz drew her fair share of danger. Held underwater by Reeves for a crucial scene, she struggles wildly to free herself. Deceptively simple, Rondell cautions that such a scene could easily prove deadly if those on set mistake acting for genuine survival. A lot depended upon pre-arranged signals and Reeves’ instinct. Later, in a scene where Angela fights for her life in the hospital hydrotherapy pool, Weisz reveals good-naturedly, “I went under and whacked my head on the bottom. By the time we had finished all the water scenes I was bruised and scraped and sore for weeks. Luckily, nothing broken.”
Even Shia LaBeouf got in on the genuine action, in his big fight with the half-breeds, as Rondell relates. “We put him on a cable and flung him right up into the ceiling, then dropped him to the floor. It was great. We went through it first with a stunt double, and prepared both the ceiling and floor to be soft, then put him through it. It looks like a million bucks when you see the actor take a slam like that and you know it’s really him.”
But Rondell didn’t stop there. He wasn’t satisfied until he got the director himself strapped into a harness for a bird’s eye view of his set. “It wasn’t for a stunt,” Lawrence modestly clarifies. “I just rode the path of the camera to see the action from a high vantage point, the way a dolly moves. They brought me up on cables and sort of slid me across the room. It was great fun.”
From the bottles of holy water Constantine keeps in a defensive ring around his apartment, to amulets and the myriad individual bits and pieces of religious artifacts he uses for power and protection, Constantine utilizes an ever-changing idiosyncratic arsenal of items to do his work and keep himself alive.
Most of these items are procured for him by his friend Beeman, through circuitous barter with a maze of clandestine agents around the world. Beeman, the master historian and scholar, is able to lay his hands on such enticing artifacts as stone fragments from the road to Damascus; bullet shavings from an assassination attempt on the Pope; a screech beetle from Amityville; a piece of Moses’ shroud; numerous crosses and other religious icons blessed by high-ranking clergy throughout the ages; and, perhaps the most inexplicable, a vial of highly flammable dragon’s breath, which produces a ten-foot flare of searing heat like a flame-thrower.
As the production’s real-life Beeman, property master Kirk Corwin created this incomparable assortment by more conventional means, but still relied upon extensive historical research, as well as immersion in classical Latin, as nearly every important item featured a Latin inscription.
Corwin is understandably most proud of the collection’s showpiece: Constantine’s holy shotgun, a weapon presumably crafted from a crucifix with a hollow shaft, adapted into a deadly firearm, the blast from which can vaporize the foulest demons and send them back to hell.
By far the most complicated prop in the film, the shotgun had to fire multiple rounds while having a look in keeping with Beeman’s other relics. Corwin started by examining existing shotguns. Finding one called a “Street Sweeper” that would serve as an excellent model, he worked with Lawrence and Shohan to refine its look. They decided that the components of the gun should appear to be based upon drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci.
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