Disclosure Day has come in peace, but its props were left in pieces.
Indeed, Steven Spielberg’s penchant for in-camera action sequences and on-location filming meant lots of grinded metal for the UFO thriller’s intricately staged train collision.
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“The train sequence is a real train with a real car crashing into it. And me, driving that car into the train tracks,” Henry Lloyd-Hughes, who portrays Casper Boyd in the film, revealed in an exclusive chat with SYFY Wire. “These are cherished moments in the history of filmmaking, because how many people have the power and influence to be able to say, ‘No, this is how I want to do it.’”
The iconic director spent three weeks alongside his cast and crew at a New Jersey railroad line to shoot the set piece, with a few days dedicated to filming Lloyd-Hughes crashing into a car carrying Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor.
Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor filming the train sequence in ‘Disclosure Day.’
“Universal and Amblin wanted to do it the authentic way—or the old school way,” he noted, on top of raves for Spielberg’s go-to DP Janusz Kaminski, who crafted a massive crane shot from 50 feet away as the camera arrives on the actor’s menacing reaction. “In spite of this being a fantastical event movie, so much of what you see on screen was present for us as actors and filmmakers when we were making it.”
After all, these sequences are near and dear to Spielberg, who opened his semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans with the onscreen stand-in for his younger self mesmerized by a train crash in The Greatest Show on Earth.
“Trains have been an integral part of the wow factor of what people go to the cinema to have their minds blown by,” Lloyd-Hughes pointed out, “going back to the origin of people sitting in a cinema.”
Henry Lloyd-Hughes, behind the wheel while chasing Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt’s characters, as Casper Boyd in ‘Disclosure Day.’
Spielberg dreamed of bringing that locomotive wow factor into some of his earliest work. Long before he had teenage Indiana Jones (River Phoenix) chasing his first relic atop a railcar in the The Last Crusade’s opening moments, the director had planned—but ultimately never shot—a heart-pounding continuation of the train scene in his first studio feature, 1971’s Duel.
Midway through Duel, the truck stalking traveling salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) tries to push his car into a moving freight train, but the crisis is ultimately averted.
“The train passes and Dennis Weaver’s car never gets hit. But with Disclosure Day,” Spielberg revealed in the film’s production notes, “I got to do what I really wanted to do with that sequence.”
Dennis Weaver in a promotional photo for Steven Spielberg’s ‘Duel.’
Enter Lloyd-Hughes and his henchman character Boyd becoming Spielberg’s new terror behind the wheel, helping the director fulfill his original vision for Duel through a new cinematic story five decades later.
But it wasn’t the only full circle moment of Spielberg’s that Lloyd-Hughes witnessed while playing the righthand man to Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) at WARDEX, a shadowy military agency gatekeeping evidence of alien contact and the Roswell incident of 1947.
Needless to say, that’s all well-worn territory for the helmer of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and War of the Worlds (not to mention his producerial role with the Men in Black and SYFY’s Taken miniseries—plus the time he dropped off Indiana Jones at Area 51 in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).
Colin Firth, Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Steven Spielberg chatting between takes on the set of ‘Disclosure Day.’
“So many parts of this movie and the process of making it, I think have felt full circle for Stephen,” Lloyd-Hughes figured, “as a filmmaker, to sew up so many threads and themes, particularly the science fiction elements that he has touched explored in other films.”
“It wasn’t until I saw [Disclosure Day] for a second time that I actually saw even more Easter eggs,” he continued, citing “references to beings from other planets and the way in which they’re photographed that I think are breadcrumbs for the fans.”
But the real out-of-this-world throughline can be traced back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg’s big-screen foray into asking what might lurk beyond the skies. (In fact, Blunt has said Disclosure Day answers questions posed by the 1977 classic.)
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“During Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I would say to myself: ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of this turned out to be true?’” Spielberg remarked of his seminal science-fiction masterpiece in the production notes. “Almost 50 years later, I’m now thinking: ‘Wouldn’t be it be wonderful for us to actually know that all of this is true?’”
And Spielberg hasn’t been shy across the Disclosure Day press tour on where he stands with that question IRL, after spending months fueling the discussion on the set.
“We would be sharing documentaries and sharing tidbits of information,” Lloyd-Hughes recalled. “[Spielberg] is such an expert, but he’s also so convincing on this subject matter…I certainly finished the project a lot more accepting of life on other planets than I began.”
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
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