On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Disclosure Day.
Unlike some of Steven Spielberg’s more fantastical sci-fi films, Disclosure Day is set in a present-day reality where a hidden 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 [feel] real,” Stockhausen says. “He wanted to ground everything in our real lives. This is not an artificial place; it’s our world.”
Disclosure Day avoids the flashy sets and global metropolises of other blockbuster action flicks. Instead, the story is primarily set in Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia, with Kansas City, an unlikely cinematic star, as its central location—although New York City doubled as the location for the topographically flatter Midwestern locale. About two-thirds of the film was shot there, as well 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 organization 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.”
Here, Stockhausen breaks down the main locations in Disclosure Day.
