From Hell occurs in London, England, but pragmatism dictated that production ensue in Prague, Czech Republic. Aside from prohibitive costs, the abundance of modern buildings in London makes it impossible to replicate the Victorian era with any sense of scope — even with Illusion Arts grantingthe architecture a period facelift through CGI. After an initial scout of Prague, production designer Martin Childs determined that erecting the city’s East End as a working set was the best means of accurately depicting the slums of Whitechapel — circa 1888.

“After being in the Czech Republic and touring Prague itself and some of the little towns around Prague, it became clear that it didn’t look very much like London,” reveals Childs. “I hesitate to say ‘absolutely none,’ but very little of the architecture in the Czech Republic matches anything in England. It’s of the same period, but has no overlapping architectural visual detail at all. There’s lots of plasterwork in Prague as well Art Deco and Viennese influences and very little naked brick. Therefore, you get rounded, organic shapes to the windows — whereas square, industrial-looking windows would be more appropriate and more authentic. That’s how it is around the murder sites on Commercial Street. It’s not me being overly picky and measuring windows and looking at forms in detail — it is an overall, broad-brush, huge difference.”

If anyone can recognize such stylistic inconsistencies, it is Childs. Throughout a film career spanning several centuries of metropolitan design, the former draftsman has become somewhat of a student of European architecture. His projects have transported him to France of 1794 (Quills), late 1600s Holland (the upcoming Girl with a Pearl Earring), and England of the late 1500s (Shakespeare in Love) and late 1800s (Mrs. Brown). Childs also art directed the historical epics Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Madness of King George. On Shakespeare in Love, almost all his Oscar-winning spaces had to be furbished on a soundstage while Mrs. Brown shot on practical locations across the United Kingdom. With these experiences under his belt, Childs knew that even if From Hell was produced in London, period accuracy would still suffer. “A lot of the places that were absolutely right, where the murders took place, and where you can still swing your camera around 360 degrees and see London of that period, are now such upscale housing that nobody would allow you to shoot there at night.” (Although in late-April 2001, the crew did film pick-ups in northern London at an area around Kings Cross Station. The exterior shots consisted of chase scenes in alleyways, photographed along an area rife with “nondescript industrial brickwork” ideal in showing someone running from one end of Whitechapel to another.)

With a 20-acre soccer field outside Orech village as his canvas, Childs set about sketching the microcosm of Whitechapel over the course of a week. Ripperologists have amassed at veritable treasure trove of authentic documentation, including detailed street maps of Whitechapel and crime scene photos. Using these references, Childs managed to duplicate sites like the 10 Bells Tavern, Commercial Street and Christchurch with picture-perfect accuracy. The streets in between, however, had to be reimagined because in some instances the areas sat miles apart. So Childs built an intricate network of alleyways as corridors connecting those various landmarks. He also blocked out the streets so that shooting in opposite directions on the same lane lent the appearance of being in different boroughs.

However, when pressed to actually assemble the ramshackleprecinct, Childs found that Czech setbuilders needed representations of British masonry. “So I came home and photographed huge numbers of windows and bricks of the appropriate period and mood — walls and industrial buildings of massive Victorian architecture,” he recollects. “I then took those out to the Czech Republic and the construction people looked at them as I had looked at the architecture in Prague. I’d never seen anything like it before, and they’d never seen anything like this before. But they adapted to it pretty instantly and started doing buildings that looked wonderfully English. Then we had two English painters go out to lead a team of Czech painters. These artists were wonderfully apt people who immediately understood the tremendous layers of color it takes to create a brick wall, which at first glance looks like it’s brown but is, in fact, several shades of red, yellow and blue [as part of an artificial aging process].”

Whitechapel requiredsome 12 weeks of construction, after which time Childs finessed its finish with cobblestones collected from local brewhouses and other facilities. Because of Prague’s erratic climate and the constant haze of manmade mist blanketing Whitechapel, he took great pains to insulate his facades from the elements. On some back-to-back shooting days, the mercury hit the 90-plus mark followed by outbursts of intense downpours. A stormfront showered the set with volleys of icy shrapnel mere days before filming, nearly destroying the walls’ protective surface. “Because the paradox is that when shooting at night you have to put on lots more light than during the day,” states Childs. “We put thick layers of matte glaze on, but we had to keep the glaze very matte to not alter the way light would play on the texture and surface. So it was all beautifully weatherproofed with huge layers of glaze that didn’t alter its look. But it wasn’t weatherproofed against unexpected hailstorms with hailstones the size of golf balls. They battered the plasterwork, battered the paintwork and literally knocked the glaze off, which came down in great lumps. So we had to go in and mend certain bits of the set as we were shooting.”

As for interiors, production occupied Hostivar Stage in Prague to fashion the innards of the 10 Bells Pub, a Chinese opium den and the harlot’s hostel of Miller’s Rents. Though the Ripperologists had snapshots of Special Branch and the 10 Bells, Childs did not limit himself to carbon copies. The real 10 Bells is so tiny that the tavern could barely accommodate the five actresses playing prostitutes. Its exterior is a rather faithful replica, but he enlarged the insides with festive, lively designs and made it a meeting mecca for cliques of all social castes. Scenes set amongst London’s healing establishment had a more artistic influence. “We didn’t absolutely make a copy of what London Hospital would have looked like, because there were fantastically atmospheric medical paintings of the period, from which we took our inspiration. [Specifically, “The Surgical Clinic of Professor Gross” and “The Clinic of Professor Agnew” by American realist Thomas Eakins.] Similarly, with people’s offices, like William Gull and Charles Warren, we took the character as written, rather than following research to the letter, because very often research can turn out to be dull to replicate painstakingly.”

Childs also renovated the ornate chambers of several castles within a few hours of Prague into the Ripper’s lair, Inspector Abberline’s flat, the Freemasons’ rotunda, interrogation cells for Special Branch and the London morgue to name but a few setups.“However, we absolutely couldn’t build the interior of Buckingham Palace for the sake one or two brief scenes,” the production designer notes. “So we scoured the whole Czech Republic trying to find castles that looked a little like the inside of Buckingham Palace. We found one [in Opocno Castle]. The snag was that it couldn’t be further from Prague — it was almost in Poland — but, that aside, it was a perfect place.” Weeks later, production returned to a Queen Victoria sequence, but scheduling conflicts prevented another retreat to Opocno. “I did a lot of research into other rooms in Buckingham Palace and found that monarchs, Victoria included, put gifts and exotic objects from foreign lands into a theme room. So we found a room [in Prague Castle] very much of Eastern European style, with a hint of Chinese about it and created a room that doesn’t exist in Buckingham Palace, but which we justified in our own minds, calling it Queen Victoria’s Chinese breakfast room. It’s where Queen Victoria would have stored all gifts from all her Chinese friends, but that was entirely our fantasy.”

This preoccupation with cultural knick-knacks extended beyond the Queen’s realm to permeate the entire upper-class strata of Victorian society, and Childs exploited that passion for decor to its fullest potential when forced to maintain the integrity of these Eastern European palaces. “Very often, I was able to repaint the sets, even though they [the structures] were of historical value. But if we weren’t allowed to paint, what’s great about the Victorians is they had a hell of a lot of stuff — pictures, decoration and objects — that we could fill the sets with. If the color wasn’t quite as I would have chosen, you didn’t know because there was so much clutter everywhere!”   

One might believe Childs’ years of formal training in architecture, his many cinematic trips to England of eras past, and the detailed negatives collected from Ripperologists to be a profusionof creative assets. But the From Hell graphic novel, which parades grand panoramas of London in all her splendor as the British Empire’s crown jewel, also made for a great resource. “If you wish to see it that way, the comic book reads like a storyboard. You’d be mad not to reproduce some of those frames because they’re great dramatic shots.In terms of wide shots, we did do one or two scenes that reproduced frames from the comic book. We mostly isolated frames from street scenes and made it possible to do them, going out onto the big set. But those were only the comic book frames that we reproduced extremely authentically — other than almost commercial ‘pack shots’ [product close-ups] of hands holding hearts and bits of rag in broken windows.”