The largest indoor movie set of all time
Once upon a time, Hollywood was known for its iconic studios, where the likes of Paramount, Universal and MGM made the majority of their movies on their Los Angeles premises under baking studio lights. Whilst many films were made under their watchful eyes in indoor sets, other projects were taken off-site, with artists and production designers creating vast areas where the actors could physically interact.
Instead of simply using CGI to create a set with size and scale, sets were painstakingly constructed, allowing the filmmaker to toy with every aspect of the film’s frame. Such led to some rather spectacular sets both inside and outside of Hollywood during this time, with Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis and Ben-Hur, the film that saved MGM from bankruptcy, standing out as significant releases.
Having inspired the likes of George Orwell, George Lucas, Ridley Scott and many more, Lang’s extraordinary 1927 film remains known for its iconic visual style that combines a future dystopia with German expressionism. Covering over 60,000 sq ft in the Babelsberg Studios near Berlin, the set featured 25,000 extras and remains one of the most impressive physical sets ever brought to life on the silver screen.
A little closer to Hollywood, MGM released Ben-Hur in 1959, a historical epic that told the story of a prince sent into slavery who regains his freedom and sets out for revenge. Using nine soundstages and 148 acres, the set for the movie required over one million pounds of plaster to put together, making it the largest set in cinema history at the time, before it was beaten five years later upon the release of 1964’s The Fall Of The Roman Empire.
Yet, whilst such productions are impressive, there is one indoor set that blows both out of the water in terms of size and scope.
Released in 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the movie Steven Spielberg had wanted to make for some time, with the success of his blockbuster Jaws two years earlier allowing him a lot of creative freedom. So much so that Columbia Pictures allowed Spielberg’s production team to create a set inside a 283,000-metre hangar at Mobile, Alabama, USA, to film the climactic UFO landing scene.
With the set reaching a height of 27m, a length of 137m and a breadth of 76m, the feat was unlike anything Hollywood had ever seen at that point, with the budget predictably swelling from the predicted $2.7million to $19.4million.
Reflecting on the movie, the director called the production “twice as bad and twice as expensive [as Jaws]” in Steven Spielberg: A Biography.
Take a look at the scene that features the incredible set below.
