Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/139371
62 www.bigrigowner.com august 2013 to let down his little girl with the news, he takes her on a tour of the White House, when the complex is overtaken by a heavily armed paramilitary group. Now, with the nation's government falling into chaos and time running out, it's up to Cale to save his daughter, the president, and the country. Beyond developing the movie's characters, it was a challenge for Emmerich to create a realistic environment for the area surrounding the White House (since no actual filiming is allowed in that area of Washington, D.C.). The task of designing and building the sets fell to production designer Kirk M. Petruccelli. "Kirk is one of the unsung heroes of this production," says producer Bradley J. Fischer. "He had one of the biggest challenges on this movie, to build these sets. We've only had glimpses of rooms we know exist – the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or the beehive where the Secret Service works, which is actually below the Oval Office – so Kirk's job was to pull back the curtain a little bit and invite people behind the walls. He gave us a great playground to have as much fun as we could." Aside from the White House, Petruccelli's team was responsible for the Capitol hallways, the White House office suites, ancillary newsrooms, the streets throughout Washington, D.C., Air Force One, Marine One, the Pentagon Bunker, the Presidential Emergency Operation Center, the Secret Services offices, the South Lawn, the South Portico… and The Beast. The Beast is no mere luxury production car: this is a rolling fortress. "When I first took this job – to build three presidential limos – I thought, 'Yeah, no problem,'" says Kelly. "I thought we'd just take a Cadillac limo and un-stretch it a bit. But then I saw a reference picture of a Secret Service agent standing on the back quarter of the car. He looked like a small guy. And then I realized… he prob- test drive 0713.indd 2 test drive ably wasn't a small guy. He was probably at least six feet tall. And that meant the car was enormous." "The most surprising thing about this vehicle was the actual size of it," recalls Cyril O'Neil, president of Reel Industries, the company that built the cars. "You look at photographs of the vehicle and you think it's a normal limousine. And we actually entertained the idea of actually building it on an existing limousine. But as you start to look at the dimensions, you start to figure out the actual size of it, and you start to realize that the car is a true anomaly. It's brilliantly designed in that it looks like a limousine, but it is not. On the outside, it is the size of a large truck, and on the inside, because of the armor that it has, it's the size of an SUV. The result was that everything on the vehicle had to be custom built – there was no starting with something and changing it. We would have to build the Beasts from the ground up." One of the reasons it was so important to get it right was that Roland Emmerich was determined to shoot practically whenever possible. It seemed there was a neverending list of tasks that the car would have to pull off. "Every day, Roland would tell me, 'Oh, by the way, there's something else I want it to be able to do,'" and I'd just say, 'Okay, Roland.'" For the production of White House Down, the filmmakers would need three replicas. And this was a tall order, because, in essence, nothing is known about the car. "When we first took on the project, obviously the first place we went for information was the Secret Service," says O'Neil. "We were told that as interesting as they found our project, they would be unable to provide us with information about the vehicle. They couldn't even provide us wheel base or length. They literally would give us no information about the vehicle." Of course, some information was available through research. "For many years, General Motors has been the company 6/7/13 8:48 AM