Eric (Jai Courtney), tattooed and pierced.
Working on Theo James’s (Four) tattoos are (L to R) head of makeup Brad Wilder, additional makeup artist Zsofia Otvos, and key makeup artist Denise Paulson.
LONG DAYS
Author Veronica Roth looks at the screen with producer Lucy Fisher.
Production on the film began in early April. For over three months, the cast and crew crisscrossed the city of Chicago, shooting the Divergent film scene by scene. As with any movie, the scenes weren’t shot chronologically, so it would be difficult for an outside observer or a person on the street to get a sense of the growing whole. At the end of each day, though, director Neil Burger and his team watched the dailies—raw footage of the day’s work—and they could see that the film was becoming all they had hoped for, and more.
For Shailene Woodley, the days were exhilarating but long. Most cast members came in and out of scenes, but she was in every one of them. It was a heavy workload for the actress, but nobody saw her falter. Executive producer John Kelly says, “If we’re starting at the beginning of the week, she’s in at five thirty in the morning. She comes to set. She does rehearsal with the rest of the cast and the director and crew and then she goes, she gets her makeup on. She gets her wardrobe on. She comes back out. We start the scene and we go through and we start. We’re going to go until six o’clock, seven o’clock at night. She’s going to get out of makeup about seven thirty. She’s going to get home at eight o’clock. And then sometimes she’s got to be back at six a.m. to do it all again. Usually if you’re an actor you do one scene, maybe go back to your trailer and you can take a nap, relax, sort of just rejuvenate. But not Shailene. And there’s days where, when we were doing the running in this train, she ran back and forth probably forty times. Probably ran a hundred yards forty times during the day, had to do her scenes, had to be ready, had to look fresh every take, and she was absolutely fantastic about how she dealt with it and how she treated everybody.”
Woodley wasn’t complaining, because the role was a dream come true. Not only was her character the focal point of a major film, but she was working with an extraordinary group of actors—some world-famous—and learning from them every day. In addition, she and Neil Burger had a productive working relationship, where they could exchange ideas honestly. “Neil sees this movie in a very visual way,” says Woodley, “where I’m used to doing movies where it’s more character-driven, from a heart-based point of view. So it’s really great to have both those parts together. He’ll say, ‘I need you to do a game face—you’re serious right now,’ and I’m like, ‘No, Neil, she’s a vulnerable little girl, she’s not serious right now.’ And we’re able to hear each other and sort of meet halfway.”
Stunt coordinator Garrett Warren attaches a safety line to a harness underneath Shailene Woodley’s (Tris) costume.
Author Veronica Roth chats with executive producer Rachel Shane during a visit to the set.
Visits from author Veronica Roth kept the actors focused and alive, as they were performing the scenes she had written. And Roth, for her part, couldn’t get enough of watching. She describes the experience like this: “Mostly I was in awe. Filming movies is very repetitive—for a single two-minute scene, they get a series of takes from one angle, then rearrange everything and get a series of takes from another angle, so it can take hours. I think everyone was expecting me to get tired of that repetition, but I never did. Whenever I went to the set, I stayed until the bitter end, if I could—it’s completely fascinating and surreal and wonderful to watch the world in your brain become physical and active in that way. I did get emotional on certain days, when I saw certain things. The day of one of the significant character deaths (I don’t want to spoil!) was also deeply upsetting, simply because Shailene Woodley is amazing and really dug deep. That scene was raw and intense; it completely gutted me. I rode home on the train that day, instead of getting a ride, just so I could collect myself and mull it over.”
While the actors had worked hard in training, the filming of the fight sequences was a completely different experience. Producer Doug Wick remembers, “It was startling when we first saw one of the fight scenes cut together. Neil shot it very much from Shai’s point of view, and the idea of going into the ring, where there’s a guy there who’s bigger and wants to hurt you . . . and seeing her go up against it in a real way and recover from that experience . . . that was extreme.”
The fighting was hard on all the actors, not just Woodley. Zoë Kravitz describes it like this: “You start and stop in training . . . we’d run it a few times and then we’d stop. But when you’re shooting, you only have a certain amount of time to get the fight scene done, and I got really tired! Which is great, you know, because you kind of want some desperation to come through in the scene.”
Veronica Roth was on set for one of the Dauntless training days, when Tris and the others are learning to shoot guns. She remembers, “We were on this really dirty, dusty rooftop and the wind was blowing the dirt around, so everyone’s faces were coated in grime, dirt caked into every pore. That night I put my hand through my hair and it stood straight up without any assistance. I found particles of dirt in my ear for days afterward.”
Shailene Woodley (Tris) and Miles Teller (Peter) film a fight scene.
Shailene Woodley (Tris) and Theo James (Four) film a fight scene.
DO I DO MY OWN STUNTS?
As the days went on and the cast members built up a new level of comfort and trust with one another, many of them felt that their performances were growing stronger. “As Shailene and I became closer as friends, the scenes were kind of developing in that way anyway,” says Theo James. “When we didn’t know each other . . . we could use that. And then when we became more at ease in each other’s company and in each other’s body language, we could use that, too.”
Many of the young actors were eager to try their own stunts, and stunt coordinator Garrett Warren did all he could to accommodate their interest while still keeping them safe. Theo James says, “I’m glad that, whenever we could, we were allowed to do our own stunts because (a) they’re the fun parts, and (b) you can feed off of that kind of energy and create something good out of it.” Warren adds, “Safety is always a boundary on a movie set. When we first discuss any of these stunts, safety is always the first thing that comes up. But we also have to make it seem—to the audience—that this is a little bigger and a little badder than anything they have seen. In the future, you know, you have to go a little bit bigger than you would now.”
Shailene Woodley—like Tris herself—was facing some fears as she made the movie. She says, “I don’t have a fear of heights . . . I have a fear of falling. But it’s one of those things that I get so pumped by that I have to continue to do it. I get such an adrenaline rush from completing something that I didn’t think I could complete.” Woodley used her fear—and her search for the adrenaline high—to bring real feeling to the scene where Tris takes the first jump into the Dauntless Pit. In spite of her fears, Woodley did the first part of the jump herself.
Shailene Woodley (Tris) and Jai Courtney (Eric) talk between shots.
Miles Teller (Peter) jumps from the Dauntless train.
Stunt double Alicia Vela-Bailey makes the jump into Dauntless.
Garrett Warren explains, “As much as visual effects can do a great job of re-creating a scene, it’s not the same thing as the real thing. You will never see a person fall with the same kind of weight in a two-dimensional character as you would with a three-dimensional person.” Woodley stood at the top of a real building in Chicago, seventy feet up, in high winds. She was wearing safety cables and had a team of people there to protect her, but she was the one leaping from the ledge . . . over and over again. Neil Burger says, “So she’s jumped on a train, she’s jumped off a train, and now Tris has to jump down through this seven-story courtyard through a hole in which she has no idea what’s at the bottom. We’ve already shot her landing, at a different build
ing, but this is from the top. Shailene is game for anything, so she wants to do the jump herself.”
Shailene Woodley (Tris) takes a photo as her stunt double completes the jump into Dauntless. The camera man in the sky is stunt coordinator Garrett Warren.
The full jump was actually performed by Woodley’s fearless stunt double, Alicia Vela-Bailey, whose personal record had been a thirty-foot jump before she signed on for Divergent. Slowly, Garrett Warren worked her up to becoming comfortable with the seventy-foot jump that was required. Warren says, “Even though that air bag might be nine feet tall and eighteen feet wide, it looks like a cell phone when you’re jumping off a seventy-foot building, and to miss that air bag is the end of the world. We also wanted to play with how she could act when she was doing it, because nobody just wants to see a stunt person jump off a building. You want to see Tris jump off a building!” As Vela-Bailey hurtled through the air, Warren was in front of her with a camera to catch the action.
Shailene Woodley (Tris) and her stunt double, Alicia Vela-Bailey, mug for the camera.
DAUNTING FOR DAUNTLESS
Every day on the set was physically demanding for the Dauntless. For instance, says Garrett Warren, “On the train sequence, we had to have them jump from the train across a wall. We first set the train at a six-foot distance and wanted to drive it at eight miles an hour. Safe for everyone to do, and we had everyone train for it. But on the day that we got there, Neil looked at it and said, yeah, that’s good, but it would be nice if we could go bigger than that and make it a little bit more scary. We ended up moving the wall out to eight feet, and we drove at twelve miles per hour.”
Of Woodley, Warren says, “I’m not surprised that she’s able to do as much as she has, but I am surprised with how fast she recovers because, you know, to run and catch a train at twelve miles an hour is exhausting, and to do that all day long is really exhausting. But she comes back in and she’s ready to go, so I give her a lot of credit.”
The cold, wet weather in Chicago’s not-quite-spring was a factor the production team had to contend with. The Dauntless dining hall scene, for instance, was created in spite of the constant threat of flooding. Once they were ready to go, though, cast and crew continued working—on this scene and others—as long as it was safe.
A physically demanding train scene.
Huddling—the Dauntless actors and director Neil Burger during a cold day of shooting.
Neil Burger recalls an instance when the weather could have really messed up a shoot: “So it’s the second-to-last scene in the movie, where Tris and her brother and some others are really running to get out of Dauntless. Working with trains, even when you’ve made your own, is always a bit dangerous—they’re huge, heavy machines—and these guys are running to get on. There’s not a great way to hang on, and now it’s raining, which makes it more dangerous. We’ve got huge cranes in the air, holding up an assortment of lights and silks and green screens . . . if the wind comes up, they’ll all blow over, and if the lightning comes up, they’ll all be lightning rods, so it’s all a little hairy . . . luckily, none of that stuff happened. We sort of dodged a bullet and got the scene done.”
Shooting the scenes beside the fence also was tricky. “We get out there next to the wall, and we’re in the middle of a field—and right next to Lake Michigan,” John Kelly says. “And when I say lake, you know, it’s like a small sea, or an ocean. It has high waves, tankers, everything. So we’re out there and we’re getting winds, like, twenty miles an hour. Hair is blowing. Carts are rolling, things are just going everywhere. And that’s before we start getting wind gusts, fifteen-foot whitecaps on the lake. It was crazy. We shot through it, though. All done safely.”
THE FERRIS WHEEL, CAPTURE THE FLAG, AND THE ZIP LINE
Shailene Woodley and Theo James shot their pivotal scene on the Ferris wheel from midnight to five in the morning. Burger’s team had worked hard to reserve time for filming at Chicago’s Navy Pier, a popular tourist destination. Within one night, they needed to age the area to make it look as if it had been abandoned for fifty or sixty years—adding dirt, moss, gravel, and rust—do the filming, and then restore everything to normal before the tourists arrived the next day. It was a huge undertaking, made even more intense by the cold that night. “It was a real element of testing,” remembers Theo James. His hands were almost sticking to the bars, and he and Woodley stayed at the top of the Ferris wheel for almost two hours, shooting the scene about forty times.
In spite of the cold, though, Shailene Woodley remembers that night fondly. “The Ferris wheel looks way more complicated and intense than it really was,” she says. “We were on a ladder that was not completely vertical—more like a forty-five-degree angle. And we were attached to safety lines and it was fun. It was beautiful, too. . . . That night there was a full moon, and it was the first lunar eclipse of the year. So Theo and I got to experience that magical moment, climbing up—which I’m not sure he cared about, but I thought it was pretty great.”
The Ferris wheel scene with Theo James (Four) and Shailene Woodley (Tris).
While this important scene could be created with real actors at a real place, some of the other critical scenes were heavier on effects and required careful behind-the-scenes planning as well as strong performances by the actors against green screens. Visual effects producer Greg Baxter explains, “In Four’s fear landscape, when he’s on the high wire, we had him on a wire between existing skyscrapers, but obviously we’re not going to put him way up there. We have our actors on a green screen stage on a wire with a pad below them in case they fall off, and that entire environment is computer generated. But it has to look exactly like you took a photograph of those buildings on, you know, noon on a Saturday.”
When Tris zip lines off Chicago’s Hancock building, also, the scene is partly performance by real actors, partly augmentation by effects. Burger’s team built a set piece that stood in as the top of the Hancock building, and filmed Woodley (and other Dauntless) there, going down a short zip line. Later, Greg Baxter’s effects team shot footage of the top of the tower from a helicopter and wove it together with a scene showing Tris on the ground after her ride. This scene was several months in the planning, as the producers needed to find a way to do it well while staying within the constraints of their budget. It’s a short scene in the film, but important for establishing one of the high points of Tris’s initiation into Dauntless.
Theo James (Four) and Shailene Woodley (Tris) balance in front of the green screen shooting one of Four’s fear landscapes: the high wire.
Dauntless cast members set to catch Shailene Woodley (Tris) from the zip line.
OFF-CAMERA FUN
Weeks of training had bonded the cast, and they unwound after their workdays with evening trips to concerts and sporting events. Christian Madsen threw out the first pitch at a June Cubs game, and several cast members were on hand the night the Chicago Blackhawks beat the Los Angeles Kings to advance to the Stanley Cup finals. A group of actors also rocked out at a Rolling Stones concert, where surprise guest Taylor Swift joined Mick Jagger onstage.
Amy Newbold (Molly) and Ben Lloyd-Hughes (Will) at a Cubs baseball game in June 2013.
Veronica Roth found that some of the most lighthearted moments were during on-camera rehearsals. “That’s when they’re still blocking the scene so everyone knows where to go,” she says. “The actors go through the scene very quickly, and they usually have a little fun with it—Theo James and Shailene Woodley were frantically tapping on this green-screened computer one day, and I remember Theo saying, ‘Quick! I have to update my Facebook status!’ and Shailene responded, ‘But what do I tweet?!’”
Ben Lloyd-Hughes (Will), Christian Madsen (Al), and Amy Newbold (Molly) were the cast members who sang during the Seventh Inning Stretch.
Actors Shailene Woodley and Zoë Kravitz continued to connect. Woodley says, “We have a lot in common. Before we met, we had mutual friends, so we already had a respect and a l
ove for each other before we actually connected face-to-face, and it’s been great to have her. We’re surrounded—we have ten brothers in this movie, so it’s nice to have a sister on your arm.”
Their “brothers” bonded in a different way: by constantly joking around. Their humor reached its height (or its low point) after a visit from author Veronica Roth. As Miles Teller, who plays Peter, tells it, “There are a couple of characters in this movie that die, right? So I said ‘Veronica, if you could bring one character back, who would it be?’ She said, ‘Oh, it would be Will. I always loved Will.’ And so Ben [Lloyd-Hughes, who plays Will] was, you know, kind of happy and gloating or whatever.” Teller thought he was just asking to be pranked.
So Teller asked one of the production assistants to buy a balloon and a card, which he put in Lloyd-Hughes’s trailer with a note, supposedly from Roth, saying that the two should get together to talk about Will’s role in future films. Lloyd-Hughes could text her, the note said. But the number on the card belonged to Jai Courtney, who played Eric.
“So Ben was telling us, ‘Guys, I think Will’s getting a spin-off. I think he’s coming back from the dead. She didn’t talk about resurrection, but that was the general vibe,’” Teller remembers. “I was laughing so hard. But then he was texting Veronica with Jai sitting next to him. And when he heard Jai’s phone, he figured it out. . . .”
Lloyd-Hughes still laughs when he hears the story. “It was tragic,” he says, shaking his head. “That’s all I’m saying.”