Alex McDowell is the man whose task was to bring the terminal to life as seen in this early Photoshop illustration of the main concourse. All images courtesy of Alex McDowell unless otherwise noted. ™ & © DreamWorks LCC.

Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal focuses on a visitor from Eastern Europe (Viktor Navorski, played by Tom Hanks) who finds himself trapped in an unfamiliar world when he lands at JFK International Airport, and discovers that his homeland has suffered a sudden political coup that prohibits both his entering the U.S. and returning home.

To shoot the story required that a huge archetype of an international airport be constructed as the key set, creating a space that also becomes one of the key characters of the film. It is a rare opportunity for a production designer to be able to design a single set for virtually the whole movie, and one that I relished!

As a child, I flew thousands of miles, often unaccompanied, between school in Britain and my parents in the Far East. As an adult in the ‘80s, I emigrated from London to live in Los Angeles. So I’ve long had a fascination with the airport both visually and as a border. An airport is at once attractive, stimulating, cold and dehumanizing. It is a place that is designed to move people through it as efficiently as possible, with an enormous hidden infrastructure to fulfill this role and also to control this flow socially and politically. Like an iceberg, 9/10th of the airport is hidden from view. Designing the film gave us access to the hidden layers, as it will for the audience.

As a designer, I am aware that the best design is often that which the audience never notices. The hope is that the audience watching The Terminal, rather than marveling at the scale of the set (and in reality we all spend time in spaces much larger than the set we built), will never doubt that we filmed in a real airport.

Palmdale Airport, Hangar 703 became the home of The Terminal's terminal.

The set was constructed at Palmdale Airport, Hangar 703, which measures 750' x 300' x 70'. The hangar was built for the construction of B2 bombers, and then used to modify 747s. The massive Main Concourse set measured 360' x 270' x 60', and the freestanding, atrium-style structure contained three stories of fully dressed stores and smaller sets. Some 650 tons of steel were used to create the terminal's framework, and a certified structural engineer had to approve the plans for the self-supporting structure, which featured two sets of operational escalators. The floor included 58,000 square feet of polished granite imported from China, and approximately 112,000 square feet of glass opened out onto a view of the “airfield” — a 650' x 48' painted backing.

Driving the design of the film in relation to vfx and digital planning was the need create a setting that would allow Steven to concentrate on the drama without having to worry about the production implications of any visual effects shots, despite the obvious problem of almost an entire wall of glass that looked out to the interior of a hanger. Steven wanted to treat the set as he would a location, and did not want to storyboard any of the film.

These two factors set the path by which we approached all the 3D planning for the film.