A Quiet Place: Day One, the prequel film to John Krasinski’s hit horror films, is set in New York City during the start of the franchise’s alien invasion, but that doesn’t mean the movie was filmed on location in the Big Apple. Directed by Michael Sarnoski, the apocalyptic horror film centers on Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a terminally ill cancer patient who lives outside the city with her cat, Frodo. When a nurse at Sam’s hospice center convinces her to join a group trip to the City,Sam finds herself in the middle of the first moments of an extraterrestrial invasion.
Memorably, the aliens in theA Quiet Placemoviesare blind, but boast an acute sense of hearing. Needless to say, the prequel’s New York City location is a thrilling choice for the sci-fi horror story. Packed with people and all sorts of sounds, Manhattan is probably one of the worst places for Sam andA Quiet Place: Day One’s cast of charactersto weather the alien invasion. Even though so much of the film is defined by its setting,the prequel was not filmed in New York City. In fact, it wasn’t even shot in the United States.
Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden In England Was The Film’s Main Shooting Location
The Well-Known Studio Is Located Just Outside Of London
While New York City is integral to the look, feel, and story ofA Quiet Place: Day One,the production team recreated the streets of the city on the backlot at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden, which was also where blockbusters like theHarry Pottermovies were filmed. Funnily enough, Sarnoski was inspired, in part, byChildren of Men— Alfonso Cuarón’s United Kingdom-set dystopian action thriller. Despite the UK inspiration, the team worked hard to recreate a total of four New York City blocks — each standing about two stories high.
A Quiet Place: Day One Review - John Krasinski’s Horror Franchise Has Officially Overstayed Its Welcome
Lupita Nyong’o is great, but A Quiet Place: Day One has the depth of paper and less effective scares and tension than either of the first two movies.
In order to create some visual variance in the sets,A Quiet Place: Day One’s team recreated Chinatown’s Mott Street as well as parts of Harlem, the Upper East Side, and the Lower East Side. First, production designer Simon Bowles (The Descent) designed 3D models of the New York City street sets with modeling software, which allowed Sarnoski to test different filming angles ahead of time. With top-notch visual effects completed by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), includingA Quiet Place: Day One’s destruction of New York’s bridges, the movie’s budget ballooned to $67 million.
London’s Charing Cross Serves As A NYC Stand-In
A Quiet Place: Day One Trades Manhattan For The Center Of London
Although most of the film was shot at Leavesden,A Quiet Place: Day One’s cast and crew did head to London Charing Cross to shoot the movie’s subway sequence. In the scene, Sam and Eric (Joseph Quinn) are cornered byA Quiet Place’s mysterious alien monsters, so they head down a subway escalator and into a water-filled station. Instead of having Bowles and his team build the set on the studio backlot,the production was shot on location in London’s Charing Cross Station, which was transformed into an MTA-branded New York City subway station for the occasion.
According to Bowles, the production design team used very finely chopped up cabbage and broccoli to make the subway station water look murky.
Why A Quiet Place: Day One Didn’t Film In New York
Warner Bros.' Pre-existing Backlot Helped Streamline The Filming Process
EvenA Quiet Place: Day One’s endingscene capitalizes on the story’s New York City location, which makes it even stranger that the production shot just one scene — at Harlem’s Patsy’s Pizzeria — in the Big Apple. For the vast majority of the film, London and Leavesden are New York’s stand-ins.
It’s hard to say why, exactly,A Quiet Place: Day Onedidn’t just shoot entirely on location, especially given all the VFX that was needed to transform the sets into a convincing Manhattan. Likely,Warner Bros. felt its preexisting lot would cut costs and streamline logistics.
A Quiet Place: Day Oneis now streaming on Paramount+.
A Quiet Place: Day One
A Quiet Place: Day One is a spin-off of the A Quiet Place franchise conceived by John Krasinski. The film is set at the beginning of the invasion as humanity scrambles to survive, before the events of the original film, with Lupita Nyong’O leading the cast, directed by Michael Sarnoski.
