Igor Tolstunov's production company «PROFIT» has finished shooting the first Russian disaster movie «Metro».
For six months the creative team worked to create a genuine man-made disaster: real metro carriages and their models were wrecked, glass was shattered, wiring was short-circuited, lights went out again and again (in some places there were none at all) and the water kept rising. The human panic could not be stopped — emotions overflowed and at times went off the scale. People «died» from electric shocks and sudden braking, fell out of carriage windows. Escaping death, a huge crowd rushed along the tunnel away from the accident site, and then got injured in the crush on escalators and in metro vestibules, trying to escape the ill-fated underground as quickly as possible. Audiences will see all of this at the end of 2012, when «Metro» is released in wide distribution. «I am convinced that audiences want this kind of genre because it gives them not only an absorbing story but the chance to become part of it, to live the lives of the heroes and get an emotional jolt as well,» says the film's general producer Igor Tolstunov. «A disaster movie isn't just a tale about natural cataclysms or man-made collapses — it is about the heroes who, in these extreme situations, try to save themselves and the people around them. It is a story of how a hero comes into being. That is why in its time the disaster movie Air Crew was so popular. The picture succeeded because of the presence of a real hero — it is under such extreme conditions that his true essence is revealed and the deepest qualities of human nature come out. That is very important for us, and this is the kind of hero we are trying to present in Metro.»
Most of the shooting period was held in Moscow. For the shoot of «Metro», unique sets were built: a full-scale 117-metre-long metro tunnel and an underground bunker erected in a special filming pool. All the sets were airtight and designed to work with large volumes of water. Four real metro carriages were acquired for the film, which, after being deliberately damaged, were placed inside the constructed tunnel.
1:3 scale models of the tunnel and train carriages were also created. For «Metro» they were essential, because only on miniatures could the collision of the train with a massive body of water, and the tunnel almost completely filled with it, be shot.
At the very end of the shooting period the crew worked in a chroma-key pavilion, where one of the most terrifying and difficult scenes of the film was filmed — the collision of the train with a huge section of the metro tunnel's tubing. Twenty stunt performers were involved — in special gear they literally flew around the carriage, demonstrating passengers falling during a sudden train braking.
«Metro» was shot mostly on RED and Arri Alexa digital cameras. In addition, non-standard technical equipment was used extensively. Almost all the unique special equipment that made it possible to achieve the desired spectacular shots was a proprietary development by director of photography Sergei Astakhov.
Part of the shoot took place in Samara. The location was the operating Samara metro. That is where the metro vestibules and the huge crowd of injured passengers — 800 people — streaming toward the station's exit were filmed, as well as several other key scenes of the film. Shooting in the Moscow metro proved impossible: passenger flow is too heavy at any time of day, and it would have been impossible to shoot mass scenes with hundreds of specially trained people without disrupting the metro's normal operation. Filming in the Samara metro did not disrupt train schedules or station operating hours — preparatory work was carried out late in the evening, when passenger flow is minimal, and filming in vestibules was done at night.
For participation in mass and group scenes, the creators of «Metro» needed to select about 800 Samara residents. Anyone who submitted an application and passed the initial selection was accepted as an extra. In total, around 3,000 people signed up for the casting. Samara residents were very active — casting staff received dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of applications every day. Besides candidates for mass and group scenes, about 50 local theatre actors were auditioned for cameo roles, from whom the director chose just 14 people.
Working at the operating Samara metro stations was extremely difficult — the metro is a high-risk facility. And when up to five hundred extras gather on a platform, along with about a hundred crew members, special equipment is running, and trains continue their normal schedule, the danger increases many times over. For this reason metro representatives were on duty at the set to ensure strict compliance with all safety measures.
Also, the Samara metro allocated a special train to the crew just for filming. It operated at the station late at night, when the other metro trains had stopped running, picking up and setting down passenger-actors.
Throughout almost the entire shooting period, the creative team was in water that sometimes reached more than one and a half metres in depth. The water was pre-heated to create as comfortable conditions as possible. In total, more than two thousand tonnes of water were poured out during the shoot. «As far as I know, no one in our cinema has ever dealt with such a volume of water,» says production designer Pavel Novikov.
The picture now moves on to editing and post-production, with a great deal of attention devoted to creating and processing scenes using computer graphics.