Sixty five years and three week after Orwell Wells’ broadcasted the invasion of New Jersey by Martians, New Jersey – 12 miles further east – was invaded again, filling the local woods around Merrick Farm in Howell Township with smoke and people.
The smoke – produced by fog fluid shipped to the site from a special effect unit located in Bayonne – was designed to simulate fog, but anyone who had seen similar wooded scenes in films like ET or AI recognized the unmistakable visual signature of director Stephen Spielberg.
Although Spielberg only shot at two locations in Howell Township for one day, film crews had spent more than a week setting up critical shots to the 2005 summer blockbuster, War of the Worlds.
The day-long shoot was divided between two nearby locations, Merrick Farm on Merrick Road and the exteriors of a house on Cranbury Way near Route 524 within an easy jog of the farm.
For more than a week prior to the shoot, construction crews created their own swamp in the wooded area behind the farm, and reconstructed part of the interiors of the Cranbury House. The swamp shoot required spreading of a sticky red colored string that CGI special effects specialists in Los Angles would later reshape on the film digitally to make it move and grow.
The film’s star, Tom Cruise, arrived at the local police station’s parking lot via helicopter before dawn on Nov. 23. Unlike other sites where Spielberg has shot segments of the film such as Bayonne, Newark, Virginia, Connecticut, Athens (NY) and Staten Island, the Howell Township shoot required no extras – although as many as 20 police were on hand to help with crowd control. As in Bayonne, people stopped along the roads leading to both sites in Howell, and continued to grow until the shooting stopped at some point just after 6 p.m. The police chief escorted the Cruise to and from the sets.
The smoke used in the woods was apparently not an indication of alien invaders using their deadly heat ray, but rather as a mood setter Spielberg wanted floating through the woods while he shot critical scenes near the red weed-decorated swamp – similar to the fog used in open sequence of scenes in ET and the wooded scenes in AI.
Doubles for the actors Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin (whose character will likely perish at some later scene) arrived early, standing on the side of the pool of slimy water as crews completed their last minute touches under the careful eye of Spielberg. Once Cruise and the kids arrived, Spielberg chased everyone off the set but the stars, the doubles and the camera crew.
Spielberg worked fast, cramming in as many shots in his short time there as possible, so that when he was finished with the swamp scene he had plenty of material to send west to Los Angeles for processing. Cruise and the kids went off for lunch, posing briefly at the road to pose for pictures with some residents.
But work was not done for the day, and the crews and actors made their way towards the Cranbury Way location for the external shots of Cruise and kids arriving there after their long flight from the disaster in Newark (depicted in the Super Bowl trailer). Although interior shots were originally scheduled, Spielberg decided against them.
As in Bayonne and other places, crowds gathered at the barricades in anticipation of seeing Cruise leaving later, and they were not disappointed when he stopped for a short time to chat, take pictures and even eat some butter cookies one of the residents gave him. By 8 p.m. Cruise, Spielberg and the other stars were gone, leaving the crews to pick up the mess and restore the area to what it had looked like before the Spielberg invasion.
