On Location peels back the curtain on your favourite films, television shows, and more. This time, we look into the world of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
Everyone’s favourite detective Benoit Blanc is back for another installment of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out franchise. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is a classic whodunnit that moves away from the opulent glamour of the Glass Onion’s Amanzoe setting for a more lived-in, pastoral setting: a forested, fictional small town called Chimney Rock in upstate New York with a gorgeous Neo-Gothic church.
There’s a new hot priest in town: Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a boxer-turned-clergyman with a neck tattoo. Duplenticy is assigned to serve at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a church that seems to be bleeding parishioners – pun intended. Jud bristles against the church’s charismatic, problematic head honcho, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who spreads a gospel of judgment, paranoia, and resistance to the slough of vague outside threats – sound familiar? His starry parishioner cohort includes characters portrayed by actors Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Glenn Close, and Kerry Washington. When a sudden death befalls this congregation, masterly detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), with his over-the-top Southern drawl and impeccable tailoring, partners with Father Jud to solve the puzzling case.
Much of the action in the movie takes place in the Hudson Valley – outdoors in the lush forests surrounding the church, and in cosy, older homes and offices that feel quintessentially Northeast. But production actually occurred primarily in London, with the English countryside making a fine dupe. From the centrepiece location of the beautiful Neo-Gothic church to the kitschy townie bar Il Diavolo, here are some of the most significant sites used during production.
What town is Chimney Rock based on?
The entirety of the mystery unfolds in the small town of Chimney Rock. In order to create the fictional upstate town where the movie was set, the production team started off by scouring Google Maps. The film’s production designer Rick Heinrichs says the team was certain that they wanted the town to be in a river valley where there was a strong sense of history and settledness. Ultimately, they landed on the town of Cold Spring, a little over an hour north of New York City. “It had all the elements we were looking for with a main street that goes straight down to the river,” Heinrich says, “We did some drone scouting and some environmental photography and then we added Chimney Rock [in post-production] into the background.”
While most of the key scenes from the film were shot in England, Cold Spring isn’t just an inspiration for Chimney Rock – it was actually used as the backdrop in some transition shots. They’d already shot some of the town establishments on a stage at the Leavesden Studios in London and then they planned exactly where on the actual main street of Cold Spring they would insert those businesses. “There are a few things that got quite expertly added by Giles Harding, our visual effects supervisor. He added the church steeple in the background of some of the shots [of Cold Spring], the titular Chimney Rock, and the storefront of our bar, Il Diavolo.”
Where is the Knives Out church filmed?
Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude has an epic feel with its intricate stonework and beautiful stained-glass windows, especially for a worship house with such a puny population. It’s one of the few sites where we see the whole cast together and it is also a place where fears are stoked and weaknesses are preyed upon. It’s an exemplary Catholic church, one part divine and one part petrifying. To find such an edifice that also was plausibly located in New York state was a difficult task in England, where most churches are Anglican and were erected long before the United States was founded.
The church that fit the bill within their shooting radius ended up being Holy Innocents Church in High Beech, a mid-nineteenth-century Neo-Gothic church just outside of London, nestled away in Epping Forest, Essex. “It was just old enough to give us the right feel, but not so old that it looked decrepit and un-American,” Heinrichs says. We see Monsignor Wicks greeting his congregation outside Holy Innocents Church, but due to the relatively small and dull interior, the scenes inside are a church constructed on stage. “The interior that we built on stage was about twice as large as the real interior of the church.”
And with the help of cinematographer Steve Yedlin, they were able to create the sense that the outside and inside were in harmony: “We got to play a bit with the neo-Gothic and the Gothic. We made sure that there were Gothic proportions, that the stone and finishes were very carefully calibrated. We had a hammer beam ceiling. And oftentimes they would put carved angels on the end of the hammer beams. So that was a great opportunity to have fun and to have it be kind of a metaphorical theme for the different versions of God that were being placed in front of the audience.”
Those themes were subtler in some places and more overt in others. One of those more manifest furnishings is the pulpit from which Monsignor Wicks preaches. This menacing wooden ambo features both the bow of a ship and an eagle in flight, a nod to John Huston’s 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick. Though this church in the Hudson Valley would not be that close to the ocean, Heinrichs was drawn to the image, “I really responded to the idea of using the metaphor of the ocean and the priest being the captain at the wheel of the pulpit, ploughing its way through the seas of life.”
Vera Draven’s estate
Vera Draven (Kerry Washington) is a clever lawyer with a house that belongs on many a mood board. She and her live-streaming brother Cy occupy a house that could only belong to a more upper-crust member of Chimney Rock’s community. Heinrich and the production team faced the same challenge as with the church: finding a residential location that could be conceivably American and in the Hudson Valley. For the Draven siblings' abode, they landed on a house on an estate in Guildford, a town in West Surrey. The property also had a refurbished structure that was formerly a brick squash court that they used to shoot some of the rear interiors and exteriors of the house.
The mausoleum and groundskeeper's cabin
It wouldn’t be a Knives Out story without a dash of Agatha Christie flair. This instalment actually references another novel of the genre, The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr, which, without giving any spoilers, is of the locked-room mystery category. The Wicks mausoleum figures heavily in the mystery, and as we see in the trailer, is the subject of some rather untoward graffiti (though Martha is under the assumption that those drawings are rocket ships).
Located on the church grounds, we learn the mausoleum is near impossible to open from the outside. But apparently, in order to prevent individuals from being buried alive, it could be simply pushed open from the inside. Heinrichs spent a lot of time examining American cemeteries and found a mausoleum in Detroit that served as a model for this one. “This one has a slight Egyptian quality to it,” he explains, which was customary at the time.
The mausoleum and the nearby Groundskeeper’s cottage, unlike some of the other buildings, were both built on site in the Winterfold Forest in Surrey where they were shooting. “What’s interesting about [the forest] is that it was probably planted as a tree farm,” he says, “which is why you get those avenues of aligned trees. It gives this sort of perspective shift. There was something very cool about playing with that particularly when Blanc and Father Judd are walking in the woods and you see a little light crossing behind them.”
Can I visit the dive bar Il Diavolo?
Il Diavolo, Italian for ‘the devil,’ is Chimney Rock’s local pub. It’s not exactly a dive bar, but it is certainly a local haunt and becomes a place of great intrigue when Detective Blanc shows up. And with all the examination of religion in this movie, it’s hard not to notice this bar leans the exact opposite direction of heaven. This kitschy establishment has walls plastered with devil iconography, photography, and tchotchkes, and the lived-in look of a place you might accidentally inhale a bit of dust. Unfortunately, Il Diavolo is not a real bar you can visit – it was built on the production team's Warner Bros. stage in London – but it was created in the image of many retro American pubs. Heinrichs suggests that moviegoers really look at the details when the bar comes on screen. “There’s a devil Elvis lamp in there,” he shares, “and there’s a painting of a devil Van Gogh with one of his ears – no – one of his horns cut off!”
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is streaming now on Netflix. This article was first published on Condé Nast Traveler.