The upcoming HBO miniseries The Pacific chronicles the wartime journeys of three Marines, spanning thousands of miles over land and sea, from the United States to the many Pacific Islands where historic battles took place.
The mammoth undertaking of recreating these locations for the camera fell to the talented team of production designer Anthony Pratt, supervising art directors Dominic Hyman and Richard Hobbs, art director Scott Bird, Far North Queensland art director Charlie Revai, and location supervisor Nick Daubeny.
Pratt and Daubeny were veterans of HBO's 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers, and brought a similar care for detail to this project. As on Band of Brothers, a production team from The Pacific, including Pratt, Daubeny, co-executive producer Bruce C. McKenna and historical consultant Hugh Ambrose, journeyed to the real-life battle sites of Guadalcanal and Peleliu before set construction and design began.
Daubeny says that visiting the historic sites strongly influenced the miniseries' settings, observing, "Our recreated locations become rather chilling places, because they echoed the original battlegrounds that we saw." Production designer Pratt notes the importance of studying the details of the original locales, observing, "You look in particular at textures. One of the first things I noticed was the distinctive coral rock at Peleliu, which was eventually recreated from
photographs for our production."
Although these location visits were invaluable in recapturing the past, the art department couldn't always copy what it saw. During wartime, islands like Peleliu were stripped of trees by gunfire; today, these islands have thick vegetation, and the designers had to rely a great deal on reference photographs and archival footage.
Principal photography for The Pacific was conducted on location over a tenmonth period beginning in August 2007 in Australia's Far North Queensland and in and
around Melbourne, in the state of Victoria. Most of the jungle and beach landing scenes were split between two main locations in Far North Queensland: Drumsara, located near Port Douglas, and Rocky Point, a town further north. Drumsara housed 12 sets, including the numerous island jungles of Guadalcanal and New Britain, as well as a coconut plantation of the sort common to many Pacific islands.
Also recreated at Drumsara was the narrow pass on Guadalcanal where Sgt. John Basilone and his fellow Marines prevented Japanese advancement, an action for which he was awarded the Medal of Honour.
To the north, Rocky Point was the site of two key beach landing sequences, as well as the locale for Guadalcanal's Alligator Creek. The location offered a dramatic landscape for the filming of two quite different landings: The deceptively calm landing at Guadalcanal was shot on the northern beach, and the viciously fought Peleliu landing on the southern.
To create Alligator Creek, the team constructed from scratch an entire creek on privately owned beachfront property, bringing to life the scene of the desperate
night battle and site of the first combat seen by Robert Leckie. A crocodile and snake wrangler came out ahead of the crew every day while filming at Drumsara and Rocky Point.
The miniseries also takes its three heroes into the streets and ordinary life of World War II Melbourne. Location supervisor Nick Daubeny observes, "The Marines were in Melbourne for many months, and we have a whole episode that tells this story. We had to close streets, especially around the iconic Flinders Street Station.
Every Australian of a certain age remembers the American troops there with joy and sometimes envy." The period scenes in Melbourne were all shot on location or at Melbourne Central City Studios, which was also used for the interior scenes set on the homefront in America. Additional homecoming scenes were also filmed on location in and around Melbourne.
The battlefields of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were built at Hillview Quarry in Victoria's You Yangs district, located near Melbourne. At the quarry the production crew was joined daily by herds of kangaroo.
This large quarry set also provided the site for the Battle of Peleliu, the first part of which was shot in Far North Queensland, requiring that the quarry be redressed to match the other set's vegetation and devastation to provide proper continuity.
To recreate the coral atoll of Peleliu and other locales, the art department sculpted some 750 pieces of coral. And to replicate the distinctive black sand of Iwo Jima, huge amounts of sand were mined and refined from a local company that is one of the world's few suppliers of scoria, a black lava rock.
Many of the sets took 12 to 13 weeks to build, with the end goal of destroying them in the course of shooting. Looking back on his team's hard work, Far North Queensland art director Charlie Revai reflects, "I suppose the proudest moment is knowing the set works and then seeing it entirely blown up, which is great too, because that's the intent of it all."
Episode One of The pacific can be seen on Sky Movie on 5th April.
Tagged in The Pacific