On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favourite films, television shows, and more. This time, we ask: where was Disclosure Day filmed?
Unlike some of Steven Spielberg’s more fantastical sci-fi films, Disclosure Day is set in a present-day reality where a fantastical truth is about to disrupt business as usual. That meant that production designer Adam Stockhausen’s sets had to be as authentic as possible.
“It was very important to Steven that it be real,” Stockhausen says. “It’s not a fantasy – this is a story of real events unfolding. He wanted to ground everything in our real lives. This is not an artificial place; it’s our world.”
But unlike other blockbuster action flicks, Disclosure Day avoids flashy sets and global metropolises. Instead, the story is primarily set in Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia, with Kansas City, an unlikely cinematic star, as its central location. This choice by screenwriter David Koepp makes the film even more relatable. Even more unusually, the filmmakers doubled New York City for the topographically flatter Midwestern locale, which has rarely been shown onscreen. About two-thirds of the film was shot on location in New York City, New Jersey, and upstate New York. The rest was filmed at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard.
“A challenge is we were filming this in New York and it’s not a New York story,” Stockhausen says. “It’s not often that you shoot New York for Kansas City.”
The film follows a whistleblower named Dr Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who steals thousands of files from the shady government organisation he works for in order to reveal their cover-up of extraterrestrial life. We meet him and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) while they’re already on the run from a secret agency called Wardex, which is led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist, has her own mysterious connection to the aliens that eventually leads her to Kellner. It’s an action-packed film, but also a heart-warming one.
Stockhausen, who previously collaborated with Spielberg on Bridge of Spies, Ready Player One, and West Side Story, wanted it to stand alone, rather than call back to or reference the filmmaker’s earlier sci-fi, namely Close Encounters of the Third Kind?. “I didn’t want to do any Easter eggs because it might pull you out of the story and give you this meta awareness of his work,” he says. “We wanted to tell a real story that stood on its own.”
