Where Was Disclosure Day Filmed? The Midwestern America of Spielberg's Latest Sci-Fi

On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Disclosure Day.

Unlike some of Steven Spielberg ’s more fantastical sci-fi films, Disclosure Day is set in a present-day reality where a hidden truth is about to disrupt business as usual. That meant that production designer Adam Stockhausen’s sets had to be as authentic as possible.

“It was very important to Steven that it [feel] real,” Stockhausen says. “He wanted to ground everything in our real lives. This is not an artificial place; it’s our world.”

Disclosure Day avoids the flashy sets and global metropolises of other blockbuster action flicks. Instead, the story is primarily set in Missouri , Maryland , and West Virginia , with Kansas City , an unlikely cinematic star, as its central location, although New York City doubled as the location for the topographically flatter Midwestern locale. About two-thirds of the film was shot there, as well New Jersey and upstate New York . The rest was filmed at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard.

“A challenge is we were filming this in New York and it’s not a New York story,” Stockhausen says. “It's not often that you shoot New York for Kansas City.”

The film follows a whistleblower named Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who steals thousands of files from the shady government organization he works for in order to reveal their cover-up of extraterrestrial life. We meet him and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) while they’re already on the run from a secret agency called WARDEX, which is led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist, has her own mysterious connection to the aliens that eventually leads her to Kellner. It’s an action-packed film, but also a heart-warming one.

Stockhausen, who previously collaborated with Spielberg on Bridge of Spies , Ready Player One, and West Side Story , wanted it to stand alone, rather than call back to or reference the filmmaker’s earlier sci-fi, namely Close Encounters of the Third Kind . “I didn’t want to do any Easter eggs because it might pull you out of the story and give you this meta awareness of his work,” he says. “We wanted to tell a real story that stood on its own.”

Here, Stockhausen breaks down the main locations in Disclosure Day .

Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist at the fictional news station KCXE

Margaret works as the weather reporter at fictional Kansas City news station KCXE. Instead of building the news studio and its control room on a soundstage, Stockhausen transformed a building at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark, New Jersey. The set was almost entirely practical, with live feeds on the cameras into the control room. The existing glass windows were perfect for the finale sequence, where Margaret broadcasts live.

“We looked at all of the real TV stations in Kansas City, but then broadened the scope beyond that to TV stations across the country,” Stockhausen says. “But ultimately it’s an idealized version of a TV station that has a glass wall and engages with the community, like Good Morning America .”

At the end of the film, Margaret’s reporting gets picked up first by the national news, and then worldwide. For this sequence, the production used the real NBC News headquarters in 30 Rockefeller Plaza and even had actual newsroom employees in the scenes as supporting cast.

“Steven has a lot of connections there and has spent time in that studio, so he knew it well from watching election night coverage there,” Stockhausen says. “He wanted to be in the real space and for their reactions to be live and authentic. It wasn’t just scripted dialogue, but the actual reactions they would have to an event that was happening right in front of them and the calls they would really make.”

The set design of secret government agency WARDEX, led by Noah Scanlon (pictured) and played by Colin Firth, is filled with real world references.

Although the WARDEX headquarters were built in Steiner Studios, Stockhausen did incorporate several real-world references. The structure was inspired by the “nerve center” for a train or transportation system. He looked at Brutalist architecture, as well as architects like Tadao Ando , whose work stateside includes the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth . The inner room took inspiration from sterile cleanrooms in pathogen labs and quantum computer spaces. The video screens in the control center worked practically.

“We developed all the graphics ahead of time and then Steven shot the raid sequences on the farmhouse and the warehouse in advance, so we were able to feed that footage into the room for the characters to respond to live on camera,” Stockhausen says. “It was such a cool, fun adventure. I can say that a year later, but it was nerve-wracking at the time.”

Scenes featuring a dilapidated farmhouse, used by whistleblower Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) as a safe house, were filmed at Foster Fields Farm in Morristown, New Jersey.

Daniel and Jane hide in a decrepit rural farmhouse while on the run from WARDEX. The sequence was filmed at Foster Fields Farm in Morristown, New Jersey, and Stockhausen and his team built the house from scratch because the script required a car to drive through the building. The geography of the sequence was especially complicated and Stockhausen even had to relocate some of the existing fences. The field where Daniel takes a phone call from Margaret was even shot in two places: Foster Fields Farm and on the ground of a convent in Mendham, New Jersey, used in an earlier scene.

As the couple flee in a car, the action moves to Dibbles Quarry near Catskill, New York . The location allowed the team to drive the empty car off the cliff. “Steven's a huge believer that the real physics of things is what makes it work,” Stockhausen says. “The audience can smell a fake, so the more you can do for real, the better.” The area of Catskill also provided the roadside diner and the motel seen later in the film.

Cape May, New Jersey provided the setting for a high-drama train chase.

As Daniel and Margaret flee the WARDEX goons, an agent rams their car into a moving train. The high-stakes sequence was filmed on an actual train line outside of Cape May, New Jersey. “We were able to control it and have our cars on it and go back and forth and stop and start,” Stockhausen says. “They worked with us and gave us a bunch of train cars, and then we brought in a couple of our own that were modified and chopped apart and had stunt rigging. We did the actual car stunt.”

The team then brought some of the train cars back to Steiner Studios to complete the stunt with the actors in a safe environment. “Because it was the same terrain car in the same rig, the scene fit together really well,” Stockhausen says. “Everything was connected back to that real structure in New Jersey.”

When designing the childhood home of lead character Margaret, production designer Adam Stockhausen drew on his own memories of growing up in the Midwest.

The recreation of Margaret’s childhood home was built inside an actual warehouse in the Bronx. “I really love making big sets in weird places,” Stockhausen says. “Building that house inside that warehouse adds to the light and the quality. It’s very different than if you were on a sound stage surrounded by a giant blue screen.” A lot of research was done into the design of the house, but Stockhausen also drew on his own childhood home from growing up in the Midwest. “I have a strong personal connection to houses that look a lot like that from exactly that time period,” he says. “So I was leaning on personal history too.”

An industrial site in Staten Island stood in for Roswell, New Mexico

Once the existence of aliens is revealed to the world, dozens of clips of footage of alien crash sites play on the screens. Stockhausen created each clip, including footage depicting Roswell, New Mexico , in Staten Island at an industrial site. “Next to it was this landscape that was like a moonscape, essentially dirt and rock and rubble,” Stockhausen says. “It was a good blank canvas for us to create the nighttime New Mexico look.”

The alien spaceships we glimpse at the end went through numerous iterations. “We were doing drawings on those ships all the way through our prep period, all the way through our shooting period, and then all the way through the post-production period,” Stockhausen says. “It was something Steven was working on every single day. It was so important for those to read exactly the way that he wanted them to.”