Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge tells the true story of Desmond Doss, the first conscientious objector to win the Congressional Medal of Honor for saving 75 men during the Battle of Okinawa without ever touching a weapon. While the first hour of the film tells the story of Desmond Doss (played by Andrew Garfield), a Seventh-Day Adventist who refused to eat meat or take a life but nonetheless felt morally obligated to help the war effort as a medic. In the film, Doss is persecuted and court-martialed by fellow servicemen who view his convictions as liabilities, but he still goes to war with them, and saves a tremendous number of lives doing so.
It's in that war that Hacksaw Ridge really shines. It's a horrifying portrayal of warfare that's graphic and unblinking, with several sustained sequences of utter chaos and destruction that conveys the claustrophobia and confusion of battle but without sacrificing clarity. To get a better sense of how the movie pulled off its take on the brutality of this specific portion of the War in the Pacific—where American forces suffered immense losses in their attempts to scale the titular ridge where Japanese forces were waiting, dug into bunkers and tunnels—GQ spoke with production designer Barry Robison.
As production designer, Robison is one of the first people hired on a film, working with a director—in this case, Mel Gibson—to decide the film's look and make high-level creative decisions following a period of heavy research. Once the producers and director agree on these things, the majority of the crew is hired, and the machinery of production goes to work. For Hacksaw Ridge, Robison was instrumental in helping determine the aesthetic shifts between the film's three distinct segments—Doss growing up in Virginia, his training in boot camp, and the final stretch staring down the titular ridge—but it's that last section that will stick out in the memory of anyone who sees Hacksaw Ridge. It was also, clearly, the biggest challenge Robison and his team faced.
"Mel really stressed that he wanted the battle sequences to be tight and chaotic," says Robison. "He talked about the ugly intensity of war, so we were really cognizant of that." But there was, according to Robison, an interesting thing about the Battle of Okinawa that made it a bit challenging to recreate but also liberating at the same time: It's both well documented and yet not, with plenty available to study in museums like New Orleans' National World War II Museum, but few visual references for what you would need for a boots-on-the-ground recreation.
"I saw a lot of battlefield maps but didn't ever have a really clear idea visually of what the battlefield was like: how the landscape was sculpted, especially when you were down in there. There's a lot of high photographs from airplanes, of what looked like the craters on the moon. "
Eschewing most computer effects and modeling, the Hacksaw Ridge filmmakers constructed a nine-by-twelve foot model of the battlefield to plan, which served as the basis for the mock battlefield they would construct on a dairy farm East of Sydney, Australia, one Robison says was about five to six acres big, carved into the earth like a bowl to block out the picturesque Australian scenery that would have conflicted with film's setting of bombed-out Okinawa. But according to Robison, the most remarkable aspect was the malleability of the set.
"If Mel needed something, we were able to create a completely different look on the same battlefield just by moving the dirt around, putting up new, burned out trees, rock elements, etc." Robison said. "It was pretty cool. It was moving all the time."
This of course, would all be tricked out with all the practical effects used to turn this farm into hell itself—fuel lines for explosions, apparatus for smoke and fog, and the various damaged buildings that would dot the landscape, and complemented with studio sets for more intimate scenes—like a terrifying sequence where Doss is trying to escape the Japanese tunnels without being seen. "That's a true story!" says Robison. "When I read it on the page, I couldn't believe it."
But for all of its carnage and viscera, few things in the film are as imposing as the titular ridge, a suicide mission carved out of rock and draped with climbing net. It's one countless American soldiers scaled, only to lose their lives at the top. It's one many would never have come back down, if it weren't for Desmond Doss. It's something Hacksaw Ridge producer Bill Mechanic, along with Mel Gibson, had spent a considerable amount of time trying to find, with Robison joining in on the search when he was hired. Eventually, one was found.
"I found this ridge in a little town called Goulburn—at the turn of the century, some railroad engineers had come through, and they had basically cut into a cliff and created this [ridge] so the railroad tracks could go by," says Robison. "So everyone was like yes, this is it and Mel was ecstatic." But it turned out that the perfect ridge wasn't going to work—the filmmakers needed the ridge built on the battlefield set.
So they did: Building up by digging down, making a trench thirty feet deep and sixty feet wide to form the basis of their cliff face, taking molds of the Goulburn cliff face and creating a facade over the trench. This is the Hacksaw Ridge you'll see on movie screens: one that, like a lot of movies, is a hybrid of the real world and the sculpted one of Hollywood artisans. A massive yet often invisible job hidden behind the fog of war, the paranoia of gunfire and seclusion drawing your focus to the bravery of the scared men onscreen. In the end Barry Robison, Mel Gibson, and the team behind Hacksaw Ridge, couldn't quite find a perfect hell on earth. So they made one themselves.