1984 | 1984
- DIRECTOR |
- Michael Radford
Designed like a forties dystopian nightmare, and made during the period in which the original story was set (April-May 1984) at Twickenham Studios, Southwest London and on location around London itself, including the disused Battersea Power Station, off Battersea Park Road, and the old railway station which used to serve it (used also in Ian McKellen’s 1995 Richard III).
'Victory Square' is the shell of Alexandra Palace, Muswell Hill, N22, after it had been gutted by fire. It has since been completely renovated.
The 'Ministry of Truth' is the white deco, Portland stone tower of Senate House, the University of London Union, on Malet Street at Montague Place in Bloomsbury, WC1.
Vaguely totalitarian in scale (it was built in the mid-Thirties), the look of the block really did the model for George Orwell’s sinister Ministry.
The building more recently became the ‘Russian’ Interpol HQ in Fast And Furious 6.
It’s the Union’s clean, no-nonsense interior that’s more often seen on screen – again in Richard III as the king's bunker, as the ‘Manhattan’ clinic in Tony Scott’s The Hunger and, most famously, as the Gotham City courthouse in both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.
The idyllic 'Golden Country' of which Winston dreams is the Roundway Down Iron Age Hill Fort, about a mile northeast of Devizes in the Wiltshire countryside.
