How to create the series "Chernobyl"

Recently the last episode of the Chernobyl mini-series, a joint project of the American HBO channel and the British Sky, filmed on the basis of real events - liquidation of the consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. The series tells not fictional stories about the tragic fate of the heroes of man-made disaster. April 26, 1986 is a day that forever changed the lives of tens of thousands of people.

The series from HBO has already become one of the main events of 2019: its audience rating has broken absolute records of the «Game of Thrones» and «Breaking Bad» in the IMDB online movie store. «Chernobyl» received many positive comments on the detailed reproduced pictures of the life of the Soviet Union of the 80s. Perfectly accurate portrait of Soviet life, expressed in relation to the characters to each other, and in the faded picture with recognizable houses, and in the smallest details of costumes and props. Cars and clothes, hairstyles and interiors were supposed to be not just like in the USSR, but like in the USSR in 1986. Art director Luc Hull and costume designer Odile Dix-Merier were responsible for this. «We wanted all the costumes to be as authentic as possible. The clothes of Soviet people were very different from what Europeans wore. We watched a lot of documentaries about the Chernobyl disaster, studied the newspapers and magazines of the era. A huge part of our Lithuanian team spoke Russian, so they easily found on the Russian sites original samples of a working or medical uniform. We were also at Belarusfilm and in the state archive of costumes in Kiev, where we looked for and rented things of the era (...) In Lithuania, we found a tailor who worked at a factory in the 1980s. She said that men's suits of the time were made of wool and polyester. I hate polyester, but there really is a lot of it in this series: Johan said that he likes everything ugly. So I was lucky: I didn’t have to worry much about the clothes for the main characters. It was the same with glasses: they were strange and were sitting rather badly, including on Legasov. It is clear why - because then they gave what they wore», - said Luke Hull.

The creators of the series were faced with the task to reproduce the picture of life in the Soviet Union after the Chernobyl NPP disaster in 1986 as best as possible. Luc Hal says that such an atmosphere can still be found in the Ukrainian and Lithuanian cities. According to him, special attention was paid to Kiev, where «many monumental and unique architectural objects of that time were preserved». Although most of the field shooting in the series took place at the Ignalina NPP in Lithuania, which has reactors of the same type as the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant footage in the series is a work of Postmodern digital studio in Kiev. Kiev authorities are discussing a project to create a tourist route for the filming locations of the series. It is planned that the route will include the Chernobyl underground bunker, in which the first liquidation headquarters, the fire department, the hospital, the legendary «Death Bridge» worked on the night of the accident, from which, according to the series, residents of Pripyat watched the fire at the Chernobyl NPP, the central square with the hotel «Polissya» and the city executive committee. Guides will tell tourists stories about the filming of the series, as well as interesting facts about real events in these places.