Neil Burger Explains Concept Images Found in ‘Divergent’

Don’t have your Divergent DVD yet? Well, one of the really cool things about it is the Director Neil Burger’s commentary which is found in the extras. Mashable got an exclusive look at these and shared with us the concept imagery along with commentary from Neil Burger. It’s awesome to see these and realize how much work goes on behind the scenes, before filming starts. Check out the concept images below:

First Image

 

 

IMAGE: SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT

Burger: “One of the first images I came up with was this opening image of the grass blowing in the wind, the sun rising, the birds circling in the distance, with the birds being a motif in the movie that figure in with Tris’ fears and tattoos. Then we see this tanker sitting in the distance, sitting in the field and so maybe we think it wasn’t always a field, that the water must have dried up.”

Technology

 

 

IMAGE: SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT

Burger: “Chicago now is a city of 3 or 4 million people — in the world of Divergent it’s maybe 50,000, so they don’t really have a need for the tall skyscrapers anymore. So what do they use them for? We combined that idea with the question of where do they get there energy. And the idea was to plaster the skyscrapers with wind turbines. Chicago being the windy city, that’s where they get their energy.”

Abnegation Village

 

 

IMAGE: SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT

Burger: “We found this location right in the shadow of the city, south of the Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower.”

Abnegation House

 

 

IMAGE: SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT

Fisher: “The houses for Abnegation look so real that one time someone came by and offered $250,000 to buy one.”

The Pit

 

 

IMAGE: SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT

Burger: “The Pit is based on a marble quarry in Colorado. We’ve seen lots of movies shot underground in dark, dank spaces and the idea was trying to make it much more inviting and luminous. It’s unusual for an underground space and because the marble is white it also makes it a brighter place and it makes it more inviting and welcoming to Tris.”

Hammer Fist

 

 

IMAGE: SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT

Burger: “We came up with a whole new fighting style for the movie. We figured that 100 years from now people would be fighting in a slightly different way. If you know Krav Maga, which is a fighting style that has become popular in the last 20 years and seen a little bit in the Bourne movies — if we used that it would have felt like we’ve seen that before. Garret Warren [stunt coordinator] came up with this new fighting technique which is based on the ‘hammer fist’ — sort of hitting with the base of the fist instead of the knuckles which is safer on the hand and has a more powerful blow.”

The Wall

 

 

IMAGE: SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT

Burger: “The idea is that the wall is keeping them isolated. And so we had this idea to treat it like a big Faraday cage, which is kind of a device that keeps electronic signals from entering or escaping an area. Andy Nicholson [production designer] found an amazing reference of a huge installation in Ukraine and we used that as our model of the wall.”

Erudite Location

 

 

IMAGE: SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT

Burger: “It’s a very cool location shot at the University of Chicago library, designed by Helmet Jahn, and it happens to be over the place where they first split the atom.”