2023 Oscar Nominee ‘All Quiet’ Production Designer Christian Goldbeck on Recreating Authentic WWI Trench Warfare

Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, now streaming on Netflix, is remarkable on several fronts. Not only does the film orient the viewer within the unimaginable and unimaginably terrifying world of war-torn France during World War I, but it also shows the first Great War from the perspective of the German soldiers forced to endure it. It’s not a perspective we’ve seen before, and the film is a richer, darker experience for it.

Also remarkable are the outstanding array of crafts on display, all working together to communicate the horrors of war. Helping both the actors as well as the audience understand this world, Oscar-nominated production designer Christian Goldbeck and his team created an eerily authentic landscape filled with all of the expected dangers and hardships of World War I. Of course, the actors remained completely safe, but they were submerged into the notorious world of trench warfare, physically recreated in-ground just outside of Prague during an extraordinarily cold winter and during the extra requirements necessitated by the COVID pandemic.

Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Goldbeck talks through his process in bringing Berger’s vision for the film to life. He reveals the initial challenges he and his team faced, how they dug in the frozen ground to create realistic battlefields, and where VFX intersected with production design. Finally, he talks about his reaction to the film when first screening it at the Zurich Film Festival.

All Quiet on the Western Front streams exclusively on Netflix and is nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Production Design and Best Picture.

Awards Daily: Talk to me about how you started working in this project. What were some of the initial problems you had to solve?

Christian Goldbeck: I met Edward [Berger], our director, in late summer 2020. Basically, the first talks we had about this project were all about making it feel as real and as humane as possible. Our approach was always dictated by by the environment that we were in and what the characters were going through. Also, we were just always going back to the book, going back to the source material, which was very, very key for us. In my first weeks, I did nothing but dive deep into archives. The photography of the First World War was mainly propaganda photography, and it showed the good sides of war, all staged. I found a set of 100 authentic photographs where basically I was confronted with this, what I call, a dystopia of destroyed Earth. It looked like a rocket ship landing on Mars basically, destroyed ground till the horizon.

I felt how should we approach that. How should we tell this to an audience, this the sheer madness of what was going on. They had five tons grenades exploding each day, a normal day, of that war. Before I actually started designing like trenches, I spent a week with my wonderful art department just doing our studies. We assembled basic lots of different kinds of earth and tried to find out how it reacts to rain, how it dries out, how it does look when there was an explosion, where the different kind of earth particles fly and how they settle and what color that brings to the earth. Not one square inch of All Quiet on the Western Front has its natural ground. Basically 100 percent of the ground surface was covered with our soil. We employed a ‘Greens crew’ which I eventually called the mud crew in the end. Only then did we start to find our ways into the maze of those trenches to figure out how our characters would move through the trenches — not only the characters but also the camera. That took about two months of design process to find out how our main protagonists move through those setups. We wanted to be as close with the camera on him as possible to help the audience have some feeling of being in the middle of it.

Awards Daily: So this war is obviously famous, as you’ve already referenced, for its trench warfare. How did you recreate the physicality of those trenches?

Christian Goldbeck: We dug. The main location we found, basically wasn’t a location by then. It was just a flat airfield about 40 kilometers outside of Prague. It was clear from the beginning that the crew holding had to be kind of close to our battlefield, so we sought an airfield where you had those old runways. The downside of it was that we were standing on a complete flat piece of land was just lawn on it. We started just basically digging in the middle of January, which was frozen. We had landscape plans for the battlefield. We figured out how deep the craters had to be, where the stunt crew can just run through, where the tracks for the camera would be, where the easiest access for our actors to run through this battlefield.

All the trenches had to be secured because they were deep. After we secured them with concrete molds, we then added the surface onto it. Starting the whole thing, I saw that we would be able to find used wood in Czech Republic or even in Germany, but the sheer amount of wood we would ultimately need wasn’t very clear. We had to build some things with new wood that went through a complete process of going through fire, then sandblasted, then water blasted. Then, the scenic painters came in and produced those beautiful surfaces on top of it. Those trenches were not fresh. This war didn’t move. It stayed put in a way in those trenches at that time where our story takes place. They were in the ground already for four or five years, so the aim was not only have the audience see those sets but that they should smell them also.

Awards Daily: You did a lot of practical building of sets, but what was your relationship between building practical designs versus relying on VFX?

Christian Goldbeck: We wanted to do as much as we could in-camera. We were working together right from the beginning with our with Frank [Petzold], our beautiful visual effects supervisor. When it came to digital settings and extensions, we wanted to achieve a ratio where 80 was analog, putting the audience into into the feeling I just described, and then adding not more than 20 percent of extension. So, in the battlefield for example, it was always the skyline where you might have some trees or maybe a building in the far, far background. Those were raised by visual effects. They always took something real that was already there in order to extend it. That was true also for all the hinterland, the destroyed villages, the field hospital set up. We found locations which had a certain amount of destruction or abandoned buildings, but we always added through VFX a lot of destruction or a lot of broken roofs, etc, to it. An abandoned building is not the same as an as a destroyed building. There’s a difference to it if something melts away over a period of 20 years or if a bomb hits it and it’s immediately destroyed.

Awards Daily: As I was watching this, I couldn’t help but recognize how authentic it felt, right down to the weapons. How did you work with your team to be able to recreate these authentically German instruments of war?

Christian Goldbeck: Well, the key again was research. This war had a lot of documents produced, but they are hard to find. We went to France, to Belgium, to deep down south Germany into war museums with each department: set dec, props, and weapons. They all recreated their specific items based on an excessive research. We thought, if there was even the smallest item in the film that was not authentic, then it could jeopardize our whole undertaking. We’re so close to the actors that the props became so important. In a scene where a Paul Bäumer [Felix Kammerer] first kills the French soldier in the big crater and then in the end wants to wants to save him, he actually gets the photographs of the family of the French soldier out of his pocket. You see as an audience the closeup of this beautiful family of the French soldier, which we produced. But, if this didn’t feel authentic, then it would have destroyed the powerful scene. The design went from the large scale to the smallest microcosm, I could say.

Awards Daily: I’ve asked this question to a few other crafts persons that have worked on this film. I know there’s such a heavy focus to make this an authentically German presence, to tell the story from the German perspective. After all of the challenging work that went into making this film, what was it like when you saw the finished product?

Christian Goldbeck: It moved me. It was so bizarre. Through the post-production process with all the visual effects shots, we were just watching scenes in loops as you can imagine, so you lose basically the horror of it. You look at it as a technical piece. As soon as the edit was finished, particularly the sound, then enter this impressive score by Volker Bertelmann. I only saw the whole piece for the first time when we had the premiere at the Zurich Film Festival. I sat in the audience and the credits were rolling, and I just basically had to leave. I was outside for half an hour just to have it settle. To understand what we actually achieved in a team effort. It was a complete craft team effort inspired by our director. That was moving, but also the story hit me. I think it has something to tell. I had an idea of it before, but I finally realized that when I saw the the final product.

Awards Daily: And what is that idea to you?

Christian Goldbeck: Why we thought it was good time to make it that three years ago was that we felt you had Trump in America, you had Brexit, you had the right wing governments all over Europe being elected. We didn’t know anything about the Russian invasion towards Ukraine at that time, but the discourse and the language felt very different. It reminded us, at that time, that we would need to read a little bit more in history books. When the film was finished, it was precisely that it’s a statement against nationalism. It’s a real statement against war. It’s not an heroic story. It’s a story of losers, losers of all sides.