The room where the characters wait before going into the fear sim room is small and linear, with a symmetrical light source. The fear sim room itself is only slightly bigger, with a couple of unusual details, like slanting doors, that the viewer won’t really notice until Tris walks through them. She walks through a narrow corridor that opens up, then, into the larger fear landscape room, where she will face crows, a tank of water, the threat of being burned alive, the prospect of sex with Four, and the horrific task of killing her own family.
The fear landscape was filmed on location at the end of Chicago’s Navy Pier, a landmark that stretches a mile out into Lake Michigan. Under a massive, eighty-foot dome sits one lone chair for Tris to settle into before the simulation begins. Audiences will feel her discomfort from the moment she sees the looming space and waits for the simulation to begin.
THE FENCE
In Roth’s novel, Andy Nicholson points out, you never know whether the fence around the city is keeping people in or keeping people out. You know it is there, but you don’t know its size or function.
The wall patrolled by Dauntless.
For the purposes of the film, Nicholson decided to make it a more striking feature. “I found a reference, a radar installation in Russia,” he says, “which kind of sparked a lot of conversation. It became the basis for something that was so big that you didn’t know what it was.” There was only one problem. Could they find such a fence in real life?
Executive producer John Kelly tells the story like this: “In the book, there’s a scene where the Dauntless initiates go to the fence and they climb up and they see outside of the city walls. I figured we’d be building something twenty-five feet high that looked like a big cement wall. But Neil said no, let’s find a big wall. Okay. Problem is, there’s no forty-foot wall in Chicago.” Sure enough, though, location manager James McAllister managed to find a concrete wall—inside the city—that ran about a quarter of a mile long. Kelly continues, “So we get out there and it’s part of an old steel factory, where they held a lot of materials that went into the manufacturing of steel. The wall is probably about forty feet high, probably fifteen feet wide, and is the perfect base for our walled city.”
Dauntless initiates reach the wall.
THE TRAINS
Filming special effects train scenes using green screen.
Since there are few cars in the future Chicago of Divergent, trains are the main form of transportation. They take characters between the factions’ different areas, circling the city in an endless loop.
When the film crew began discussion of how to handle the train sequences, they planned to create a train that could travel on the existing Chicago El tracks and structure. When they realized the number of practical problems that would cause, however, they decided to build their own train and sections of track instead. The train car was built on top of a bus chassis, which made it easy to move it from place to place.
In addition, they also built a small section of El structure, for when the Dauntless climb up and wait for the train. Location manager James McAllister says, “We put our section of track in a canyon, so we could get some of that real city environment all around us.”
The train sequences were shot in pieces and augmented with visual effects. (Special effects are flourishes, such as lights or smoke, that are created and then filmed by a camera. Visual effects are those that must be added after the shoot. Often there is a blank spot in the film—indicated by a green screen—that indicates something to be filled in later.) Visual effects producer Greg Baxter explains, “The first train sequence, when Tris leaves the Choosing Ceremony and runs with the Dauntless, gets onto the train, takes the train to the Dauntless compound, and jumps off . . . that sequence is probably one of our most expensive visual effects sequences. We had to film it in six different places. Our job is to tie it all together so the audience doesn’t realize it was a location, and then a set piece, and then a stage, and then the back of our parking lot.”
While they didn’t always film on the real El, the actors really did jump on and off the train, and they worked hard to prepare for the train sequences.
Neil Burger planned these scenes with painstaking care. He recalls, “I sort of sketched out how I saw the scene, and these are very rough thumbnails to start with. That’s somebody grabbing a handle, running away from us; those are feet running away from us. The whole scene is in very rough storyboards. And then I worked with a guy who drew them in a quicker way, and we turned those into the pre-visualization, which basically looks like a video game, or something like that. It allows us to know where we need green screen, which parts will need visual effects, and which parts we can do for real, what we need to build and what we don’t need to build. That way, we can be really efficient when shooting. We know we’re looking from the front of the train to the back, we’re going to need some sort of green screen beyond the train because we’re going to put the city in, and sometimes we’re looking into the train so we don’t need that at all. It’s a matter of knowing what we’re going to shoot, how we’re going to tell the story, and what tools we’re going to do it with.”
Filming a train scene with Theo James (Four) and Shailene Woodley (Tris).
THE COSTUME DESIGNER WORKS FROM ROME
Costume designer Carlo Poggioli.
The futuristic tone of the movie and the core values of the different factions would also be expressed through costume and makeup design. In other movies, great attention is given to creating a unique look for each character; in Divergent, however, the focus was on developing a look that worked for whole groups of characters—the factions—while still allowing for a range of differences within each group.
Costume designer Carlo Poggioli was charged with articulating the factions’ styles in a very short time frame. He signed on to work on the film in January 2013, and shooting would begin in Chicago three months later. Within that time, he needed both to create the looks for the factions and arrange to manufacture large numbers of costumes.
“The challenge to understanding a futuristic world is understanding just how futuristic you want it to be,” Poggioli explains. “Neil was telling me from the beginning that this future is not so far away from today. I needed to keep the futuristic designs rooted in now, so the audiences could connect with the costumes.” Poggioli had a lot of experience working on historic films, from The English Patient and Cold Mountain to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. His most recent project had been Terry Gilliam’s film The Zero Theorem, but he was still quite new to science fiction and had never had the chance to invent an entirely new world through costume design. “It was the first movie where I made everything from the clothes to the accessories, even some of the shoes,” he says.
An Amity outfit prototype.
Poggioli began with a series of sketches informed by the brief descriptions in Roth’s book. While she had described the colors for each faction, she had not described the shapes of their clothes, or considered the way they would work when real people were wearing them. It was up to Poggioli to make her ideas three-dimensional. Once he had sketched out some ideas, he began a series of long calls with Burger, Wick, and Fisher, from his base in Rome.
Costume designer Carlo Poggioli’s sketches of Amity’s clothing.
DRESSING DAUNTLESS
It was urgent that they develop the Dauntless look first, because most of the characters were Dauntless, and many of the Dauntless sequences would be shooting first. “We didn’t want to represent them in uniforms, like soldiers,” Poggioli remembers. “Neil directed me away from the idea that this was a militaristic society.” Instead, Burger was looking for something exuberant, youthful, cool, intense, and a bit mysterious.
A sketch of Tris’s uniform and fabric samples.
As in the book, basic black was the way to go. The color could say punk rock or high fashion, or anything in between—many different kinds of brave people wear black. And black would also be functional for characters who wer
e in constant motion. The costumes were made of a special fabric Poggioli had developed specifically for the Dauntless. It was flexible, like athletic clothes, but not made of Lycra, and it appears to be recycled, like so much in the Divergent world. All of the Dauntless fabric had to be tested to make sure it would work in the action scenes, and some actors received extra gussets—flexible patches of fabric—in their clothes to allow extra movement.
A prototype of a Dauntless uniform designed for Tris.
A full-color sketch of female Dauntless uniforms.
To differentiate the groups within the faction, Poggioli came up with a set of colors to accent the black. Transfers, for instance, have orange accents, while Dauntless-born have red. Dauntless trainers have purple accents. These accents serve as reference colors for the audience, allowing them to keep track of each character’s place in the hierarchy.
Poggioli recalls what happened next. “I made the prototypes in Rome where I live, and I brought the prototypes to workshops I knew in Hungary and Romania—I mean, we had to make thousands of costumes. We started on the thirteenth of February and had our first shipment on the thirteenth of March. In one month, they did all the Dauntless and the Abnegation—it was just unbelievable.”
A male Dauntless uniform prototype.
Dauntless faction uniforms shown in many subtle shades.
ABNEGATION’S SIMPLICITY
The Abnegation clothing was completely different, made from natural fabrics and with a simple shape. “Not too much color,” Poggioli says. “Mostly grays, because they’re not interested in vanity. It’s a rough cut, too . . . the shape of the Abnegation is a little like a sack.” For many characters, he mixed light fabrics, such as linen, with heavy fabrics, such as wool.
A sketch of Abnegation costumes.
Because the Abnegation value modesty, their costumes show very little skin. Tris is covered up like the others at the beginning of the movie (though she regards the Dauntless with curiosity at school). “As she transforms into Dauntless,” Poggioli says, “we begin to discover her body. We begin to discover her skin.” Her later costumes are more body-conscious and fashion-forward. In this way, the costumes help to tell the story without words. As Shailene Woodley puts it, “You know, they’re not just pieces that the characters wear, they’re almost characters within themselves. They help to tell the story visually.”
Faction members dressed in Abnegation gray.
Costume designer Carlo Poggioli adjusting an Abnegation costume on set.
A sketch of Abnegation costumes.
Original sketches aren’t too far from how Tris (Shailene Woodley) and Caleb (Ansel Elgort) dress in Divergent.
THE SHARP LOOK OF THE ERUDITE
The basic idea for the Erudite clothing came from Neil Burger himself: a scientist’s lab coat, with a functional cut and plenty of pockets. “This was a difficult concept for me at first,” Poggioli remembers, “because I thought they would look too much like uniforms. But he was right, because we were able to do many variations.” The Erudite clothing had a cold color palette of blues—which supposedly sharpen the mind—and crisp tailoring. The coats were modified for different groups inside the faction as well. One kind of lab-inspired coat would work for wearing outside, for instance, and another would be worn by the faction’s technical team. Poggioli points out, “Kate Winslet’s coat is a little different from the others, because she’s allowed to wear the green accent underneath the blue. She looks like she’s wearing the same thing as the others, but she’s not—the little details are completely different, like the inside of the collar of her coat.” In addition, the length of Winslet’s coat concealed the fact that she was five months pregnant.
Erudite costume sketches with fabric samples.
Erudite faction members in costume.
A male Erudite uniform prototype.
Caleb Prior (Ansel Elgort) clothed in his Erudite uniform and Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) dressed in Dauntless.
THE CONTRAST OF CANDOR
Sketches of Candor uniforms.
While we don’t see much of Candor or Amity in this film, great care went into their respective looks. “Candor was the most difficult faction to design,” says Poggioli. “The idea was to have them in black and white, because that’s what comes from the book. But I started off in a completely wrong direction. I was thinking that the Candor were the open faction . . . I was thinking about transparency, different colors of glass, maybe sea glass . . . but it didn’t work, even with a special shape for Candor. Neil decided, in the end, it was better to stick with black and white.” The focus in Candor is not on either color but on the contrast between the two. If a character wears a white jacket, they have black pants. If they have a white vest, they have a black jacket. And of course, in Candor we see no shades of gray.
Christina (Zoë Kravitz) in the Candor uniform based on the prototype below.
THE FRIENDLY LOOK OF AMITY
Amity characters wear natural fabrics—presumably from fibers they grow themselves, like cotton—that are colored with vegetable dyes. And the factionless wear costumes that hint at the characters’ past factions, their colors faded to only a shadow of what they used to be. These groups’ looks will get more screen time and be developed further in later films.
Sketches of Amity children’s costumes.
An Amity costume prototype.
Sketches of Amity costumes.
The Amity faction in costume on set.
MANUFACTURING THE COSTUMES: A MASSIVE UNDERTAKING
While the costumes were manufactured en masse in Europe, Poggioli also found a local crew in Chicago to create costumes for the lead characters and handle fittings for the large group scenes. The largest scene in the movie is the Choosing Ceremony, which required seven hundred extras from all the factions. Each costume was made by hand in the overseas workshops and finished in Chicago, after being fitted to an individual actor or extra. Poggioli’s team then added details to distinguish, for instance, the adults from the children. It was a massive undertaking.
Author Veronica Roth visits the costume department on set with costume shop supervisor Giovanni Lipari.
Poggioli worked closely with production designer Andy Nicholson because, as he says, “When you think about how to create a costume, you have to think about where that costume will go. The character you’re creating is moving where? If the costume goes into a space that has nothing to do with the colors or the kind of fabric you’ve used, then you’ve made it wrong.”
Production designer Andy Nicholson shares his work with director Neil Burger.
Members of each faction are easily distinguished by their clothing.
A touch-up by makeup department head Brad Wilder.
TATTOOS, PIERCINGS, AND HARDWARE
Carlo Poggioli also collaborated with Brad Wilder and Denise Paulson of the makeup department. The Abnegation wore no makeup—or the appearance of no makeup—while the Erudite were carefully groomed and polished. They wore blue eye makeup, blue or black eyeliner, and nail polish in various shades of blue. All the Erudite men were clean shaven.
The idea for the Amity makeup was inspired by the hippie-era flower children circa 1968: fuller hair for the women, long hair and beards for the men. Their makeup had a pretty, soft palette of pinks and peaches, with eyes in rust and gold. The Candor palette was more neutral, with soft gray and brown eye shadow, lips in rich colors, and natural nails.
And naturally, the Dauntless look was the boldest and most edgy, with green or black eye shadow and extensive piercings. Makeup department head Brad Wilder was inspired by wandering around a hardware store and realizing that, in a future society, jewelry might be defined very differently. In addition to ordinary piercings, some characters, such as Eric, have studs (created by hardware bolts) embedded in their skin. (Or really, stuck to the skin with double-sided tape.) To the studs, Wilder attached different, interchangeable kinds of nuts. The hardware store also inspired the earrings worn by Maggie Q as
Tori—they are made of washers, nuts, and bolts, held together with wire—and Eric’s earrings, created from rubber compression nuts.
The makeup team created the Dauntless tattoos.
Tattoos were the final piece of the Dauntless look. Director Neil Burger says, “It seems like everyone has a tattoo now, so I wanted to come up with a way that the Dauntless tattoos were a little bit different. So I came up with this idea that they’re blood tattoos, that somehow they’re the pigments of your skin that form the design. To get the tattoo, they put a toxin into your skin that basically releases the pigmentation, whether it’s the purple of a bruise or the red of your blood, and they’ve figured out how to do it in a very focused way to create a particular design.”
Tris’s famous tattoo: three birds (Shailene Woodley).
Designs for these blood tattoos—from the faction markers to the ravens on Tris’s neck—were created by the film’s art department, who then made them into transferable tattoos that could be refreshed for shooting every day.
Like the rest of the costumes and makeup, the tattoos create character without words. When Tris is tattooed with three birds to remind her of the three family members she’s left behind, the audience is constantly aware of that choice, although Tris never mentions it again. And when viewers see the tip of a tattoo on Four’s neck, it creates a mystery and hints at a question: What is underneath? With each design detail, the filmmakers add dimension and depth to their story.