Besides attracting major talent in front of the camera, renowned director Jonathan Demme continues to draw highly skilled professionals to work with him behind the camera. Once again he collaborates with key members of his creative team: cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, ASC, production designer Kristi Zea, editor and Academy Award® nominee Carol Littleton, A.C.E., and composer and Academy Award® winner Rachel Portman, whose score features contributions by Wyclef Jean.

Demme began production at PS 32, an elementary school in Yonkers, New York, with a key scene that introduces audiences to Major Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) and to the inner conflict he’s about to face. In the sequence, Marco, formerly in command of troops in the Gulf War and now relegated to the Army’s public relations department, talks to a group of Boy Scouts about the ambush of his patrol in Kuwait and the heroism of Marco’s staff sergeant, Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber).

In order to film the crucial battle scenes that Marco describes at the school, Demme and his team did extensive research into the Gulf War, keeping full-time researchers and military advisors close at hand to ensure accuracy in every detail.

Since shooting in Kuwait was clearly out of the question, the filmmakers created the desert closer to home at the sand mine Sahara Sand. In only two weeks, members of the film crew moved tons of sand in order to build two roads that served as the site where Marco and his men fall under enemy attack.

“Filming those battle sequences was like working in a huge sandbox,” recalls production designer Kristi Zea, who also created Marco’s apartment in Washington, D.C. “I based the outside of his place after the typical mock-Tudor residential buildings I found in the D.C. area, but the interior design had a lot to do with Denzel Washington’s input.”

A small dark space filled with books and newspapers was the actor’s idea, remembers Zea, who had originally pictured Marco to be meticulously neat, in keeping with his military background. Washington, however, imagined that the character’s obsessive nature would turn him into a pack rat.

“Maybe all Marco can do is hold himself together by putting on his uniform every morning,” says Washington. “But his house afforded the opportunity to paint a picture that was in stark contrast – full of signs indicating a man who is on the verge of an internal breakdown. I think he would be unbelievably messy, not able to throw anything out because he’s obsessed with piecing together what happened to him.”

Zea also delved into the Washington, D.C., political arena that is the hothouse milieu of Liev Schreiber’s character, Congressman Raymond Shaw, and his mother, Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, portrayed by Meryl Streep. In particular, she sought striking visuals that would represent the high-stakes, national campaign of a Robert Arthur/Raymond Shaw ticket.

“I wanted to achieve a mood with Works Progress Administration (WPA) style posters that grew out of the 1930s Depression Era,” says Zea. “To achieve this, our graphic designers came up with some astounding stuff, including an eerie Arthur/Shaw campaign slogan, ‘Secure Tomorrow,’ which was coupled with a visual akin to the ‘Uncle Sam Wants You’ poster – a pointed finger coming out of a red, white and blue starburst.”

The filmmakers’ research included trips to the U.S. Senate, where they visited the offices of Senator Barbara Boxer in order to create an authentic look for the senatorial offices of Eleanor Shaw (Streep) and her political rival, Senator Thomas Jordan (Jon Voight). To that end, the historic Yonkers City Hall, an imposing Beaux Arts building dating from 1911, captured the old-world elegance and grave atmosphere of the senate.

Similarly, the production sought out homes on the Potomac owned by our nation’s more prominent politicians as references for Eleanor Prentiss Shaw’s sprawling mansion. Old Westbury Manor, a beautiful house on Long Island, New York, fit the bill perfectly. Built in 1906 as the country estate of John S. Phipps, son of a partner in Carnegie Steel, the house was so close to what the filmmakers envisioned (both inside and out) that their only changes before filming were to add new draperies and a few personal items from the fictional Prentiss-Shaw political dynasty.

New York, where Marco follows Raymond on the campaign trail, offered the filmmakers a variety of locations throughout the city, including the Compass Restaurant on the Upper West Side, the Plaza Hotel, the New York Public Library for Science, Business and Industry, the Javits Center, Times Square, Penn Station, the ballroom of the Regent Wall Street Hotel and Central Park.

A key location was the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, the nation’s largest Victorian glasshouse. Built in 1902, it served as the setting for a Shaw fundraising gala where Marco seeks out Raymond among the Washington elite.

In creating the costumes for that well-dressed group, two-time Academy Award®-winning costume designer Albert Wolsky describes Washington, D.C., as “a world of suits, suits, suits.” Accordingly, he dressed Liev Schreiber’s Raymond, a young man born into a prominent political family, in high-end custom-made suits, similar to the impeccable look of Jon Voight’s Senator Jordan, also a political insider.

Having worked six times with Meryl Streep, Wolsky says he was careful to give her character Ellie Shaw more polish and style than the average female politician. “We wanted to avoid the kind of lacquered hairdo women in politics often have to have because they’re on camera so much and don’t want their hair to move,” explains Wolsky. “Also, Ellie Shaw comes from an almost aristocratic line, so we wanted to give her a look that reflects someone accustomed to having money. Therefore, she’s dressed in attire of the highest quality and wears fine jewelry from the prestigious Fred Leighton collection.”

In order to costume the military characters and sequences, Wolsky researched the uniforms worn by American soldiers in the Gulf War and had replicas made by authentic military sources. A further challenge to the costume designer was Ben Marco’s wardrobe out of uniform, and the changes in Marco’s look throughout the film.

Prior to filming, Wolsky, who worked with Washington on “The Pelican Brief,” consulted the actor. “He’s really a brilliant actor, and being so good at what he does, he wants to offer his input as to how the character is going to look,” says Wolsky. “We talked about it a lot and decided that when not in uniform, Marco had to have a signature look, so we came up with a khaki-colored raincoat that had a slight military echo.”

One sequence in the film that was left entirely to the filmmakers’ imaginations is the dreamscape that Marco continually revisits in his nightmares, a frightening series of visions resulting from the character’s twisted, violent memories of Kuwait. Production designer Kristi Zea found the dreamscape sequence to be her most intriguing challenge – and the most thrilling work she did on the film.

“Suddenly you’re in a whole other world of the mind where there are no laws and there is no reality,” says Zea. “Because of that, you have the freedom to make your designs as crazy or as odd as you want.”

Working closely with cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, Zea delved into surrealistic art and the Dada movement as inspiration for the style of the horrific dreamscape, which also creeps into the mad drawings done by Jeffrey Wright’s character, Al Melvin. Painstakingly drawn by art department team member and film student Jimmy Joe Roche, the bizarre artwork is discovered by Marco, who searches out his disturbed missing comrade, only to find his squalid apartment strewn with nightmarish images of blood and death, featuring soldiers with whom Melvin served, including Marco and Shaw.

“These images started with looking at pieces of paper found in the streets of New York City, and by looking at the drawings of some of my folk art heroes,” says Roche. “I tried to work in such a way that the results would seem like the creation of a madman – I didn’t want to create works of art, but rather, road maps of Melvin’s descent into madness.”

“Jonathan Demme wanted to mirror the paranoia in Melvin’s drawings with Marco’s paranoia,” remembers Fujimoto. “He wanted to give audiences a visual connection between Melvin’s room and Marco’s mind. In that way, the cinematography is almost documentary-like, with the camera sort of poking around, probing to find something in the center of the frame that’s not there.”

Fujimoto’s innovative camerawork adds intensity to the story’s chilling suspense, which co-screenwriter Daniel Pyne believes will have audiences responding on a myriad of different levels.

“I think people will walk away from this film having lost themselves in Marco’s emotional experience,” says Pyne. “At the same time, because of the compelling performances of all the actors, I think they’re going to come out of theaters with all sorts of ideas spinning around in their heads.”

Producer Tina Sinatra, daughter of the late Frank Sinatra, who portrayed Marco in the original 1962 film, observes that as spooky as the story is, its true core is human emotion. “It’s about a group of individuals who are in serious jeopardy because of a similar experience they cannot explain,” says Sinatra. “And Marco in particular is going to figure it out … or die trying.”

Denzel Washington agrees wholeheartedly. “The film is essentially a very human tale about how the spirit wins out,” says the actor. “In a nutshell, what the story is saying is that the heart is stronger than anything.”