‘ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT’

Production design by Christian Goldbeck (“The Reader”)

Time frame:

Hero home: The trenches

1918

Filmmakers started digging trenches for both French and German soldiers in January 2021 outside of Prague. Built on a stretch of land the size of 10 football fields, the soldiers’ no-man’s-land nightmare environment would eventually be populated with barbed wire, bomb craters, animal carcasses and corpses. For the trenches, Goldbeck says, “we only used materials that would have been used in 1917, mostly wood, which went through a process of burning, sandblasting, foundation color. Scenic painters added a layer of gloss to the trenches so they had the feel of the walls being damp all the time.” Inspiration: Drawings and photographs archived in historical museums in

Berlin, Belgium and France provided historically accurate dimensions, which were slightly enlarged to accommodate the “All Quiet” camera crew.

Dose of reality: As winter snow thawed in March and April, the ground turned muddy. Actors, armed with custom-manufactured periodcorrect Mauser Gewehr 98 rifles, tramped through the muck just as soldiers would have done in 1918. History speaks: In the fictional French town of Eguisac, German officers commandeered a mansion whose interior was shot in an abandoned 16th century Renaissance chateau called Libechov Castle and dressed to reflect wear and tear from the war.