Joel Froome on the sets of “The Yeti”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself, the path that took you to where you are today, and how early you knew you wanted to be a part of this industry.

Joel: It’s a fascinating question because the film industry is such a unique and diverse place, and people definitely don’t have the same journey to get there.

I grew up in Sydney, Australia. I went to Balgowlah Boys High school, and when I was about 15 years old, I saw an article in the newspaper that a legendary cinematographer named John Seale had won the Academy Award for “The English Patient”. That was big news because I was at the high school that he went to many years earlier – and that’s how I had heard of cinematography, but that’s not what made me want to be a cinematographer, obviously.

Fast forward years later, I was trying to discover what I wanted to do. A career advisor put me in touch with a course at the Australian Film School. One day a director spoke in the morning and an editor spoke in the afternoon, and while it was interesting, it didn’t resonate. And then it was Thursday afternoon, and a cinematographer came in and spoke for three hours, explaining what a cinematographer does from start to finish on a project. That cinematographer was Andrew Lesnie who went on to do the “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” movies, and that day is such a vivid memory for me.

I’d been doing photography all through high school, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. I remember Andrew’s talking about the collaborative nature, telling stories visually through photography, and using light – and it hit me so hard. And I was sitting there thinking that I just graduated high school, so how do I do this now? And then I thought back to that time hearing about how there was a former student that had won the Academy Award, so through some people I got in touch with John, and I was able to ask him a few questions and pick his brain a little bit.

I went on to work in the camera department for a little bit, and then worked at Panavision for a little bit to learn gear, and then eventually went to the Australian Film School to study cinematography a number of years later. After graduating and spending a bit more time in Australia, we decided to move to the US with my wife in 2011. I didn’t know anyone over here, so I volunteered to work on short films and try to get on anything possible. Through some connections I had in Australia, I did a short film out in the California desert for pretty much no money, and through one of the actors on that short that later auditioned for a feature film I connected with the director that loved the look of our short. That’s how I ended up in Sweden in 2013 shooting my first feature film.

After spending a few years in New York City we moved up to Buffalo, where my wife’s from, and I’ve been living in Buffalo for about 10 years now. And now, “The Yeti” was the first opportunity to do work in Buffalo itself.

On the sets of “The Yeti”.

Kirill: Over this period of roughly 20 years, how do you see this debate / divide / transition from film to digital?

Joel: It’s interesting, because even if you’re shooting film now, it goes through a digital process. It’s an important debate.

I was the last of a certain generation that only learned on film. When I was at the Australian Film School in 2009, there was a distinct point about halfway through the year when RED One camera came out. All of our projects and tests up until that point were on 16mm and 35mm, and from that point on we were on digital. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do with all those buttons.

At first I was scared, but then we started talking about it and starting to use it. For myself, I decided that I was going to do the same process that I used to do when shooting film, and that I was going to approach this as a negative. How do I get the best exposure? How can I get the most latitude? What’s the look of the story that’s going to be able to be the best for this? So I still use a light meter. I still use a contrast viewer. I try to approach things like I still shoot on film. I like the discipline of shooting film and not doing 50 takes because we can.

The discipline of shooting film is important. I was helping out at a film school and teaching a course, and I saw those young students shooting something and their image was overexposed. They looked at the monitor and saw that, they went over and closed it down, and everything was good. But my question to them was – how did you get to the point that you were two stops overexposed? If this had been film and you didn’t have the monitor, you would have rolled and it would have been overexposed. It’s important to understand the process as to how you’re going to expose, and nothing was better for film than doing that.

It’s hard to get film cameras approved from production, especially, but it’s getting more common because it has become popular again to shoot film.

If you’re shooting digital now, there are great cameras that can give you so much detail. And when you go through the digital intermediate, there are software packages that add grain that react with your image instead of being a static overlay. You are able to get those filmic images. That’s the feeling that we love and resonate with from film.

In the debate of film versus digital, each project has its own merits. As long as you understand the fundamentals of film and you bring that to digital, you can get the most out of whatever format you’re shooting on.

Kirill: What do you feel are the bigger misconceptions about cinematography and the role of the cinematographer?

Joel: One of the biggest misconceptions is that cinematography is just beautiful images. I have friends not in the industry, and they say “check out this beautiful cinematography” and it’s some compilation of drone footage of sunsets. That’s nice to have as a screensaver, but that’s not what cinematography is.

A lot of people think it’s purely based on beauty, whereas it’s the art of telling the story and collaborating and bringing a director’s vision to life. Sometimes that’s ugliness. Sometimes that isn’t beautiful. But it gives what the story needs. Good cinematography is when you can best serve the story, to get the emotions needed for that film to make it an overall experience that the directors wanted the viewer to have. That is the most important thing about cinematography. It isn’t just these beautiful images or moody images. It’s what helps the story convey the right tone for the director.

On the sets of “The Yeti”.

Kirill: Apart from the transition to digital, what other big changes have you seen in the industry itself or maybe in the field of cinematography?

Joel: Technology is changing in every aspect of cinematography. Lenses are getting bigger and cheaper, and you’re able to do all sorts of things with them. Production might ask “why can’t we use these new lenses”, and it’s because they might not have the right texture and the right feeling for that film. The price point can be a tough challenge when negotiating when you want to achieve a certain look for a film. The possibilities with the cameras and lenses are endless. You need to be able to decipher all of that and to “sell” the producers on what is the most important thing for your particular project.

DaVinci is such an amazing software and a lot of people are getting into color. I find that the new generation of colorists that don’t have the experience of working with film are not getting the references that I give them for a certain film stock look. It’s not just the technical skills of working with the software itself. There’s so many options between color, cameras and lenses, but you still want to go to the people that truly understand what color means to a film.

Kirill: Are you excited about any particular advances in lighting technology?

Joel: Lighting changed so much over the last few years. For years you had Arri lights, Mole Richardson lights, and then old school tungsten and daylight fixtures. And then the LED lights started to come out, and it was a game changer in what you could do.

As this technology has developed over the last few years, it’s remarkable what some of these companies are able to build. The output of light for the size is incredible. The fixtures used to be so big and expensive, and now you can get these strong lights in small packages at affordable price points. Aputure is one of these game-changing companies that are building fixtures that offer nice images and nice clean beams of light. You get to the point where you ask yourself what is it in an old-school HMI film light that can be replaced with LED lights. It’s so incredibly versatile, small and powerful. And everything is controlled and dimmable via an iPad. The future of lighting is exciting.

Cinematography of “The Yeti” by Joel Froome.

Kirill: A few years ago there was this promise of cheaper cameras and lenses, and having iPhones in everybody’s pockets that would revolutionize and democratize filmmaking. But it’s still difficult to make a story that reaches a good audience of viewers. Where do you see the barriers?

Joel: In this industry you learn by doing. When you see people shooting a film on an iPhone, a lot of people still roll their eyes. I was just at a film festival a few weeks ago and there was a film there that was shot on an iPhone. It was great. It had a good look to it. They were able to do it. But they didn’t just shoot straight on an iPhone. They got the rig. They had a lot of problems with overheating, so they had to get cooling bags to put on it.

If you’re able to make a film on an iPhone, maybe it’s not the highest quality. But if you’re able to tell a story and put it together, it doesn’t matter as much what camera you have. If you’re shooting a certain frame – no matter what the quality is – if that frame can tell a story and that story makes sense, that’s great. People need to embrace it as a way of learning and a way of getting better as filmmakers.

If a director wants to make a film, and they learn by putting out a short film they shot on an iPhone, and it works, and they can level up from that learning experience – that shouldn’t be thrown away as a lot of people want it to be. It’s a great way of being able to find your voice. A lot of people don’t have $30K for a short film to get good cameras and lenses and hire a bunch of crew. You can make it with your friends. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the best looking film ever, as long as you’re able to find your voice as a filmmaker. It’s a good way for people to start.

Cinematography of “The Yeti” by Joel Froome.

Kirill: Getting to “The Yeti”, what is the secret of the enduring appeal of the horror genre and the monster genre, at least for the American audiences?

Joel: Over the last decade the horror genre has been one of the most exciting places for the filmmakers to have the most freedom in. There was a period of time where horror films were associated with “Saw” and “Hostel”, more of the torture porn subgenre, as they called it. I think people got exhausted that horror needed to be gross and disgusting, and that’s what you were getting out of that.

And then all of a sudden, these filmmakers started coming out and blending genres and telling these stories that were so good. You have these amazing films mixed in with horror elements. Filmmakers are able to use horror as a vessel to tell bigger stories and really have fun. That’s what old horror films were. They were fun and exciting and different and new. Horror lets people experiment and find their voice as a filmmaker.

Creature features have been around forever. You watch the old King Kong and Godzilla films, and it’s part of filmmaking. No matter how big your budget is, and no matter how crude they sometimes might be, you put these mythical stories on film, and it’s fun. That’s what a lot of people love about movies. They take you to this wild world and somehow you believe it for those couple of hours.

Kirill: What brought you to this particular film or perhaps what brought this film to you?

Joel: I’ve been living in Buffalo, New York now for 10 years, but I’ve never worked up here. One of the local rental houses had told the line producer about me. He gave my name to the directors and producers, and they sent across the script. It was quick, barely enough time to digest and do a breakdown before meeting with them the next day. It was such a fun idea, and I had pictures in my mind of how I thought it could look.

I pitched the look of the movie being this throwback to films like “The Thing”. I also talked about one of my favorite cinematographers Robert Richardson, and how he uses pools of lights. I thought we could do that in our interior scenes to create this interesting look, but then give it that nostalgic feel that film gives. I was excited about the prospect of shooting this film and giving it that throwback feel to films that we love.

I knew it was going to be a challenge because we shot the whole thing on a soundstage. It was not a big soundstage, so we had a lot of technical issues with our budget. Our brilliant production designer could only build 18 trees, and about 80% of our movie is set in a forest. It was challenging when you only have 18 trees that don’t have tops on them so we can’t tilt up. It was a fun challenge to find the right lenses that could give us the right feel to convey that old filmmaking tone in a modern setting.

On the sets of “The Yeti”.

Kirill: We get this visual look from the very first frame, and it brought me back to the time where for a few years I watched only the TCM channel on my TV. You have these rich vibrant colors, but also a certain cinematic look that is a little bit less sharp compared to what we see today. Was that what you were going for?

Joel: Definitely. We knew there would be a lot of haze, and that was going to affect the sharpness of the image. We shot on Alexa Mini LF, and we were lucky enough to get the second full set of the Atlas Mercury lenses. We liked those lenses, but as newer anamorphics, they are much sharper than what we had originally thought about using. We definitely wanted to soften it up a bit. When things are clean and sharp, that doesn’t feel as filmic to me. So I try to find ways to “dirty” it up a bit, with the look-up tables [LUTs] and with how we light.

Kirill: Speaking of colors, you have this separation between the cool blues and the warm yellows. What were you going for there?

Joel: There was always discussion on moonlight and how dramatic we wanted it to be. Pretty early on we settled on it being way more of a silver moonlight. It can be pushed in grade afterwards, but we did want to avoid an overly blue moonlight. We knew they’d have their flashlights, practicals and lanterns for color separation, but we didn’t want that teal blue feeling. We wanted it to be more neutral throughout to have the warmth of the firelight and the practical lights to shine through. It’s a matter of not having the extreme blues and extreme warmth to be that far apart.

Cinematography of “The Yeti” by Joel Froome.

Kirill: What did you go for with light sources?

Joel: We wanted to make it feel like it was a relatively single source lighting. We have a big moonlight and as little fill as possible, and I love that. I don’t love a ton of fill.

When you go back and watch some of these older films, they are a bit more stylized than what you see today. I knew I would have to be a little bit more dramatic in the lighting to use a bit of fill light to fill in some gaps here and there. “Nosferatu” had just come out, and there was this one scene where he’s walking down the driveway washed in one big moonlight. That image of one big moonlight and a relatively silhouetted subject stuck with us.

We knew we would need to fill in a bit more. We had Aputure 600C for our big moonlight source, and a 1K balloon light as a soft source. I didn’t want many shadows, as that moonlight source was a stronger one than I would normally use for moonlight. And then we had a couple of little panel lights if we ever needed a tiny bit more here and there.

Later on when we get closer to capturing the Yeti, the directors wanted the moonlight gone. They wanted it to be firelight only. They wanted a distinct change to come through. For that we used some flame bars and ambient to lift it up, and a mirror board to bounce the flames so that we could use the flames as our key source. One of the references they sent was this shot from “The Revenant” where they’re on horses in the forest, and it’s firelight and everything else is darkness. That’s the vibe that we wanted to switch to. It’s a distinct tone shift later in the film where we took away all of our moonlight and it became ambient firelight.

Kirill: How difficult is it to do atmospheric effects at the scale of a smaller indie production and the level of effects that you wanted to achieve as we gradually get the glimpses of the creature?

Joel: It’s so ambitious to do a creature feature on a low budget. That’s why we tried to keep our lighting package small. This is a film where they’ve spent a lot to build this creature, and we didn’t want to take away from that. We had to be creative to find how we can work with a minimal amount of gear.

The Yeti is white, and that is challenging. You don’t want to be full silhouette when you’re starting to show it, because it looks like Bigfoot. It’s about how we can show enough to give glimpses and to be scary and know that it’s a Yeti without giving too much away. We had a great practical effects team that was keeping the haze levels. We were trying to keep the Yeti in enough haze, and to have a stronger haze as we get closer to the Yeti. You can’t spend too much time on one thing. We needed to give the stunt team enough time to be able to flip cages or to be able to pull people through windows on wires. We tried to be as flexible with our lighting plans as possible.

On the sets of “The Yeti”.

Kirill: What was the biggest challenge in recreating this Alaskan wilderness on a stage?

Joel: It would probably be the size of the set. We only had our 18 trees, and it required a lot of planning for the different shots to look like a completely different part of the forest. We also went as wide as we could, but the stage wall was there just a few feet past some of the trees [laughs]. I needed to control the exposure and the framing to not show too much, to use the lens fall off to hide that studio wall beyond the trees. That was the challenge – selling the size of the forest and hiding the size of our box.

Kirill: How many takes on average did you have for those moments where the characters get splashed with good amounts of blood? I’d imagine it takes a lot of time to get everything cleaned up and ready for the next take.

Joel: From what I remember, we only did one take for the opening shot. We had two cameras and made sure it was great [laughs]. Once you splatter the floor, it’s over. We didn’t have time to redo anything.

The two sisters in the film are played by actresses who are sisters in real life. Heather Lind plays the sister in the opening scene, and Christina Bennett Lind plays the other sister throughout the rest of our film, and she was also the editor on this production. There’s a wide shot of the girl who gets splattered with all the blood at the start where we cut back to the Yeti with the spinning record player in front of us, and you see that shot in the trailer. But we shot it on one of the last shooting days with Christina instead of Heather, because we didn’t have the time to get that wide shot on the original day. It was a big luxury to have twin sisters to get that other shot later on. I’m glad we were able to do that.

Cinematography of “The Yeti” by Joel Froome.

Kirill: What would be the most memorable day or sequence on “The Yeti” for you?

Joel: It’s the lead up to the scene where they’re all together in that little hut right before the guy in the mask gets pulled out the window. That was intense. There was so much dialogue and movement that we wanted to portray before we got to that. We wanted to get it right, but we also wanted to get to the pulling out the window, and it was such a relief when we finally got all of it. Now we’re at the window, let’s pull him out, let’s get a Yeti hand through his guts and get some blood and gore. That was so much fun that we were able to do what we needed to do in the lead up and get the right pacing that we wanted. When someone walks in with a massive bag of intestines, you know it’s going to be a fun day on set [laughs]. And then, anything when the Yeti is being fully shown was cool to see, because it was such an incredible costume that they built.

Kirill: Do you want people to watch this on the biggest screen possible in the movie theaters?

Joel: “The Yeti” would be great to see on the big screen. A lot of people associate the movie theater with big event films like “The Avengers” – as they should be. But the big screen is there for other films, to have the big scope and to make sure that the darkness is right. If you’re watching this movie in the middle of the day on your TV in the living room, you’re seeing a lot of reflections. You’re not going to get the full experience of what we tried to do with this movie – to make it this fun throwback creature feature. The movie theater is the best place to go see it, just as people used to do back in the day – going with your friends and seeing these wild and exciting horror movies in the theater.

Cinematography of “The Yeti” by Joel Froome.

Kirill: Do you believe Yeti, Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster exist? Nowadays everybody has high resolution phone cameras in our pockets, but we’re not getting great photos of all these mythical creatures that are supposedly living right next to us.

Joel: Mitch Hedberg is one of my favorite comedians, and he has a joke that the reason we can’t get better images is that Bigfoot is blurry [laughs].

The belief in the mysterious and the wonderful is exciting. I’ve done one horror film and one thriller film in Nepal before, and the director of that horror film always said that he wanted to do a Yeti film one day. The Yeti is a huge part of Himalayan culture and mythology, so why not? It’s the fabulous and the fantastic. How exciting is it to think of the Loch Ness monster, this massive creature that is just hiding out there. It’s not causing any issues for anybody like Godzilla. There’s a lot on this Earth that is unexplored, so why not?

Kirill: Is there anything like this in Australia? Are there any big local creatures roaming around?

Joel: Kind of, and I might get in trouble for spoiling it. Australia has a national joke that we play on pretty much anyone that comes to Australia, and I’m going to let you in on it.

We’ve got these things called drop bears. They’re rabid koalas. They have rabies, they’re foaming at the mouth, they are up in the trees, and they fall out of the trees, and they’ll scratch you and gnaw you. You’ve got to be careful of drop bears in Australia.

When my wife first came to Australia, we were walking through the bush one day with my best friend, and he said “watch out, it’s a drop bear egg” even though koalas are marsupials, and he went on this whole story about drop bears. It made quite an impression on my wife, and it took years until she realized that it’s one big in-joke that Australians are always going to tell you. I can’t believe there hasn’t been a drop bear film yet. There really needs to be a drop bear film in Australia. It’s so ridiculous and funny. Definitely not the size of a Yeti, but still as vicious in our stories.

Cinematography of “The Yeti” by Joel Froome.

Kirill: Where do you find yourself today on generative AI?

Joel: It’s such a wild time with AI. It can be a tool that can be used to stoke creativity, but I’d hate to rely on it solely to come up with an idea for a movie. One time I was doing a film, and I was talking with the director about the tone of the film, the artwork and the mythology in it. So we put all these keywords in to see what it comes up with, and that was mildly interesting in its choices. We didn’t use any of it in our work. It was more of an exercise in seeing the cumulative look of this thing we were thinking of.

If it can help spark creativity, that’s OK. But when people want to use AI to replace the actors or make a full commercial at the click of a button, that is taking away the essence of filmmaking. It’s taking away the creativity and the collaborative nature of it, and that is a shame.

I think back to when 3D was supposed to be this big new thing and the future of everything. And now it’s a tool that is used on certain things, but it’s not for everything. I hope that we’ll still rely on artists creating original art.

Kirill: What are the key ingredients for longevity in this field?

Joel: The film industry at the moment is such a rollercoaster of emotions, of finances, and of personal time. You have to surround yourself with people that are supportive. I had a friend once that was just starting out in the industry, and his girlfriend at the time told him to get a real job. I told him that if this is your passion, this relationship is never going to last. You have to surround yourself with people that believe in you and understand why you do what you do.

It’s important to separate yourself from the business, and that can be hard to do. When you don’t get a certain job, it’s hard to not feel personally about it. It’s the same with the actors – sometimes a different performance is the right one for that role. If you can separate the business side from the personal side, it’ll ease your mental health quite a bit. You can’t base your whole existence on whether you’re working or not, because that’ll never be healthy.

Be a good person. Be friendly, be helpful, mentor when possible, answer questions when possible. There’s a lot of cinematographers out there that are worried that somebody will take their job. But there’s so much content being made now, even though the film industry is up and down. They will hire the right person for the job, maybe it’s going to be you, and maybe it’s going to be someone else. Have a good attitude, because the days are long and people can be away from their family for a very long time. I don’t like working with tense and stressed people. If I’m going to be away from my family for a month, I want my camera assistant to be not only technically gifted, but also just a fun good person to be around.

Kirill: If you had a time machine to jump back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?

Joel: It’s hard to know where you would land in the industry if you did something completely different. A young cinematographer that is starting out would watch all the films of the day, and that would of course include the study of Roger Deakins’ work. How do I make this look like Roger Deakins would do it? What would Deakins do? That’s great, and he’s such an amazingly giving person with his website and sharing his knowledge. It’s great to want to do it how Deakins would do it.

But if I could have a time machine and talk to my younger self, I would say that the earlier that you find your voice and find what interests you as a cinematographer, the better you would become. It’s not about what Roger Deakins would do. A lot of people try to learn by copying others, but you’ll learn much quicker if you do things because you like them. Try to find your own voice and learn by making your own mistakes, instead of trying to make it look like someone else’s work.

Cinematography of “The Yeti” by Joel Froome.

Kirill: Out of all the travel for work so far, what would be your favorite cuisine or dish?

Joel: I am not going to say Nepal, because as much as I loved dal bhat, I didn’t love eating the same meal three times a day for 30 days straight.

I did a film called “A Chance Encounter” that we shot in Sicily. It was a magical experience with a tiny crew, only seven or eight of us. We were in Sicily for a few weeks staying in this big villa, and one night this old Sicilian nonna came in and made us a feast. You think you’ve had lasagna before, and then this 80-year old woman comes in and cooks you this thing. I can’t even describe how good it was.

Kirill: Is it a blessing or a curse to be the dedicated photographer of the friend group every time they want to take a photo?

Joel: Sometimes. People can be quite judgmental when you’re going to take the photo of their friends. They’ll comment on the framing way more than a director would in a movie [laughs]. They want it all perfect, while you can’t control any of the lighting or exposure. It can definitely be a curse.

Kirill: What are your favorite productions of all time, not necessarily from the cinematography perspective? What do you come back to? What shaped you? What would you suggest for young filmmakers to draw inspiration from?

Joel: My favorite film is also one of my biggest inspirations in cinematography is “Seven”. The lighting, the tone and the textures that Darius Khondji got on that film was incredible. I was lucky enough to meet him when I was shooting a film once, and we got to discuss the look of the film. It was wonderful to chat with him. “Seven” has the best ending ever. I was way too young when I first saw it, and I don’t think my mom realized what she was doing when she rented it from the video store.

The other one might not necessarily be my favorite film, but its cinematography is as close to perfection as anyone’s gotten. It’s “Road to Perdition” which was Conrad Hall’s last film before he died. We watched it in film school and have studied it. It’s an absolute masterpiece in screen direction, screen language, lighting, framing, tone and so many other things. Conrad Hall shot so many brilliant films, and it’s a bittersweet thing that he left us with this piece of work. Every young cinematographer should watch “Road to Perdition”.

And for one more I’d go for “Nacho Libre” with Jack Black. I first saw it when I was backpacking in Canada with some friends, and it was ridiculous and fun. But then I was in Mexico City and I went to a lucha libre match, and there was a little person in a gorilla suit, and that was real life [laughs].

Joel Froome on the sets of “The Yeti”.

And here I want to thank Joel Froome for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of cinematography. I also want to thank Jordan von Netzer for making this interview happen. “The Yeti” is playing in theaters now. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Jonathan Furmanski on the sets of “The Burbs”, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Jonathan: When I was twelve, I told my parents that I wanted to work in movies, and honestly, I can’t say I was serious I was when I said this. I think I said it only because I loved going to the movies. I was a kid who grew up on “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, and I wanted to be involved in that. I didn’t have any idea what that meant or what position I would have, and my parents didn’t take it seriously.

But then, seven years later, I got into film school and that’s where I almost accidentally discovered cinematography. I had no ambitions towards cinematography, but when you get there you learn the basics of what a camera is, what a lens is, how film stock works, etc. I was fascinated by all of it. I devoured as much as I possibly could about all of the technical and creative aspects of being a cinematographer. My friends noticed I was always talking about and thinking about this stuff, and they started asking me to shoot their student films.

So I never really had to make the choice. The choice was made for me, but I don’t say that regretfully or anything close to that. I feel it’s almost like we found each other – cameras and me.

After college I spent a brief amount of time working as an electrician, and then several years working as a camera assistant. Then a documentary opportunity fell in my lap. I had no ambitions towards documentaries, but it turned out that I really loved that experience. It led to another documentary, and I spent about 10 years working almost exclusively on documentaries. Then off of one of those documentaries, a scripted comedy show with a small budget fell in my lap. That led to another thing and another thing, and I ended up doing scripted comedy for a long time. I still do, and I’m lucky enough to be able to dip my toe back into documentaries every now and then.

Kirill: How was the transition from film to digital for you?

Jonathan: This transition happened at almost the same time when I went from working as a camera assistant, which was mostly on 35mm film, to working in documentaries. We started seeing these new digital cameras coming on the market, and people started shooting video on DSLRs.

In documentaries at the time you had a choice between Super 16 or Digital Betacam, and all of a sudden there were all these options that were inherently more cinematic. Some of them were 24 frames per second, and in the case of the Canon 5D you had access to a full frame sensor – all of these technical attributes that were out of reach for most documentaries. So when I shifted over into docs, I fell into all of the digital stuff at the same time. And by the time I got back into scripted, the industry had shifted over and it wasn’t even a question. By the time I was doing “Delocated” or “Inside Amy Schumer”, nobody was even thinking about shooting those shows on film.

Cinematography of “The Burbs” by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: What other big shifts have you seen in the last 30 years or so?

Jonathan: Certainly number one is the Internet and everything that comes with that, whether it’s social media or streaming platforms. That has had an enormous impact on the industry in terms of the amount of work that’s available, and the amount of jobs and the kinds of jobs that people want to do. And it has also, overtly or inadvertently, educated the public on what cinematography is.

Not that people were ignorant before, but when you have things like Instagram or YouTube and all of the streaming stuff, it becomes a much bigger part of the conversation, because people have a deeper understanding of it. Even if it was just for their Instagram account, they’re still thinking about framing and light. So now they’re taking that to their movie and TV watching experience. That’s great! It means that there is a greater appreciation for what people like me do.

Another sea change, at least in terms of the way we work day to day on set, is the advent of LEDs. LED technology has brought a flexibility and a speed that are impossible to ignore. We experienced it on “The Burbs” – as I’m sure everyone experiences on every show these days – where you can be making adjustments as you’re slating the shot and nobody knows anything about it. You’re not telling the AD that you need a minute. People in the video village aren’t seeing anything change. You can make these subtle changes that can happen over the course of a couple seconds. It’s all happening invisibly. They’re about to say “Action!” and you didn’t realize that the actor’s shirt was going to be so yellow, and you can adjust the lighting on the fly.

On top of that, the lights are lighter, they’re cheaper, they’re more versatile. They work better in inclement weather. We’re still using giant 18Ks and 20Ks, but LEDs have fundamentally changed the way that we work on set.

Kirill: There was a period of time about 10 years ago as smartphones were becoming ubiquitous and they were getting better and better at taking videos where people started saying that it was going to democratize filmmaking and storytelling. The promise, so to speak, was that when everybody has a great camera in their pocket, it was going to open the floodgates to millions of new filmmakers making their own movies on their phones. But that didn’t really materialize. It’s still difficult to make these stories. It still takes a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort to make a full length story.

Jonathan: It’s all about collaboration. Collaboration is an inherent part of the process, and an extremely important part of the process – whether you have five people on the crew or five hundred. You might be making a video about your cat, and you can do that by yourself and you might be able to make something great. But a bigger story needs multiple people working on it. It grows to having a script, and props, and cars that people are driving, and coverage, and sound – and all of these things that need to be at a very high level.

You need people with a better understanding and appreciation of cinematography – and filmmaking in general – to deliver something that is high end. That is something that is extremely difficult to do by yourself on your iPhone. It’s not impossible, but the crew is what enables you to do great things.

Kirill: What do you feel are the bigger misconceptions about the job of the cinematographer?

Jonathan: A lot of people might think that cinematography is about moving the camera around. There’s probably another level where people think it’s about the camera and coordination with the lighting people. Even though those are two big parts of the job, the missing component is this idea of developing visual language and what that means. It’s hard to put it into words.

You can pick five people to shoot the same scene and they will do it five different ways. That’s where you start to see what visual language is. It can be something as simple as shooting a closeup of a person. It can be a wide lens close, or a long lens far away. It can be off to the side a little bit. It can be right on the eye line, or a bit underneath it. There are a lot of small and subtle choices that have a big impact on the audience’s experience. It’s not a secret sauce or anything grand like that, but that’s what it is. It’s these small changes that are personal to you that create the language that everyone experiences when they watch the show.

Kirill: How did you find your way to the show, or maybe how did this show find its way to you?

Jonathan: Celeste Hughey was our showrunner, and we worked together before – but we had never met. I was the DP and she was the writer on some other shows. Her work happens before my work even starts, so we had worked together, but we hadn’t actually worked together. We have a lot of people in common, and it was probably through the shared awareness of other work that I had done on “Search Party” and “I Love That for You” that they reached out and asked me to present a pitch.

Cinematography of “The Burbs” by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: How many scripts were ready by the time you joined the production?

Jonathan: When I signed on for the job, the pilot script was the only script that existed, and there were outlines for the next 4-5 episodes, just a few pages each of where the story might go. When I asked Celeste about her thinking of where the story was going, she gave me a few sentences on what she thought the last couple episodes were going to be.

We really didn’t know until the scripts started rolling in. As always happens, things changed a lot. Even the pilot script was rewritten several times – not from the ground up, but in some ways as we got closer to shooting. The script for the finale was there around the time we were shooting episode five or six, and it wasn’t because people were being secretive. They were still cracking the code, so to speak.

Kirill: I did not watch the movie from 1989, but what I read about it said that it was a commentary on Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”. Did you have any stylistic references to it in the show?

Jonathan: No. But then, Hitchcock was such a powerhouse of filmmaking, and there’s no way that his impact isn’t there with me, even if it’s subconscious.

You should watch the original movie! It’s fun, and it’s quite different from our show. It’s the same basic story, but it’s a deeper screwball satire of suburban life, and what it means to live in a closed world and then have it disrupted by some new people arriving. Our story was something that was maybe a little bit less silly. It’s still fun and still funny. But we wanted to lean into some more serious topics, and be a little bit more 2026, a little more of the current cultural environment.

The two movies that we talked about a lot in prep were “Nope” by Jordan Peele and “Don’t Worry Darling” by Olivia Wilde. The latter is a hyper-realistic version of suburban life. It’s a hyper-colorful, pristine approach. And then on “Nope” you can almost feel the dirt as they’re walking on the ranch. It’s still colorful and vibrant, but a lot softer in its contrast and its colorfulness, and a lot more measured in how it approaches everything.

We were trying to take those two ideas and marry them together, to have something that did feel a little bit like “The Stepford Wives”, but also something that felt tactile. We wanted the viewer to feel that you could reach out and touch the wallpaper in the houses, to feel the blades of grass between your toes in the front yards.

Kirill: My understanding is that you shot pretty much everything on the studio back lot. Was the weather cooperating?

Jonathan: For the most part we got lucky that we had days that were sunny but not too hot. We started shooting around late February or early March. There were some days that we got rained out, and we had to go down to the stages. That was one of the big advantages of shooting at Universal Studios – being able to improvise quickly. If something wasn’t quite right – if something needed to be done on the back lot, if the weather was inclement – we could slide down the hill and go onto our stages. It was an efficient way to work.

Cinematography of “The Burbs” by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: I liked what you did for the Victorian mansion which is this mysterious place in the show, leaning into high and low angles, and tilting the camera. Did you want to visually separate it from the sunnier, more familiar visuals of the rest of those suburban houses?

Jonathan: We wanted the Victorian to feel like not just a different experience from the rest of the houses on the street, but also to be trapped in time. It’s not a dirty place, because the first time we see it, it’s ready to be shown at an open house. We wanted the Victorian to feel like a whole other space, from the beginning of the season when they walk in for the first time to the end of the season where people are more settled in.

One of the things we did is we used atmosphere in the Victorian house, but in no other house. Everyone else’s house felt cleaner and a little bit more of the classic suburban vibe – but then the Victorian felt a little bit more gothic and atmospheric.

Kirill: What were your lighting setups for the night sequences in that cul-de-sac?

Jonathan: This was not a job where we had a lot of luxury of time, and to some extent, you have to move quickly on every job. This one had us moving at top speed all the time, and we needed to come up with a lighting plan that enabled us to shoot in any direction without moving huge things around.

So we ended up putting two large lighting lifts on either end of the cul-de-sac with giant moonlights. For shooting one direction we turned one of them off, for shooting the other direction we turned the other one off. Sometimes we would use both, one as our backlight and the other as our frontal fill. That gave us the base level of illumination for the whole cul-de-sac quickly and easily. And on top of that we had all those little lights that the houses had – porch lights, walkway lights, street lights. They have not just the depth, but also suggestion of life. That way we could establish whether people were home or not. We could create a lot of color contrast between the warm light coming from the houses and the blue moonlight coming from up high. It gave us this nice, rich, colorful canvas that was easy to pivot.

Kirill: Are digital camera bodies and sensors good enough to capture everything that you want them to capture?

Jonathan: The digital cameras are so good these days in terms of sensitivity and dynamic range. If you got real forensic about it, I’m sure you could find places where film is superior to digital – or even maybe in the other direction.

I haven’t done a big project on film in a long time. I think the big difference in working on a film project versus a digital project is that film is a physical thing. There’s a limited amount of time that you can shoot before you have to stop and put another magazine on. This and other small aspects of film have a ripple effect through how everything is done. With digital, you can roll for an hour if you want. Some directors like to work one way and others like to work the other way. That has more of an impact for me than the look.

Without, again, getting super forensic about it, you can get a look with film and a look with digital that are nearly identical. If you read any of Steve Yedlin’s articles, he’s basically proven that you can make one look like the other, that you can go in either direction. It’s really just about how much work you want to put into the color pipeline. So I don’t ever see digital as a limitation from a capture standpoint.

I do sometimes wish that we had that ten minute limit on how long we could roll before we had to stop. Sometimes you want to take a break and to make a small adjustment while they’re reloading the camera. With digital, you sometimes don’t have the option to do that. You’re rolling, and that’s fine too. The schedule is so tight, and we’re probably better served by having the ability to just go.

Kirill: Going back to the show, what was the most challenging part of it for you?

Jonathan: It was probably the fact that I was the only cinematographer on the show. This was not the first time I was the only DP on a show, but those other shows had more prep days and sometimes even small breaks of one or two days here and there where the production would give the whole team a chance to catch up, go scout, have meetings and talk about what’s coming.

On this, we had none of that, and that was fine. But it meant that often I felt like I was a little bit behind in the information process. I had an amazing crew. Our production team was on top of everything. Every other department was outstanding. I never felt out in the wind. It was more about now knowing 100% how we’re tackling this thing next week. It was a challenge of time management.

The toughest episode for me was Episode Four, because so much of it is daytime outside on the cul-de-sac. The entire episode was shot in nine days, and it took four or five days to shoot that block party sequence on the back lot while making everything feel consistent. It takes place over one afternoon, and that’s one of the hardest things for a cinematographer to deal with. There’s only so much you can do about the sunlight, and you have to be smart about timing. We were sitting down with the director and the AD of that episode, and talking about the most advantageous way to shoot it in a specific order. And then you rely on the crew and let them take care of filling in the details.

Cinematography of “The Burbs” by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: You’ve been in the industry for a while. What do you feel are the key ingredients to longevity, to staying in the industry and not getting frustrated by it to the point of leaving it for good?

Jonathan: We all get frustrated by the industry for one reason or another all the time, and that’s OK. What keeps me around – and what probably keeps most of the people that I like working with around – is that we love doing it. It’s a real joy to be on set every day. I feel so lucky that I’m in the position that I’m in, not just that I’m a cinematographer, but that I’ve had the career that I’ve had. And hopefully I will continue to be here for however long.

Not to sound corny, but it is a bit of magic. There’s a lot that happens to make a show, and a lot of it is wizardry. It’s a fun thing to have a front row seat to – not the least of which is just watching actors do their thing. It is so enjoyable, especially on a show like “The Burbs”, where you have so many talented and funny people. That makes it all worthwhile.

I’ve always felt that while the film business rewards talent, it rewards tenacity even more. I think tenacious people are the people who make it and stay where they are. You do need to have talent no matter where you are on the team, but you also need to be willing to weather the tides. The last five years have not been great with the pandemic and then the strikes. It has taken a lot of fortitude on the part of a lot of people to stick around and stick with it, and I’m fortunate enough to be one of those people. Ultimately, that’s what it takes.

Kirill: Given how much goes into every production, do you see it as a little miracle, so to speak, when it all aligns and gets to that phase where it is all done and released to the audiences?

Jonathan: I’m always reminded that it’s a business when all is said and done. I do like the word “magic”, because I think even though I totally understand the whole process, there is still something mysterious about it to me.

I don’t know that I would call any show a miracle, but there are a lot of little miracles that happen along the way. It’s a little miracle that we got the cast that we did. It’s a little miracle that we got the production designer that we did. It’s a little miracle that I was on the job at all. It’s the opposite of death by a thousand cuts. It’s magic by a thousand tiny miracles, if you will. That’s what my experience feels like.

Kirill: What do you know now that you wish you knew back when you were starting out? If you had a time machine to jump back in time to give a piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?

Jonathan: It would be to not take yourself so seriously. You’re only 25 and you don’t have that much to say just yet. Just do your thing and enjoy what this is. I feel lucky to be where I am and where I have been, and I would have told myself that you’re going to feel that way a couple decades from now. When I was 25, everything seemed so important. Every decision, every job, every scene. It felt like the entire rest of my career was balancing on every shot that I was about to do. And of course, that’s not true.

As a companion to not taking yourself so seriously, I would have probably encouraged myself to be more risky. Those times that I have subsequently done that in my career have been rewarding and enlightening. Sometimes it worked a lot better than I thought I was going to. And sometimes it was not what I wanted at all, but now I’ve learned and won’t do that again. So I would have encouraged myself to take more risks and be a little bit less serious.

Cinematography of “The Burbs” by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: Without asking you to predict the future, how do you see generative AI today?

Jonathan: I see it a bit more as a tool than a threat. There are a lot of conversations about AI generated images and videos, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of picking it apart and making fun of an image of a person with six fingers, or something else that the AI hasn’t quite figured out yet. But it’s still creating something out of nothing, and that is impressive. Even if it is inaccurate or just doing what it is told to do, despite all its shortcomings, I’m impressed.

I suppose that means that in 10 years it will probably start to impact people like me – people who do what I do – in a way that’s probably not going to be all great. Maybe it is going to be disastrous, in fact, for cinematographers and other creative people. But we don’t know.

I wasn’t alive back then, but people had similar conversations about TV being the death of film, or video being the death of radio. These things come up all the time and people adapt. It will change how we work and how we create. But the audiences are always going to be looking for these human heartfelt stories, whether they’re comedies or dramas or whatever. It’s hard to imagine – at least for a little long while – a computer being able to replace that.

Kirill: What would you consider to be your favorite productions, movies or TV shows, from the cinematography perspective?

Jonathan: There are a lot of extremely talented people who are working in cinematography these days. Almost everything is looking way better now than what we grew up on.

There are a few names that if I hear they’re involved, I want to watch that. Hoyte van Hoytema, Linus Sandgren, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Bradford Young are always interesting. There’s a lot of talented people, and these names and people like them are pushing the envelope at the same time. They all insist on shooting on film, which is interesting. I always look forward to seeing what they do.

Kirill: What was the most memorable food that you had while working on “The Burbs”?

Jonathan: Maybe not food, but a snack. While I was working on this show, I got addicted to the little paper thin seaweed snacks. I ate them religiously. People would bring them to my little station, and it became sort of a theme.

Jonathan Furmanski on the sets of “The Burbs”, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

And here I want to thank Jonathan Furmanski for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of cinematography. I also want to thank Holden Schlanger for making this interview happen. “The Burbs” is out now streaming on Peacock. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Julia: I’m a director of photography, and have never wanted to do anything else. There was definitely some exploration of different roles in filmmaking as I was discovering it. I am the daughter of two cinephiles who were constantly sharing their love of films with me so I was curious about it from childhood. My first job as a teenager was in a movie theater. I never strayed from this. I thought about editing and directing, but it was in the practice of making films in school when I was really young that I figured out that cinematography was the best fit for me.

I grew up in Southern California and I knew that Los Angeles made the most sense for a move, being such a hub for filmmakers and the industry. I did an MFA in cinematography at UCLA, and we shot non-stop. We weren’t writing papers. We weren’t studying theory. We just lived on soundstages.

After film school, I shot anything I could. I didn’t come up through crewing but that also meant I couldn’t curate the work I took too much because I had to survive. But after a little while, features started materializing, commercials took off. It’s been a really exciting journey.

Kirill: Is LA still the place to be? Is LA still the place to start one’s career in this field?

Julia: I do think Los Angeles is a valuable place to start with all the resources it has to offer but it’s not THE place to start. Production is really abundant in a lot of places all over the world. There are a lot of great hubs around the world where you can get started, full of great filmmakers. Everyone’s path is different. Everyone comes from a different place. Nowadays I’m barely in LA anyway. I am constantly flying elsewhere to shoot. But Los Angeles is getting busy again and there are some of the best crews and resources, along with the best theaters, galleries, events. You can stay so extremely busy even when not on set consuming cinema, learning, meeting great filmmakers.

Behind the scenes of “The Dreadful”, courtesy of Lionsgate

Kirill: What do you feel are the misconceptions or misunderstandings about the role of cinematographer and what cinematography is inside the industry?

Julia: One misconception is that it’s this pure focus on camera and lighting. The visual language is the fun part. In fact, it’s the easy part. Maybe this isn’t a misconception more than it is something people often forget.

The job is leading the set with the assistant director, leading and working alongside your crew. There are politics, working with your budget, the schedule. You have to know how to structure a shooting day. You have to be able to look at a shot list and know if you can make your day. You have to know how to reorganize or plan differently should a day fall behind for some reason. You have to be a great communicator and a fast, creative problem solver.

Kirill: Digital looks to continue to dominate your field. Is film a thing of the past?

Julia: I don’t think film is the past. Look at the Oscar nominations this year – a lot of amazing films continue to be shot on film. I definitely believe that we feel that impact.

I love shooting on film. I went to UCLA right as they were transitioning away from it, so all of us were shooting on digital, and all our thesis films had to be digital for the first time. But they were adamant we don’t just roll and roll, that we maintain the discipline and intention that inherently comes with shooting on film when shooting projects digitally.

Even though we’re lucky to have so many digital options, film continues to be a beloved medium and personally, I’m never disappointed when I get dailies back. It’s never not magical.

Behind the scenes of “The Dreadful”, courtesy of Lionsgate

Kirill: The professional cameras are way cheaper than they used to be, and everybody has a smart phone in their pocket that can take good images. There was an idea floating around a few years ago that all of this combined would dramatically lower the barrier to entry and we’d be flooded with a whole lot more movies. But it feels like it’s still difficult to make a movie and get it to the audiences.

Julia: The whole process of getting a movie made in the first place and distributed is a miracle. Despite more access to good cameras and tools, distribution is a whole business. It’s all marketing. If you don’t have good marketing, your movie doesn’t get seen. There are definitely more movies being made than ever before but so many just get lost.

Kirill: There’s a lot of technical advancements in camera bodies, in lenses, in lighting equipment. Is it exciting? Is it frightening? Is it hard to keep up?

Julia: It’s definitely exciting. The tools are becoming faster, they have more dynamic range, and there are a lot more options available. I don’t try to pressure myself to follow every new thing. There’s so many tools – lenses, formats, lighting units. I’ve had the opportunity to go look at new technologies early on which is really valuable. Definitely not overwhelmed by new things – excited more than anything.

We’re going to shoot one of my next movies on film. We were not sitting and talking about all the new digital options for it. We wanted to do what felt right. We should always be keeping up with new tools as they arrive in our industry but a big part, if not the biggest part, of making a film is choosing what feels right. If it’s right for that project, then go for it.

Cinematography of “The Dreadful” by Julia Swain, courtesy of Lionsgate

Kirill: Are you impressed with the advances in lighting equipment?

Julia: Yes, lighting is always impressing me. It’s definitely moving fast. My gaffers are how I’m introduced to new tools in lighting. It’s all allowing us to move faster, make quicker adjustments.

Kirill: How was Covid for you professionally? Is it fully over, or do you still see some remnants of it?

Julia: Covid stole a lot of momentum from a lot of people. It slowed things down for all of us. I felt pretty fortunate as I was doing a lot of music videos at the time and those kept getting produced. Crew sizes got smaller and sometimes my director would be on Zoom, but projects were still getting shot.

I’m sure there’s still that lingering thought of how it could have been if we had had that solid year without a pandemic and were all working. Would we be a little further along in our careers with more work under our belts?

Cinematography of “The Dreadful” by Julia Swain, courtesy of Lionsgate

Kirill: Getting to “The Dreadful”, how did you find your way to it, or how did it find its way to you?

Julia: It came from my friendship and creative collaboration with my friend Natasha Kermani, the director of the film. I was approached about it pretty early on as she’d written it a few years ago. I don’t remember exactly when I got a script, but it was at least a couple years before cast was attached because another script she had, “Abraham’s Boys”, was also floating around. We ended up shooting that first and then went off to make “The Dreadful”.

Kirill: How do you find the balance between the historical accuracy and the emotional authenticity for a story like this? What discussions did you have on the visual style, the atmosphere, the colors?

Julia: We definitely wanted something that felt rooted in realism to some degree so that audiences bought into the lives of these women but because the film has dreamy horror elements, we wanted to push the visuals at times. Color is important to Natasha and I so we knew we wanted to discuss how we implemented it early on. We weren’t interested in a desaturated look. We talked a lot about a green world being the world of Jago’s stories. We talked about bold contrast and color. We also wanted the dreams to feel different so we used these portrait lenses that we’d always been curious about.

We were shooting in Cornwall, England, and wanted to shoot anamorphic to have a wider field to take in the landscapes. It was important to us to add the scope of the terrain as Cornwall is so atmospheric.

Kirill: Was the weather cooperating?

Julia: Yes and no. We got lucky with the kids on the cliff. It’s supposed to be nostalgic and beautiful, and we had this golden LUT [lookup table] that we built for the childhood scenes. We shot them during the second day of filming, and the weather was cooperating.

Then we lost half a day because it started raining. It was the scene where Jago and Seamus were at their campfire. It was supposed to be at night, and it was pouring and we couldn’t put them in the mud. So we made the call to stop for the day and pivot the schedule.

On the last day of production we had torrential rain shooting the finale where Sophie and Marcia are out in a field. I was sinking in the mud shooting up at Sophie for the very last setup. Throughout production we had cloud inconsistencies which changed the amount of ambient light I had to account for. It was all over the place. Things you can’t protect from on a small budget and just have to roll with! But we did a pretty great job of balancing everything the best we could.

Cinematography of “The Dreadful” by Julia Swain, courtesy of Lionsgate

Kirill: What was your lighting setup? Back then it’s pretty much sunlight and firelight. What did you go with?

Julia: I don’t think I had done a movie that was that period, definitely not a feature where it was just sunlight and firelight. When in the church, we added candles for warm background elements. There’s light pushing through the windows there and in the hut. The hut has tiny windows to let in the natural light, and we placed a fire pit in a strategic way, and some candles in a few places. I knew I had to add ambience so we had a little soft box rigged on the ceiling. I didn’t want that to push contrast too hard, otherwise they’d be silhouetted against the windows. I was trying to make it feel like there’s a natural amount of ambience, but everything’s coming from the world – fire or the sun.

The moonlight for the night sequences was the toughest. We had very little crew on this movie and very little time. We don’t have balloon lights or another quick way to create ambience. So we embraced this more directional, green, stylistic look for the nighttime which was something we hadn’t done before. There’s a great shot in “The Ring” with a green night exterior. We reference some bolder night looks and let go of this obligation to light the entire frame at night.

Kirill: Going back to what you said about shooting on film, perhaps on these smaller productions you almost can’t afford to wait until the dailies are processed. Perhaps it’s this advantage of digital that the director can see it straight away.

Julia: There’s truth in that of course. As the cinematographer, you know what it’s going to look like when shooting film because you know your ratios so closely. There is a bit of instant gratification in digital knowing what you’re looking at for all departments but we’ve been shooting film much longer than we’ve been shooting digital and we haven’t had an issue.

Kirill: Was the hut there, or was it built?

Julia: It was a build on location. We had to make some sacrifices. We didn’t even see it until the morning of shooting it. The dimensions ended up a bit small. It was a build because we wanted to feel the interior and exterior simultaneously. They go in and out, and having that connection between the exterior and the interior was really important. So we built it on this field instead of on a stage.

Kirill: The story spends a lot of time in the hut. How do you make it less repetitive for the viewer?

Julia: In general on an indie I hate recycling setups for different moments and so avoid that. We try to have as much scope and diversity as we can in shots when we have a lot of scenes in one space so early on I weighed in on window placement, furniture placement, knowing how I could smartly shoot every side of the hut and allow for more blocking for the actors.

Kirill: What’s the intent of shooting low angles upwards?

Julia: Low angles can be more subjective. You’re in the character’s mind when you’re a little bit lower. It can also be more heroic which Sophie’s suited character at times. There’s a great shot where she comes out of the hut after bringing Morwen back in at the very end, and it’s heroic, looking up at her against the hut. We did that on purpose. Low angles also make spaces feel bigger and we all know the hut benefited from that purely from the standpoint of wanting to see more. I was always against a wall.

Cinematography of “The Dreadful” by Julia Swain, courtesy of Lionsgate

Kirill: What was the choice of going with soft, swirly edges for some of the shots?

Julia: We shot the main story anamorphically, and then we had the Panavision Portrait lenses that give you a circular distortion where you only can keep focus in the center. It’s a little dreamlike perspective. There’s a dream that Anne has in the beginning that’s fully shot on the Portraits, and then there are other sequences that had to do with tapping into a new perspective. There’s a sequence on the beach with Kit and Sophie, and he’s telling her a story, and they’re connecting, and their relationship is changing. It had to do with a more sort of omniscient – but intimate – POV in those instances. A fun specialty tool that we only use a few times.

Kirill: Some of my favorite shots were on the beach with characters silhouetted from a long distance. How do you think about the framing for these?

Julia: The first thing I do is I try to back up the camera as far as possible to see the scope. You have to think about the tide on those coves. One of the last scenes in the movie where Jago approaches Anne on the beach, we completely lost the beach over the course of shooting that scene. They were scooting up the sand during that, and that was tough to deal with. But when they’re meeting and silhouetted, I’m up against the cliff. I had to think about time of day to roll, sun position. The coves and beaches were one of the most exciting things to shoot, because that is why we were there in Cornwall. That is a unique part of the south of England. We wanted to capture the curvature and the colors of the coves.

Cinematography of “The Dreadful” by Julia Swain, courtesy of Lionsgate

Kirill: Do you want people to see it on the biggest screen possible?

Julia: Absolutely. I just had a chance to see it on the big screen with an audience and it’s incredible. The score is amazing, the mix is amazing, the color looks amazing. It looked so good projected and I really hope audiences can go and absorb all of those elements. It’s for the cinema for sure.

Kirill: There’s this quote that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Has there ever been a production that you’ve worked on that everything went to plan and nothing was disrupted?

Julia: No. That’s the name of the game. Things constantly change and everything’s a moving target. You’ll be weeks in and you lose a location. Nothing is real until it’s real. This is why, for a lot of us, the day doesn’t end at wrap. You’re always prepping ahead and pivoting when things change. You become a really great creative problem solver.

I believe a film is still made in prep though in a lot of ways because you are getting on the same page as your director and going in with a deep understanding of what the goal is. So even if the location’s changed and now you have to shoot it in a way that you didn’t initially intend, you know what the priorities are and what to shoot for and fight for. There’s so much value in that. The better your prep is, the better you can adapt together.

Natasha and I always have a smart, doable plan within the confines of our budget and our time and how we want to tell a story. But we are very aware that things are going to change. We’re going to need to cut things, or we’re going to need to shoot a scene differently or shoot it at a different time. We’re able to meet those challenges head on. And because we have prepped together and we know each other so well, we can pivot and not waste time.

Kirill: Is there such a thing as your favorite sequence in this movie?

Julia: That’s so hard. There’s a couple, if I may. I loved shooting the church at night with Jago and Anne in the pews. We moved them over to a different set of pews from where Anne and Morwen sit for mass for when Anne is praying and Jago joins her. He’s pressured to tell her the truth so it cuts back and forth from past to present as well as to Morwen who has the helmet now. I really love that whole sequence.

The other one is the only scene where Jago is in their hut and he’s telling the first iteration of his story of what happened to Seamus. He’s between the two women which was a decision Natasha and I had made. There was a moment where we thought we’d put him on an end, but I thought having him in the center was more interesting. His back is a bit to Morwen which says a lot and he’s favoring Anne. Anne’s not even really looking at him as she’s grieving. It’s so good. We moved through that scene quickly and I love how it looks. There’s so much subtext and as a filmmaker you know the truth so that always makes it fun to shoot. The cast gives such amazing performances around the fire.

Cinematography of “The Dreadful” by Julia Swain, courtesy of Lionsgate

Kirill: What are your thoughts today on generative AI? Some people say it’s destroying human creativity, and some see it as just another tool at their disposal. Where do you find yourself thinking about this?

Julia: The stories we’re telling on screen about the human experience have to come from us. All artistic value comes from us and our experiences, our voices. AI is a tool that we’re going to have to limit to some degree that isn’t going away but I know that we will always have actors who want to act in real spaces, photography captured in the hands of real human artists. I don’t think AI has a place in creative storytelling when it comes to the human experience. Will it help us in other ways? Sure. But the voice of an artist and the images and performances they produce must be theirs.

The experience of telling a story through a visual medium is one that is unique, fulfilling and beautiful. You can feel that in every art form – photography, painting, music. There is an inherent, profound language that transcends. AI needs to be regulated, and we need to be aware of it. We need to allow artists to keep making their art and tell their stories from the human experience.

Cinematography of “The Dreadful” by Julia Swain, courtesy of Lionsgate

Kirill: What is the secret, or maybe the key ingredients, to longevity in this industry?

Julia: It’s this inexplicable, profound love for the craft that keeps you persistent – a lot of us haven’t given ourselves any other choice in a career. This is the greatest career of all time – I can’t believe I get to do this for a living. Ultimately it’s your character and your talent that keeps collaborators calling you back. I think if you take pride in your work, in any industry, that passion makes an impact on people and they see how much you want to do this and how you push for the best on every project.

Kirill: What advice would you give to your younger self? What do you know now that you wish you knew back when you were starting in the industry?

Julia: My younger self wasn’t as confident. I’m still a young cinematographer but I have a very strong voice now and know what I’m doing. So maybe I’d tell myself that it’s less about getting all visually perfect in those early stages. You’re finding out what your taste is, the stories you want to help tell. Pick and choose your battles a little more. You learn what to be precious about in the process.

Kirill: In your group of friends, are you the photographer when people want to take pictures? Is this a blessing or a curse in disguise?

Julia: 100%. I don’t mind it – capturing images is what I do, I love it. The camera always gets passed to me when strangers need a photo too.

Kirill: What’s your favorite color, in your productions or in life?

Julia: I love a teal blue in life. I also love green. Green represents so much and you definitely see it in some of my movies. Natasha is also guilty of this hence a lot of green in our work.

Kirill: What movies would you consider to be the golden standard of cinematography of all time?

Julia: It’s hard to say there’s a gold standard because there’s so much great work out there and cinematography is unique in its language for each story. My taste is also not singular. “Alien” is one of my favorite films – gorgeous color, contrast, atmosphere. So well done. The cinematography sets the tone so well with every other element. Then I love something completely different like “Blue Valentine”. But appreciating cinematography and choosing a gold standard is so subjective. So many films do a fantastic job transporting you into their world through cinematography.

Behind the scenes of “The Dreadful”, courtesy of Lionsgate

And here I want to thank Julia Swain for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of cinematography. I also want to thank Nathalie Retana for making this interview happen. “The Dreadul” is out now streaming on Apple, YouTube and Amazon. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Roger Fires on the set of “Psycho Killer”, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Roger: My name is Roger Fires. I’m a production designer, currently residing in Vancouver, Canada, and originally from Brazil. My passion for film started at an early age. My parents weren’t wealthy, and we didn’t travel the world. The thing that we used to do as a family was to go to movies and plays. When my mom went to do groceries or to a mall, she’d drop me off to watch a play, and she’d pick me up after. That’s how my passion for film and theater started.

I started with interior design and graphic design. In the middle of taking the graphic design course, one of the workshop tasks was to create branding for a travel agency inspired by a movie that we liked. It was right around the time “The English Patient” came out, and I wanted to design something related to it. My project had the ambience from the movie, extending to the uniforms and other elements. Then, during my presentation, the teacher started asking about the texture, the fabric, the outlets, the light switches and all these other things, and that’s when I saw that it goes way deeper than just that look and the concept behind it.

That’s when I started doing deeper dives. I was lucky that all my early jobs were connected to creativity. I was doing illustrations. I was doing vinyls and signage. I was doing fashion design. I was doing interior design. I was doing graphic design, with art direction and advertisement agencies. It feels like I was preparing my whole life to be a production designer, and touching every single aspect of the creative world on the way.

I had a band in Brazil for a while, traveling and doing a lot of things. After a while I wanted to go back and to follow my passion. When I was with that band, I was happier to see people wearing our shirts or doing the artwork, rather than making the music itself. That was around 2009 when I decided that I wanted to be in the movie industry as a production designer – not in Brazil, but in one of the bigger places like Los Angeles, New York or Vancouver. I remember I was talking with the father of my then-girlfriend, and he asked me what I wanted to be, what is my benchmark, who inspires me. I said the name of David Wasco, the production designer that worked with Tarantino and Wes Anderson.

We applied for the permanent residency while we were still in Brazil, then we got approved, and six months later we were moving and jumping into the industry here. I started doing graphic design on a couple of projects, and it wasn’t too long until I asked the production designer I was working with if I could work for him as an assistant art director. He told me that his art director was not coming back, and that I could be his art director. I did “Lost In Space”, got pulled into “Timeless” and a lot of other things. For me it was the matter of absorbing the knowledge and the experience, and trying to jump to the next step. There were some opportunities to make that next step, but I didn’t think that it was the right time. And then it happened at the perfect time, and that’s where I am today.

On the sets of “Psycho Killer”, production design by Roger Fires, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Kirill: Do you feel that the role of the production designer and what you do is well understood inside the industry? If not, what are the bigger misconceptions around it?

Roger: It’s been so many times that I have to tell people what I do. When people like the set, I am introduced as the set designer quite often.

I was just in LA, and I was talking with David Wasco who did this big exhibition about “La La Land” to educate people on the role of the production designer. There was a fantastic exhibition at the Academy Awards from the production design team of “Barbie” to show the process behind it.

We’re the first to get hired. We talk with the director to get the visual direction for the project. One of the things people don’t always realize is how early the art department gets involved in shaping the visual world of a film. There’s a lot of collaboration within the process. This partnership between the production designer and the director is not fully seen by a lot of people. The director Ilya Naishuller of “Nobody” had this funny analogy for it. He says that the production designer and the director are married, and we have a kid, and it’s beautiful. And when we’re about to shoot, I get a divorce and then he gets married to the cinematographer, but we still have a kid. And we still have to talk about the kid and what we’re going to do.

This analogy explains how intense that relationship is between the production designer and the director at the beginning of a project. When I present the pitch, it should align with the director’s vision, and then we elaborate that pitch into the project itself.

The misconception here is that I am not a set designer. Production design is about the broader approach of what the project is, from the details of the props and colors, to the relationship between actors and the set.

Kirill: What are the bigger changes that you have seen in about 15 years or so since you’ve started in the art department?

Roger: The TV sets were not that advanced back when I was starting out. Nowadays, the details are too on your face. You can get away with the amount of detail when you create something fantastical, like a spaceship. I worship Nathan Crowley. He did a brilliant job on “Wicked”, and that is a fantastical world as well.

But when you build a house and it needs a double hung window, you need to do it properly because people know what it looks like. People know how a door looks, and how high a door knob should be. These details become more critical. Now that everything is on streaming, people can go back and compare and see these jumps in continuity.

The biggest change that is happening today is AI. I hope that in the future AI becomes an extra tool. I hope that it doesn’t replace our brain, if you will. I hope it doesn’t take over the decision making process. We come up with ideas and concepts for the things that we want to do, and we pitch that to the director. AI can be integrated into this process to make it more streamlined. But I don’t want to use AI for anything that is on camera. I want to use it as a tool to help with the process.

3D printing has been a big change where you can design the model on a computer and print that to work on shots and ideas. Having said that, I love the idea of the handmade crafted foamcore models. It’s interesting to see how these two approaches compare when the director starts playing with the camera angles. 3D printed models are less manipulated. They become these art pieces that aren’t as easily manipulated once they have been made. If you want to change the color, or make the window bigger, you have to go back to the computer and change the model file. I feel that the old way had more respect for the craft of making those models.

On the sets of “Psycho Killer”, production design by Roger Fires, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Kirill: How was Covid for you professionally? Do you feel that it’s fully over in the industry?

Roger: Covid was hard. There were so many more hoops to jump through to get back home and see your family, to go through the process of being there, to plan your day to start with testing. Then right after Covid we had the twin strikes, and I don’t think that everything has fully recovered yet.

It all accelerated the transition from the movie theaters to your living room, and the rise of the streaming platforms. When you talk to younger people and they ask you when this movie is coming out, you tell them that it’s in the theaters. And then the ask you on what platforms it is going to be. You see these different perspectives between the two generations on their preferences for these experiences. This shift in the perspective of the movie experience is still happening. We still have the theatrical experience, and I think every movie should be watched in the theater.

Covid did help a lot with the care we have for each other, and that is something that I experienced as a graphic designer and as a production designer. Health should always come first. If you’re not feeling well, you can stay home, get better, and then come back. We’re not going to stop the production. We’re not going to not shoot that day. Your health is more important to us. And if I have to wear two hats on that day or someone else has to do something, we’ll do it. You were always going to come first, and Covid helped on that. Go home, get better, and come back when you’re healthy again. Covid opened people’s eyes to see how things can spread, and how people can get really sick, and how much damage even mild flu can cause to immunocompromised people.

Kirill: You said that you want people to go to the movie theater. What makes it a better experience to watch a movie on the big screen?

Roger: This is how I connected with my parents. This is how I connect with my friends. Maybe “Back to the Future” is in the theater, and we’re excited, and we all go together. There’s a level of engagement in the movie theater that we’re not going to have at home.

It might be the most important movie that I haven’t had a chance to watch in the theater. I sit on my couch, and I get a text message or a phone call. I’m going to check what it is – and then you get detached from the movie. When you go to the theater, there’s a process. You dress up. You put on your shoes. You get in line. You get some pop corn. You sit down, turn off your phone, watch the trailers to see what’s coming. It builds up the excitement.

I was doing a commercial in Toronto, and “Oppenheimer” was playing close by in 70mm. I went to watch it, and they showed two trailers, one for “The Holdovers” and one for “The Exorcist: Believer”. It was an elevated experience with the 70mm texture, to see them projected on the big screen. You might have the best TV and the best home surround sound system, but you’re not going to be able to replicate that. It’s the engagement. You disconnect from the world, watch the movie, get out, talk about it, and enjoy the whole experience.

When I was on my way to becoming a production designer, that experience is what I wanted to achieve – to see my movie in a theater. And what I want to do now is keep watching movies in the theaters, and keep seeing people going to watch my movies too. You see people laughing next to you, people being scared – nothing’s going to replace that engagement.

On the sets of “Psycho Killer”, production design by Roger Fires, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Kirill: Getting closer to “Psycho Killer”, how do you explain the enduring appeal of the horror thriller genre, at least in the American culture? What keeps these stories coming? What keeps the audiences wanting to see them?

Roger: It’s the rollercoaster effect. When you go to the rollercoaster, you’re scared. And when it ends, you want to do it again. You want to feel those butterflies in your stomach again. It’s the thrill of the haunted house experience. We watch horror movies to have that butterfly effect, and that is never going to change.

And at the end, depending on the movie, there’s a fulfillment of the evil getting punished. We want to see bad people being punished. That is what most horror movies give us. Some leave an opening at the end for the sequel, of course. But the main idea is that you see the hero punish the bad guy.

Kirill: What brought you to this particular movie or what maybe brought this movie to you?

Roger: I was on my way to a premiere in LA, and right before I was about to board, I got a call from my agents. I read the script on the plane, and when we landed, I got a message saying that they wanted to meet me the next day at 9:30AM.

I loved the script. I’m a huge fan of Andrew Kevin Walker, and “Stir of Echoes” that Gavin Polone produced is one of the best horror movies ever. When I saw their names attached to it, I thought to myself that I had to be a part of it. I talked to Gavin, and I had prior experience with the Winnipeg crew. I didn’t have time to put a pitch deck together, and I did send it after we talked. Then, a couple days later I got a phone call with an offer, and then hopped on the plane to start prepping it with Gavin.

Kirill: What discussions did you have around the visual tone?

Roger: We were going for a more subtle play on the cat and mouse game, on the good and evil chasing and clashing. Jane’s environment is cool and close to heaven. PK’s environment is warm and close to hell. We don’t show any red around Jane until she’s getting closer. The closer she gets to PK, the more warm and red you see around her. There’s a constant battle of colors and textures throughout the movie. We had a big wall of textures, colors, and palettes, and then a timeline of how they would get closer.

Kirill: Between sets and locations, what would be the split between these two in this movie?

Roger: It would be close to 70% sets and 30% locations. One of the motels was a location, and the other three or four are builds. Pendleton’s house is a full build besides the exterior. The Three Mile Island plant is a build. For obvious reasons, you can’t kill a priest in a church. So what we did is you see PK coming in, then he turns left, and we replicated that corner of the church on stage to be controlled.

We didn’t have a huge space to build the sets, so we had to fit them together. The back wall of Pendleton’s great hall is that church set. We built that well, dressed it as church, then struck it, and continued with it as Pendleton’s house.

The four motel rooms were similar to Tetris that would flip. The door would be on one side, and then we would flip that, and the door would be on the other side. For the back section with the hallways, the closet and the bathroom, we built that as modular pieces to mix and move around. That modularization was needed for the fast pace of the shooting that we had. Then we add swap wallpaper, paneling and everything else. It was a challenge, since we didn’t have a huge budget. We had to be creative in making all those motel rooms in the time and the budget that we had.

Kirill: There’s probably tens of thousands of motels just in the United States. Did you want to elevate those spaces a bit? How do you find the balance between the emotional part of it and the real world part of it?

Roger: One of the references that I brought to Gavin was Stephen Shore, and his Americana lifestyle photography. His book has a lot of photos of motels, in a more cold style. And we had another book of brothels with a warm look, as wanted that clash of colors as Jane gets close in her pursuit of PK.

Gavin was adamant that everything had to be real and unnoticeable. Nothing should pop out. If you search for Three Mile Island on Google, ours should look like it. Our motels should look like real motels. I am at the place in my career where I’m happy to create this canvas and be unnoticeably effective, to have the viewer engage with the story and the actors, and not be distracted from that picture.

On the sets of “Psycho Killer”, production design by Roger Fires, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Kirill: How deep did the script go into the details of the Pendleton’s house?

Roger: The script portrays Pendleton as this buffoon. He was rich, and his habits and lifestyle followed his finances. From there we created the story that he used to live in a 25,000 square feet house, and it became a 12,000, and it kept shrinking – but his approach didn’t change. So he doesn’t have enough space for the books and the newspapers anymore, and he puts everything around the staircase. He built the great hall for his parties and his lifestyle.

Apart from the foyer, the whole house is covered with fabric to create the texture. There’s something raw about the texture and the wallpaper that worked so well on the camera. The first time that you see Pendleton as PK approaches and sits down, there’s snakeskin all over. There’s a snake wallpaper, and it’s scripted as imagery of the devil and hell. I pitched the idea to Gavin and Andrew to not be on the nose about the image of the devil. It’s the idea of the uncanny valley. You have a goat, but it has four eyes. You have this woman with a snake wrapping around her. These images are disturbing and uncomfortable.

The script described that the fireplace in the great hall had Lucifer with the tridents and everything else. Lucifer is the angel of death. The Bible representation of an angel is dove wings – and we transform that to have bat wings and snake eyes. It’s not a perfect image of what the devil would be, but a representation of the evil in the Bible. When we see the dining room for the first time, we see the devil and the bibles from the snake. The bedroom where PK decides what he is going to do has this landscape of hell on the wall. The uncanny imagery around the great hall is almost flipping the church upside down. The furniture is the transformed church pews. Our chandelier with the spikes is flipping the church chandeliers.

On the sets of “Psycho Killer”, production design by Roger Fires, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Kirill: How much work went into making the Three Mile Island facilities and that control room?

Roger: It’s a combination of a location and a set. The exterior is on location. When we go into the building, it’s a different place in downtown Winnipeg. And then we built the control room and two sets of hallways around it, and the second floor around the set for the final confrontation in the end sequence.

When we went to the Three Mile Island location, I measured the dimensions of that control room and the different elements in it. Then the director said it should be bigger, and we ended up making it a four feet increase. That also meant adding more panels, more LED screens, more controls, more buttons – along each wall of that octagon room shape. I worked on “Timeless” where we built the NASA launch control room, and we did plexiglass panels with different arrangements of buttons and lights. We ended up doing a lot of 3D printed buttons and consoles for “Psycho Killer”. It was probably the most labor intensive set that I’ve ever done.

If you look at the photos of the Three Mile Island facilities, I’d say we’re about 80-90% of what their control room looks like. The main difference is in how high that upper window is. The real ceiling is about nine feet high, but we made ours higher for the angle that we wanted to have for Jane.

Going back to the accuracy that Gavin wanted, we spent time to understand how the grenade explosion would affect the surroundings, and whether it would trigger the dynamite on his body. I had multiple meetings with the Winnipeg police officer that handles explosives to talk about that. Everything in that sequence is realistic about the Three Mile Island control room and the impact a grenade explosion would have inside of it.

On the sets of “Psycho Killer”, production design by Roger Fires, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Kirill: Have you made your peace by now with seeing your sets getting destroyed, demolished, and torn apart, or is it still a little bit painful to see them go away?

Roger: It’s hard. I’m so hands-on. I’m on the site. I’m with the construction team. I’m there when they build. And I have a hard time to separate from the wood stage of the flats to the final set. I always look at what I should have done differently, because I have a hard time separating that emotion of the flats to what is there.

The Pendleton set was hard to see torn apart because it was such a fun design to do. I shared the concepts of the Pendleton’s house and the Three Mile Island sets, and then I took photos of the finished sets. When you put them side by side, it’s so close that you couldn’t pick which one was the concept and which one was the set photo. We were so happy with how that set turned out, and it was a sweet moment when we finished it. And then the movie is done, and the set is being torn down, and it was sad.

Kirill: What is the secret, or maybe the key ingredients, to longevity in this industry?

Roger: For any position in our industry, 60% is people’s skills. Be respectful. Understand your position that you’re a part of this big well-oiled machinery. Just one loose screw is enough for the whole machine to stop working. Understanding that and respecting the environment that you are in gives you longevity.

We’re in a time right now that we can’t tolerate disrespect. You need to work on your creativity and on updating your skills. You’re constantly learning on every project. And just be a human. This is what we all saw during the Covid years. We’re all human making movies.

There’s another thing. Sometimes a project perhaps is not reaching the audience the way it was expected. Every project has so many people that worked on it, hundreds and hundreds. When you bash that project with a rush critique, it affects a lot of people that put their hearts, sweat and love into it. Sometimes it’s a hit, and sometimes you miss a few spots. It’s such a big accomplishment to make a movie these days, and that should be celebrated as an achievement on its own. Making movies is not an easy endeavor. Respect for the process gives you that longevity as well.

On the sets of “Psycho Killer”, production design by Roger Fires, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Kirill: What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were starting out?

Roger: I think it’s to not take things personally. Everyone has a bad day. Everyone has a different opinion. Your art does not necessarily reflect who you are. People talk to you and they say that they don’t want this, they don’t like the set, they don’t like the approach. It’s hard to not take that personally, and there were a few times that I got hurt at the beginning of my career. But I’m not the director. I’m not the producer. My job is to bring the vision of the director to the screen. You might hit here and you might miss there – but that doesn’t define who you are as a professional. Don’t take it personally.

Kirill: What would you consider to be the golden standard of production design of all time?

Roger: The beauty of the industry is that there’s so many people that shaped you, even if you don’t see it when you watch those movies for the first time. As I mentioned, David Wasco was a huge benchmark, not only professionally, but also personally. Nathan Crowley has this fantastic ability to create worlds. Rick Carter reaches so many levels of creativity. If there’s one movie that I watched and said straight away that this is what I wanted to do, it was “Pulp Fiction” by David Wasco and Sandy Wasco.

Kirill: What was the most memorable food you had during your time on this movie?

Roger: There’s a tapas place in Winnipeg called Peasant Cookery. The first day I went there was fantastic, and then I came back a few times. Winnipeg has a fantastic food scene. And it so happened to be that the son of my paint coordinator on “Psycho Killer” is a Michelin Chef in another restaurant. We went to that place, and it was one of the best meals I’ve had. But Peasant Cookery is fantastic. Every time I go to Winnipeg, I go there now.

Kirill: Do you miss Brazilian food now that you live in Canada?

Roger: I do miss it a lot. A few days ago I took my kids to this museum in Los Angeles. They had Pampa Grill which is Brazilian barbecue, and I had to have it, even as everybody else had something different.

Roger Fires on the set of “Psycho Killer”, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

And here I want to thank Roger Fires for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of production design. I also want to thank Kara Kitchell for making this interview happen. “Psycho Killer” out now in theaters. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

The initial sketch of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Fiona: I’m second generation film industry. My father was a film director in Australia. When I was little, I didn’t really understand it, but I was fascinated by his passion, his happiness, and the fact that I could see that he was engaged in something that he loved. My mother was a film executive, and as a couple they were always engaged and excited to talk about what was happening. Back in the ’80s and the ’90s my father would go off and he would disappear for months and months making films and television mini series. The way I remember it is that he was having adventures.

I definitely visited his sets. I was always drawn to looking at the production design without knowing it was production design. I thought of it as playhouses, and actors dressing up. When I was 15, I did a work experience on one of his TV mini series in the art department. I thought that I can’t ever do this, because the hours were unbelievable. I was leaving with my father at the end of a shoot day, and everybody was staying in the office. People were saying to me “Don’t do this, you’ll have no personal life”.

So I thought to myself that I won’t, and I started studying arts law, but that was terrible. I didn’t fit in at all, and I wound up in theater school. I feel that I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller, and it felt natural to be telling stories through visuals.

I was a theater designer for about 10 years, and in that time I was dipping my toe into short films and music promos, and working with some friends. One of those friends got his first feature film in 2010 and that was the first film that I made called “Snowtown”. I did production design and costume design, and that was the beginning. Since then, I haven’t stopped, other than to have children [laughs].

Construction plans of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: When you look at these 15 years doing production design, what are the bigger changes in the art department?

Fiona: One of the things is time – trying to make films quickly and trying to compress that pre-production process. The whole thing with filmmaking is about tension – and not tension necessarily in a bad way. It’s trying to jam things into short windows, and trying to do things as economically as possible. Sometimes that makes it quite hard, where once upon a time there might be more people, they’re trying to do it with less people.

There’s the whole question of AI and its involvement. Will that mean that we don’t have the time for thinking and contemplation, because productions will realize that you can generate quickly. That’s something that is starting to creep into my working mind. Today we’re sitting at a table, mulling over something and coming up with five or six things. Is there an expectation that we’ll make a hundred things instead with AI?

3D printing is an absolute game changer. It’s been amazing for prop making, for set construction, and for model making. It’s been great for us.

White cardboard model of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: When you talk to people inside and outside of the industry, what do you feel are the bigger misconceptions about what production design is and what the art department does?

Fiona: No one knows what it is. The name is not even helpful [laughs]. In some ways that’s a good description, because it is designing for the production. It’s not a set design. It’s broader. You’re looking at the whole look of the film. I think that most people have no idea. It took my children years to work out what I did. They used to always get the name wrong. They’d hesitate before saying what I did.

A big thing with us in the art department is that even within the film industry there is a degree of invisibility. So much of our work happens before anyone else has arrived. We will be in a room, we will be building sets, we will be doing all this work and thinking and creating. Then, when a shoot crew shows up, it’s done.

This happened on “Hamnet”. There was so much love, care and dedication that went into building the sets for the main house, but we were pressed for time. We only had 9 weeks for it. So many people threw themselves into that project, but when the crew arrived on the first day, all those painters and carpenters and others have disappeared. They’ve moved on to the next set. Our key art director Katie Money stepped away into the background, and no one knew that she was responsible. We prepare everything ahead and then we disappear. I think it leads to people not understanding the epic undertaking that it is to make the sets and the level of care that goes into it.

Set under construction of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: Can anyone be an artist?

Fiona: Anyone can be an artist. Art is about articulating something true to you without overthinking, something that’s completely individual to you. There is no such thing as right or wrong when it comes to creating art. It’s only when something is overthought or it might have an objective behind it. If it’s just purely for the act of expression, it’s art.

Kirill: What separates great artists from mere mortals, so to speak?

Fiona: It depends. There are artists that have extraordinary technique. Great art can be about a singular idea. Does it move you? Are you engaging with it as an audience?

The final set of the Henley Street house with the garden, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: Getting to “Hamnet”, how did you find your way into it, or maybe how did it find its way into your life?

Fiona: It came to me in a conventional way through my agent. I was sent the script. I devoured the script. It was such a fantastic read. It all happened quickly in a matter of days. I was shooting a commercial in Brazil and so I was a little bit pressed for time. I remember thinking about pushing the meeting with the director for a week or so, and they came back to say that it had to be in the next couple of days. So I gathered myself together, met Chloe, and within the next day I was offered the job.

The minute that I got back in the UK, I was looking at the real Shakespeare house and starting to understand the project. We moved really quickly from there.

Kirill: How do you do your research these days? How do you bridge the gap between physical archives and the digital world?

Fiona: Over the last 10 years I’ve been working closely with a researcher called Phil Clark. He helps me gather the more academic dry research for me to understand the period, and he also helps me with creative impulses. We exchange ideas back and forth, while I’m also in tandem gathering my things.

My initial response to the work is almost driven by impulse. I’m not necessarily looking at anything that is accurate or historically appropriate. I’m looking at articulating the way this script makes me feel, and what I think I want to show audiences – and then I will get into what is historically accurate after that. By the time I bring it all together, I’m usually working with art directors and the set decorating team, and they are doing their own research. So cumulatively we will all have a body of research. We will adhere to some of it, and other things will be left behind.

In my opinion, we’re having an emotional response to a text. I’m trying to interpret environments and put them into cinema, and not worry too much about it being a documentary. In fact, it’s the opposite. My job is to avoid taking people out of the film. I want it to feel completely authentic. Certainly in the case of “Hamnet” that authenticity was paramount to the film. It’s so important to understand what would have been and how things would have happened. The book was so brilliant. It was an incredible resource from day one to refer back to.

The interior of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: On an imaginary scale between historical accuracy and, perhaps, visual elevation of some of the emotional parts of it, where do you find “Hamnet”?

Fiona: I honestly think it sits somewhere in between. I believe that audiences are connecting with the film because it has an original take. We’ve created an intimate world where you are brought really close to the characters. You understand how they live. It’s messy, and it’s lively, and it’s not something that feels like a museum piece. We worked hard at trying to make it feel immersive, to make the audience feel that you can be amongst the way that these people live. That was absolutely the objective.

I’ve heard people saying that they are not speaking historically accurate language. Somebody was saying to me that Paul Mescal was doing freestyle in the water, but that wasn’t invented yet. But it’s about the way he’s unleashing himself in the water. As an audience member, it’s more important to see the emotional side of it, what that means for somebody to swim like that.

That’s true with the decoration. The house design is historically accurate, as houses would have been. The Globe feels like the Globe, but we changed some things. We changed the way that plays were put on. We changed the side of the stage. We’re collecting from markets, finding objects that feel right for our film that are not of the period. They cannot be. By now a lot of them would be dust. They’re pieces of furniture or objects that approximate the thing that feels right for that home.

You’re creating a set of rules for yourself about what is appropriate and what is not. We do that internally as a group. Once you do that, it frees you to create environments that feel right for the characters.

Kirill: How long did it take you to find that tree, and how much work needed to be put in around the tree?

Fiona: My memory might be warped, but I’m pretty sure that it was on our second trip to Lydney that we found the tree. The tree, for good reason, presented itself like it had to be part of the film. I have a brilliant greens team in the UK. We added in the roots around the tree, sculpting the place at the base of the tree where she gives birth. We planted all the ferns and the growth around it. When she’s running through, all that was planted.

It’s a protected site and it was sensitive working there. It’s a private estate. You can’t just walk there, so it felt really untraveled and wild. We elevated it and created the areas that we needed for the story.

Building the attic part of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: How do you approach designing and building for natural light that feels authentic to that era?

Fiona: We thought about it in a practical way, and how people would gravitate towards windows. Chloe had wanted to shoot in location only, but we ended up not being able to do that. However, because we went to so many locations, we paid close attention to the way that the houses were structured, to windows and little seats near the windows.

Chloe and Lukasz Zal the cinematographer were not interested in candles, as they found them quite distracting. So we did have a lot of time spent near windows and open fires, looking for ways to illuminate the scenes in natural and authentic ways. The truth of the matter is that they would have only ever had one candle burning, and they would have moved the candle. They wouldn’t have tons of candles everywhere. In fact, Lukasz was blowing out candles all the time. We would have candles for him and he would get rid of them. It’s that element of research of understanding how people lived, and then you can make decisions to honor that or step away from it.

Building the attic part of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: Talking about the main family house, how do you approach envisioning the history behind it, and its evolution over the period of time that the story covers?

Fiona: I remember reading that the house was around a hundred years old by the time of our story. That was a relief, as I didn’t want to build a new house [laughs]. We did various things that helped us give texture and history to the house. We used reclaimed timber through all of the set builds. We gathered reclaimed timber, and that sat alongside new timber that we aged to look like it was reclaimed. We had some pieces that were beautiful and old oak, and then we had pieces that we brought to look like that. Those pieces of oak came with scars, damage and history – and that aged the house immediately.

We did the same thing with objects. We did build pieces of furniture, and we had a collection of vintage textiles. We brought in pieces that already felt like they had a story and a history and had been collected over time.

The thing about that house is it bears witness to lives and generations. The house changes through how noisy it is. It changes through how busy it is. Furniture moves. There’s birth. There’s death. And the house essentially bears witness to it all. That was one of the loveliest things. You see the impact of what happens when there’s two beds and then there’s one. These things are both gentle and seismic in their meaning. We changed the bed drapes on the marital bed from red to blue after Hamnet’s death. It’s a tiny gesture but it registers. You’re plotting the movement of the house. We also plotted the garden and how that changes. It was one of the pleasures of the job.

The final attic set of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: Was it built as a single multi-level set, or was the attic built separately?

Fiona: Narratively yes, actually no [laughs]. We built the ground floor of the house with the garden and everything in the back, and a bit of the street. The street that you see in the film is partially built there. Then the attic was built separately on a platform, just off to the side. And we got a bit clever with it, building Will’s London attic in that same space as the main house attic. Going back to your earlier question, the whole thing was positioned for light. We orientated the house so that it got the most and the best light. The garden was facing out to the back lot and the trees. There’s almost no post-production in there, as you’re looking at real trees that were there.

Kirill: What went into decorating the kitchen? Where the utensils made from scratch, or found in local shops and markets?

Fiona: It was a combination. Everybody goes out and there’s a collection of things brought in. We also made lots of pieces. We made shelving. We did all our ironmongery for the fireplaces and hinges.

The build of that Henley Street house was so short and the detailing was so heavy. You’re trying to get all the textures right. We were dressing and finishing the set at the same time. We were bringing pieces in and taking them out, making sure that everything was fitting the way that we wanted it to fit. I remember it being an organized chaos [laughs]. Everybody knew what they were doing, but the place was absolutely crawling with people. There were painters finishing and detailing and layering, and then greens people in the backyard, and the set decoration team finishing. It was all happening exactly at the same time. Then we handed it over and walked away.

The larger exterior of the Henley Street set, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: When the camera looks down Henley Street and there are four or five other houses, are those just skeletons, or fully built buildings?

Fiona: We added facades to existing buildings. We found a street corner in Weobley with a handful of buildings, and we also built facades on the opposite side from our main house. They were sitting in front of a hairdresser. They were sitting in front of people’s homes. We did the texturing of the road and other things, but it’s mostly anchored in two or three Tudor buildings. That corner was a good perspective to have. If my memory serves me right, we had to hide this gas pump that was in the area [laughs].

Mapping out the facades for the Henley Street buildings, see the gas pumps in the garage, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: Moving to London, did you build the docks, or was it a place that you found?

Fiona: That was a real dock on the Thames that we dressed on top of. We built the hut at the end and we did some surfacing. The whole schedule was based around shooting that low tide. Will goes for a walk on the banks of the river, and it’s low tide that happens quite rarely.

Floor plans for the Globe theater, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: Getting to the Globe, what went into making it, and what did you want to achieve for that long final part of the story?

Fiona: The Globe that exists in London today is not the same original one, so I felt that there was a bit of creative freedom for us to interpret our interior. When I was visiting the real Globe, it did feel a few steps away from our story. It’s got marble columns and it’s ornate in a way that did not feel that it related to the aesthetic of our film. I was relieved to know that there was another Globe for us to build [laughs].

It felt to me like it could feel more rustic and have more honesty to it before it becomes the big shrine to theater that it is today. It was very much a place that Will creates as a home for his plays.

We read that the first Globe was built with reclaimed and stolen timber, and that gave us license to use great oaks and timbers. When we all visited the Globe, Chloe had said to me that it should feel like the inside of the tree. It was important to keep this big set piece within the language of our film. It was absolutely beautiful building it. There’s a lot of attention to joinery and other elements. It has an integrity and a simplicity about it. We only used a few materials. There’s nothing over the top about it.

The most important thing is what is on that stage. That’s the jewel. That’s the thing that catches her eye the minute she walks in – and that was quite deliberate. It’s a part of the concise palette of the film. You have the Henley Street house which has a particular palette that sits alongside the vivid green of the forest. And I’m doing exactly the same thing in that theater. You have the earthy tones of the wood and the plaster sitting alongside the vivid green of the backdrop. These rhymes became important to the natural progression through the film that arrives at that theater.

Floor plans for the Globe theater, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: Are you used by now to see these beautiful creations getting destroyed when the shooting stops, or does it still hurt a little bit?

Fiona: I always love my sets. You have to love your sets because it can be hard work. You want to keep showing up and you want to get them right. But quite often I’m happy to say goodbye.

On “Hamnet” it was a different story. I did not want to say goodbye to any of the sets that we made. I felt so connected to them. There was something different about those sets. The sad part for me are the gardens because they were alive. We created not only the gardens that you see in the film, but on the way from my office to the set we had our own little garden that was for decoration. When I was on my way to the sets, I would go in there and forage, along with my entire set decoration team. We’d pluck things to put into the sets, or we’d find something that was in bloom. I would love to think that the studios have kept our little garden.

The garden of the Hewlands farm, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: Is there such a thing as your favorite set in “Hamnet”, or are they all your handsome babies?

Fiona: It’s a hard one. I was very much in love with the house. It was a passion project pushing that to feel like it was a place that had heart. It wasn’t just a set to be admired. It was somewhere for people to live and for this to hold the story. And to do that so quickly was very taxing. It was so beautiful to be in. We would all stay there. When it was lunchtime, everybody would gather around. Everybody wanted to be there.

Kirill: What was the most challenging day on this production?

Fiona: It was probably not a challenging day, but rather a challenging couple of weeks. We were shooting in the countryside, 3-4 hours out of London. We were building the house, and I was driving and splitting my week between London and Herefordshire. It was hours and hours of driving, trying to keep a handle on everything, and trying to be across everything. I’m not a fan of driving [laughs].

Construction plans for the Globe theater, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: The movie is still playing in the movie theaters and it’s on streaming now. Do you want the viewers to experience this story on the biggest screen possible?

Fiona: I absolutely think this is a film to see in the cinema. It’s a beautiful film, but it’s more because it’s about shared experience. The final moments where we’re in a theater, there’s the theater sequence and you have an audience experiencing emotion in watching a play, and then as the cinema audience you are collectively experiencing something together. It’s something I haven’t experienced before.

One of the strange things for me about making a movie is sometimes you know what you’re doing, but it becomes more crystal clear in your viewing experience. This has happened to me with “Hamnet”. There are so many things that I knew we were doing, and we facilitated and understood – and then watching it I had that aha moment when I really understood it because I was experiencing it. Being in an audience and watching the audience was an absolutely profound experience that I’ve never had before. This is one for the cinema, for sure. You should sit next to people when you’re watching it.

I’ve been told more than once by different people that people sit and watch the entire credit sequence. They’re not moving. They’re sitting with the film, watching all the names and taking the time at the end of a film instead of rushing out.

Building the Globe theater, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: You mentioned generative AI earlier. Some people say it’s an amazing tool, and some people say it’s an existential threat to creativity. How do you see it today?

Fiona: I can see its benefits, but I’m not convinced by it. There is magic that happens between humans, in the process of conversation and thinking and just standing somewhere. You also have an individual’s interpretation of your experiences. We are the sum total of so many parts – where we come from and what’s happened. Therefore, what is the color blue to one person is not the color blue to another person. We all have an individuality, and I’m not convinced that a computer can take that and mimic it.

It’s not necessarily that I have fear and trepidation, even as there’s a restructuring of the world that’s obviously taking place. I have experienced that magic of when an idea dawns on you through process, through standing there and thinking and working through it. It’s absolute elation when it lands. I feel sad that people may not have that elation in their lives, because the answers will come too quickly. There’s something wonderful about teasing that out through thought and time and dreaming.

Kirill: What do you know now that you wish you knew 15-20 years ago? What piece of advice would you give to your younger self?

Fiona: I probably would say to believe that it can happen, and also that I am good enough. I always questioned that for a very long time. I suffered terribly from imposter syndrome, and what a waste of time I now know that was, but at the time I had to work through all of that.

The stage backdrop for the Globe theater, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: You’ve been in this field for about 15 years now, with all those long hours and time pressure from the production side. What kind of separates people that stay in the industry and those that leave it after a couple of rounds? What’s the key to staying in this industry for these long stretches of time?

Fiona: It has to be passion. You have to really love it. It does take a lot, but it also gives back a lot. You have community and satisfaction and creative opportunity and travel. You never know what is happening. I don’t know what I’m doing this time next year. There’s a lot of positives, but you have to have the passion and the tenacity. And you also have to be pretty fearless. We are all freelancers and we don’t know what is around the corner. You have to have a fearless quality that you can’t imagine living another way.

Backstage on the set for the Globe theater, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

Kirill: The last two questions are about your favorite things. The first is what would you consider to be the golden standard of production design of all time?

Fiona: There’s so many. I absolutely loved “The Master”. I love films that have a real attention to detail where the production design is singing in the background, where it’s not crowding anything too much. I love “Cabaret”. When I think of great production design, I think of films that feel like they have a real sense of place.

Kirill: What was your favorite food or dish that you had while you were traveling for “Hamnet”?

Fiona: There was a place in Weobley where we shot that corner called “The Green Bean”. It’s a small deli shop with sandwiches and other things. They had a cheddar and chutney sandwich that was so good. I think I had it every second day. And I loved their scones with jam and cream.

The final attic set of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.

And here I want to thank Fiona Crombie for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of production design. I also want to thank Rachel Aberly and Robin Finn for making this interview happen. “Hamnet” is playing in theaters and is also streaming on Apple, YouTube and Amazon. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Richard: My path into the art department and production designing is quite an unusual one. I studied art up to A level, and then at university I studied English literature and history of ideas. I’d always loved films and TV, and the English literature side of things took me towards cinema studies. Looking at films academically made me start to think about them as not just something on a screen, but something that gets made – how they get written, how they get directed, etc. I never really thought seriously about the process of filmmaking before that point.

Then I realized that there was a film industry in the UK, and it was something that you could possibly get involved with. I started off doing short films with a couple of friends, and then we decided to make a little science fiction movie. I went back to my limited art background. I’d kept on drawing and painting, and I designed some sets for it. I loved the experience and found it exciting. That’s when I started to realize that maybe that was my thing, combining the narrative disciplines that I had learned about in literature studies with my love of film and the visual side of storytelling.

Production design combines those things in an exciting way that I hadn’t realized existed. The average viewer doesn’t really think about production design, and that’s probably a good thing. Production design succeeds if the audience is unaware of it. But when you scratch the surface, you realize it’s a whole discipline and art form with history. That was quite exciting to me.

That was in mid ’90s, and I started assisting a production designer who was making high-end commercials and advertising films being made in the UK. That was a massive eye-opener. You realize the degree to which an environment could be manufactured and the amount of effects that could be involved. On commercials you had quite a high turnover of projects, and so it was very good training. One day you work on a Pirelli tire commercial that involves someone running down a mountain and across a dam and through a tunnel. And then you work on a beer commercial that is set in a stately home.

I started by making coffee, taking location photos, researching reference and other stuff as an assistant, then moved to doing small technical drawings and making models. It was a roots up learning process that went over a number of years in the art department. I did some films, and it was exciting to suddenly be working on long form narrative productions as a standby art director. Then I got the opportunity to start designing commercials and music videos myself, and I did that for a while. As I was making them, I realized that while the commercials are interesting, they were not what I set out to do. So I made the decision to step away from them, and do more films and television as an art director. Eventually I got the opportunity to start designing lower budget films, and it kept on going.

I love that all the different crafts and disciplines combine in the art department. You have special effects, vehicles, set decoration and other elements that create the physical world of the film that goes in front of the camera. You speak to costume, make-up and other departments, and of course the director and the cinematographer. You have all the different things that come into making a film. All these disparate elements of the production come together to create something, and if it’s successful, it feels as if it has one voice. That is so exciting.

Design render for “The Day of the Jackal”, courtesy of Richard Bullock.

Kirill: What do you feel are the biggest misconceptions about the art department and about your role?

Richard: Audiences often imagine that the action takes place in an environment that is simply found. People probably don’t appreciate the amount of forethought that goes into it. Even if it is simply a found environment, which environment is found – as opposed to all the other options? I suspect that a lot of the time people aren’t quite aware that they’re looking at a set. I’ve done things where we filmed an exterior up a mountain in France, and then the interior on a soundstage in Wales – and people have been astonished when I’ve said that.

If you know the tricks of the industry, that would have been fairly obvious. When you’re in it, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of what is quite magical about what we do. And for sure, that’s part of the pleasure of it. We’re making illusions, and when an illusion works, it’s really satisfying.

Design render for “The Day of the Jackal”, courtesy of Richard Bullock.

Kirill: If you look back at these 30 years, what would you say are the bigger changes in the art department since when you started?

Richard: One of the bigger changes is that we’re not shooting on film anymore. We’re shooting digitally, and that has a number of implications. The camera picks up an awful lot more detail. The textures and the amount of layering that goes into what we put in front of the camera needs to be more than what there was before. Film was quite forgiving.

But most significantly, and it’s also linked to digital filmmaking, is the rise of visual effects. Over time we’ve seen the growth in the scale of what you can show and how much you can alter things that are going in front of the camera. You can delete a skyscraper out of the back of a shot that’s supposed to be Victorian. You can add cityscapes. You can add digital matte paintings. The scope of the world that you can build has been massively expanded by visual effects.

The other significant change, which is not directly an art department thing, is camera technique. What the camera does now is much more dynamic than when I started 30 years back. You’re looking at a bigger, more complex world that goes on the screen – which has its implications for the art department too. It’s been an amazing period of time to be working in film.

Another massive change is in the size of the British film industry. When I started in the ’90s, it was pretty small compared to what it is now. There were a few, mostly smaller British films being made. In the last decade or so, coinciding with the rise of the streamers we’ve had a massive expansion of the resources that we’re working with. It’s exciting to be part of that, and to be working on TV shows that were probably beyond imagining when I started off. It’s been an interesting time, and things have changed significantly.

Design render for “The Day of the Jackal”, courtesy of Richard Bullock.

Kirill: There used to be a much clearer separation, if you will, between the world of feature films and the world of TV shows. And that line has been blurred so much that it might not even be there any more. There are so many great stories that are told in a longer format that just “happens” to be chunked into the more traditional episodes, but they feel like long movies that you watch with no breaks in between the episodes.

Richard: I’ve done a lot of TV shows in the last few years, and I’m just starting on a feature film. In some ways, it’s quite a relief to be working on something that is a bit shorter. These big TV series tend to be about a year of your life. This film is an opportunity to do something a little bit different. There’s a sense that this is more like a piece of poetry, rather than a novel. I love doing the big TV series when you have a massive canvas, but it’s also nice to have a change and do something a little more concise every now and then.

To your question, the line has absolutely blurred. The amount of resources, skill, and ambition that goes into some of the TV series now is absolutely equal to major feature films – which is exciting. In my view, the level of TV productions now is in some ways more interesting than some of the film stuff that’s going on, because of the opportunities for storytelling that are there. I’ve just done an adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice”, and it was great to have modern TV series making sensibility applied to a classic novel like that. It’s where it should be.

That’s been a remarkable change. Sometimes, the most exciting things are happening on the TV side of things rather than film.

Production design of “The Day of the Jackal” by Richard Bullock.

Kirill: When I ask what is art and who can be an artist, the usual answer is that art is anything you want it to be, and that anybody can do art. How does one become great at it? What separates great artists from mere mortals, so to speak?

Richard: It’s true that anybody can be an artist, and these days anybody can make a film. Everybody has a camera on their mobile phones.

To your question, some people seem to have the ability to create art that many people connect to in a personal way, something that has a transcendent quality to it. It chimes with something in our humanity or in our sensibility that feels right. It has an appeal to something universal, deep within us. That’s what a great artist does.

Kirill: Do you feel that you need to have this almost divine spark to be a great artist, or can anybody be nurtured or trained to be – maybe not amazing – but good at art?

Richard: It’s something that some people have an aptitude for, but it’s definitely something that needs to be nurtured and encouraged. It needs to be allowed to come forward.

Some people definitely seem to have a natural talent for creating something memorable. Some people have a great eye. Some people have a great ear. Some people have a great mind for narrative. Some people are great performers. There is an element of that that is probably innate to the individual, but there’s no substitute for training and practice to bring it to fruition. Many of the great artists have a certain amount of innate talent, but the thing that makes them really stand out is the fact that they have worked so hard to make it what it is.

I’m thinking of someone like David Hockney whose work ethic is off the scale. There are artists who are no more talented than a lot of other people but who have worked and worked and worked, and that is as critical as having that innate ability. If there is a divine spark then that is only the beginning, it needs hard work and focus to encourage it to burn.

Design render for “The Day of the Jackal”, courtesy of Richard Bullock.

Kirill: Getting closer to “The Day of the Jackal”, I was thinking about the whole spy genre. It feels that the British culture is fascinated with MI5 and MI6, and the spy culture that probably goes back to the days of the Cold War and the days of the British Empire influence. Why do you see so many stories in this genre coming specifically out of the UK?

Richard: It hadn’t occurred to me that it is a British genre. We were inspired by the American conspiracy thrillers, like “Parallax of View”, “All the President’s Men”, and “Three Days of the Condor”. But you are right, we have James Bond, that overshadows the entire genre, and the works of John le Carré.

Why are the British so interested in that stuff? Perhaps it resonates with the sense of the inner workings of the state, and the excitement of seeing behind the curtain and how things work behind the scenes. The spies tend to be normal people who are in extraordinary situations. It’s a way of identifying yourself with someone who is going into a world that is unknown to us, but we can identify with the character who’s in there. We’ve got the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the nobility that is not a world that we can identify with so easily as a normal person – but maybe a world of spies is something that you can identify with a bit more.

Bond and Le Carré present two very different conceptions of the British spy world. Bond is glamorous, aspirational and action-packed. Le Carré feels authentic and clever, more cerebral. In a way Day of the Jackal combines these two archetypes. The Jackal is more like Bond, he’s cool, handsome, sophisticated and violent. Bianca is more from the Le Carré school. She is an outsider within the establishment, she’s clever and analytical. She is a ‘normal’ person who has a ‘normal’ family life, but when she goes to work, she goes to work at MI6.

You have the idea that these are people from a relatively normal background who’ve somehow gone into the dark workings of the state.

Production design of “The Day of the Jackal” by Richard Bullock.

Kirill: How did you approach taking a cornerstone cultural event – the book and the original movie – and reinterpreting it for the world of 2024?

Richard: It started off with the scripts from Ronan Bennett. I was sent the first three scripts, and they were exceptionally good. I’d seen the movie when I was a kid. I was born in 1972, and my dad was reading “The Day of the Jackal” in the hospital waiting room while I was getting born, so it’s in my DNA [laughs]. It was a rare British action movie back in the ’70s that wasn’t a World War II film.

When this came up, the first thing I did was to watch the Fred Zinnemann film again. It’s so good, and it was a great inspiration to us in terms of its tone. What we did was quite different, but just tonally it was great. Ronan’s script has similar coldness of the original novel, which is difficult to distill. The genius of the novel is that you’ve got a killer that you want to survive. You’re interested in following his story. In a way, he’s the hero. But you also know that he doesn’t succeed. In the book, you know that he doesn’t kill Charles de Gaulle, but you’re still at the edge of your seat. That’s the difference between the book and the series.

In the original film there’s the almost documentary sense of realness, and that was something we aspired to. We were heavily influenced by those conspiracy thrillers from the ’70s in terms of the visuals. It’s curated reality, but hopefully you don’t feel like you’re seeing a manufactured world. It was imagined in a detailed way. We set out to balance each scene against the other, and create a coherent look and style. A lot of that comes from Chris Ross the cinematographer and Brian Kirk the director. We had great concept art from Ioan Dumitrescu who, time and time again, comes up with key images that we keep on referring back to.

That’s how we started – references to art and photography, listening to music, and then starting to look at the locations that were available. We were based in Budapest, and that drove the decisions on what locations we could use and dress, and what sets we would need to build.

Production design of “The Day of the Jackal” by Richard Bullock.

Kirill: How much time went into building those sets for MI6?

Richard: Construction and dressing took about 12 weeks, and another 5-6 weeks of design before that. It’s quite a long process.

Kirill: What about Jackal’s villa in Cadiz? Did you go to Spain for it?

Richard: We didn’t go to Spain. We looked extensively for locations to start off with around Budapest and Hungary, but we weren’t finding it. So we went to Croatia, which is a drive from Budapest – a long drive. We looked at various locations, and the place we eventually chose was mainly because of its view out to sea and this beautiful swimming pool. The existing structures at the location were quite basic. Two separate holiday houses that had been built by a local guy. Nothing remarkable except for its extraordinary setting. We built a connecting structure that joined those two buildings together. We brought in a lot of plants and greenery to landscape the grounds. We used one entrance to the kitchen on site to get in and out, but all of the other interiors were back in Budapest on a stage.

Production design of “The Day of the Jackal” by Richard Bullock.

Kirill: Where was the island of the main target?

Richard: The exteriors were in Croatia, and the interior was a location in Budapest.

Kirill: Did you go to Estonia for that concert venue?

Richard: We had our second unit that went to Estonia, Spain, Munich and other places for establishing shots. The Estonia exteriors were filmed mainly in Budapest, and some in Croatia. The concert venue was in Budapest, and we built the lighting rig from which the Jackal observes the concert.

Production design of “The Day of the Jackal” by Richard Bullock.

Kirill: What’s on your mind as you want the viewer to believe that you are in Spain while you’re in Hungary or Croatia? Is it the vegetation, the quality of the sunlight, anything else?

Richard: All of the above. I have friends in Spain, and I was sending them photos and asking if things felt right. Plus I know the area around Cadiz which we were replicating, and it felt like a good match. You also have to consider how any one specific location balances with all the other locations and sets in the production. Croatia is a remarkable place. I’ve filmed there before for France, Russia, Tel Aviv, Moscow and other places, and now Spain and Afghanistan. We filmed all the Afghan sequences on a Croatian island called Pag. It’s an incredibly adaptable place, but you need to be disciplined about how you carve it up, so you don’t overlap between your looks. You have to be specific about your Spain style, your Afghanistan style, etc.

Budapest is a bit the same, but a city. It can double for a lot of different places, and again you need to be disciplined. For Estonia we use the old town which is on the Buda side of the Danube. It has a specific architectural style that you don’t see much in the rest of Budapest. Our graphic designer Mary Wainwright went to Estonia to photograph signs and collect newspapers, as graphics and signage do a lot of the storytelling. We also recreated Istanbul, Paris and Munich in Budapest.

Kirill: Do you sometimes get cautious about collecting all this stuff, so you are not seen as a spy yourself?

Richard: We rebuilt the entrance to the MI6 building in Budapest. We wanted to show Bianca coming out of the underground at Vauxhall in London, walking across the street, a wide shot of the building, then a cut to a top shot of her going into the building through the gates. The gate is a build in a back-lot in Budapest, and we had to photograph the real location as extensively as we could to replicate it. That was quite interesting. We got a few funny looks from the security people at MI6.

There was a time when taking photographs was regarded much more suspiciously than it is now. Now you can get away with photographing a lot more. Before digital photography became so common and in the period after 9/11 it was really difficult to take photographs in the city of London. You had to be a little bit cautious.

Production design of “The Day of the Jackal” by Richard Bullock.

Kirill: What was the most challenging day for you on this production, and what was the most challenging set to work on?

Richard: There were quite a few challenging days. We had times when we were shooting in multiple locations, which is always tricky. You’re splitting your team to make sure everything is properly covered.

We were building two sets together in the same studio space, and we had an explosion in one. It’s the apartment where the Jackal takes his shot at the beginning when he kills the German politician. That was a built set on stage, and in the end it blows up. And the other set was the office building where we first see him tracking the son of that politician. That was on the same stage, and we were absolutely assured by the special effects guys that the explosion wouldn’t do any damage to any of the other sets – but it did do a little damage. That was an interesting day [laughs].

You always get delays. We were laying a very specific kind of resin floor for the MI6 headquarters, and that didn’t work properly, so we had to do it again. And by that time they were filming on the stage next door, and that was causing issues with fumes. You had to let it settle for 24 hours and then we had to dress it, so that was stressful. You’ve got a schedule to keep to, so getting everything ready for the shoot was challenging.

The most challenging set was the studio build of MI6 headquarters because there were so many different elements to it. You have lots of lights, lots of screens with lots of information on each desk, meeting rooms, and long corridors. We based that on “All the President’s Men”, with the low ceiling and specific ceiling lights for Chris Ross the cinematographer. There were hold-ups getting the cables and the right components. There was some huge figure of the number of kilometers of cabling that was up there. You have the graphics on the video screens, the lighting overhead, the lighting on the desks, the floor drying and getting the right amount of shine. That was a difficult set because of all the different factors involved.

Design render for “The Day of the Jackal”, courtesy of Richard Bullock.

Kirill: Now that you’ve been in the industry for a while, have you made your peace with seeing your sets being torn down at the end of the production, or is it still a bit painful?

Richard: Before a set is struck, I always have a moment where I think that this is the last time I’ll see this in this state, but I get over it quite quickly. It’s a thing, because you do love them. A successful set has its own life and its own energy. But that’s their nature – they are quite fleeting.

You love a good one, of course. A lot of effort goes into it, from so many people. And then hopefully it endures, if the production is successful. If it all comes together, it will endure in people’s imaginations. Going back to what we were talking about at the beginning, a successful production can engage the audience’s imagination in a significant way and become part of their imaginative landscape.

Production design of “The Day of the Jackal” by Richard Bullock.

Kirill: How do you think of success? Do you look at the reception from the viewers and the critics? How did your peers receive it? At the commercial box office numbers?

Richard: It’s all of those things, but also your personal judgment of how it looks. If everybody likes it, then that’s great and that’s a huge bonus. But it’s really your own sense of whether it has worked or not which is the most important. Then that ties in with whether your closest collaborators agree. Does the director love it? Does the cinematographer love it? Does the cast identify with it? Does it help with their performance, and does it help tell the story?

For that MI6 set, Lashana Lynch who played Bianca took me aside and thanked me. That meant a lot. It wasn’t an easy set to do, and it was great to know that it helped her feel at home in it. I remember quite a few people walking onto that set and being excited to be there, because it felt like you were in a full world. It didn’t feel like you were in a set. If you feel like the illusion has worked, that’s really exciting.

Kirill: Generative AI is on everybody’s mind recently. How do you see it today? What do you feel most excites you about it, and what do you feel is your biggest concern about it?

Richard: It’s hard to say. Funnily enough, I’ve got my first meeting tomorrow morning about designing for something which is going to be heavily using AI for environment building.

That’s probably the most exciting thing to me – that it offers a great chance to build environments. We were talking earlier about what VFX has allowed us to do, and it feels like it’s more of that. If you want to show a street in 1970s London, 20 years ago you would have been shutting down the street, filling it with period cars and signage, etc. And now, and this is going to be that conversation tomorrow, you could probably show AI a few photographs and give references, and it goes off and builds it.

One way or another, it looks like the world that we can show on screen is getting bigger – again. That is exciting.

The scary side of it is that it might render large parts of what we do redundant. Maybe we won’t be building great big sets anymore. Maybe it’ll all become something that’s done on the computer – but I somehow doubt that. I’ll be very interested to see how things develop. I am pretty sure there will always be a place for the more traditional types of filmmaking alongside the AI stuff.

Construction plan for “The Day of the Jackal”, courtesy of Richard Bullock.

Kirill: What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were starting out? What advice would you want to give to your younger self?

Richard: One piece of advice would be immediately ignored by most young people [laughs] which is to have patience with people, to remember that everybody has things they have to deal with, that everybody has their issues. Be patient and persevere. Keep going. Keep an open mind and stay interested. Remember that what we’re doing is incredibly exciting. It’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re quite privileged to be working in this industry. Stay excited about it.

Recently I have been very impressed by some of the new generation coming into the industry. I believe in evolution! They seem very smart, talented, mature, and importantly, considerate to others. In the end, the people are the most important thing.

Kirill: What keeps you going in the industry?

Richard: I still love what I’ve always loved about it. I’m working in my favorite medium which is film. I’m working in this specific area that combines narrative with art: visual storytelling. I’m always meeting interesting new people. Some things are always different. You always get a new challenge.

Sometimes it is difficult balancing it with family life, but you have to make that work. Sometimes you have to sacrifice doing a job that you might like to do, because it doesn’t work for your family. That’s part of it. Sometimes you do horrible jobs. Sometimes you do jobs which are rough and stressful. And then sometimes those are the projects that you’re most proud of when you finish and you look back at it.

It’s not just one thing that keeps me going. It’s all of those things. It’s an extraordinary way to work and it’s still keeping me interested.

Production design of “The Day of the Jackal” by Richard Bullock.

Kirill: My last two questions are about your favorite things. What would you consider to be the golden standard of production design? What productions did you look up to, what productions shaped your own taste, what would you consider to be the classics?

Richard: One of the first films that got me very excited about the portrayal of a totally new kind of world was Terry Gilliam’s film “Brazil”. It still stands out. His work is fantastic. I saw “Bladerunner” at around the same time, which also felt like a window into a new realm of the imagination. Ridley Scott’s work is hugely inspiring. These are two auteur directors who both came from an art and design background.

As a kid I remember seeing “The Empire Strikes Back”, and when I left the cinema I felt like it had actually happened, like I had experienced something real. I remember the moment I saw a magazine with the storyboards from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and I got my first inkling of what goes into making a film. So Lucas and Spielberg. Both films designed Norman Reynolds.

The work of Dean Tavoularis, including “Apocalypse Now”, “The Godfather” films, and “One From the Heart” is production design at its best.

I love “A Matter of Life and Death” by Powell and Pressburger, designed by Alfred Junge, where you have a self-conscious kind of production design. You know it’s theatrical, and that was revelatory.

Richard Sylbert could possibly be my all time gold standard if I had to choose one. “Catch 22” is an exceptional piece of production design. “Chinatown”. “Rosemary’s Baby”. Jack Fisk could be another – “Days of Heaven”, “There Will be Blood”, “The Revenant”. Then there are David Lean’s films designed by John Box. The films of Stanley Kubrick who worked with exceptional production designers including the visionary John Barry; Ken Adam, a master at the pinnacle of the craft; Anton Furst, another visionary; and Anthony Masters whose technical excellence on 2001, I would argue, had a significant cultural influence globally.

I also have to mention the early films of Werner Herzog as a massive influence. And perhaps counter-intuitively the films of the Dogme movement including Festen and Pusher.

Production design of “The Day of the Jackal” by Richard Bullock.

Kirill: Of all the places this particular production took you to, what was your favorite place to eat at?

Richard: There’s a town called Opatija in the Istria region of Croatia. You can walk along a coast path north and come to a small village called Volosko. There, beside a small harbour, you will find Plavi Podrum, my favorite restaurant. I first went there when I was working on “McMafia”, and then we went back there for Day of the Jackal. It’s an absolute standout, you can’t beat it. They have absolutely fantastic seafood, and very good Croatian wine.

Production design of “The Day of the Jackal” by Richard Bullock.

And here I’d like to thank Richard Bullock for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of production design, and for sharing supporting materials. “The Day of the Jackal” is available for streaming on Peacock. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Kirill: We spoke about your work on “Nightmare Alley” in mid 2022. How have these last three years been for you, professionally and personally?

Tamara: I’ve moved from Toronto, which was our home base for many years, while working in the film industry. We built a house in the woods in Cape Breton by the ocean, and we’re living here now, which is really nice. It’s been a big year of change, finishing “Frankenstein” just over a year ago and landing here in Cape Breton.

I’ve taken this year off. I’m at an age now where I’m going to be picky and choosy about what I’m going to work on. I’m trying to do stuff that is a little bit more appealing to me emotionally and politically – not that “Frankenstein” wasn’t – but that’s also a little more accommodating to a change of lifestyle. “Frankenstein” was a very long project for me. I worked on it for almost two years and then took the year off. And now I’ve been doing a lot of publicity and interviews about it. It’s come back at me in a big way, which is wonderful because the movie is doing well.

It was a passion project for Guillermo and me. One of the things that we intended for the film was to make it very handmade, particularly in this age of the increasing use of AI. Guillermo is a big supporter of not letting AI replace human creativity. It’s not something we should be relying on to create our own artwork, masterpieces, and cinematic journeys. Ones and zeros don’t have human emotions. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ve been trying to do my own artwork, which is actually hard [laughs]. It’s much easier to work on a film that I’ve been doing for almost 40 years. But I’ve been trying. I’ve been trying to do a graphic novel as well.

I was so involved in living and breathing while I was doing “Frankenstein” every moment of my day, 24/7. I was dreaming about what I was going to do for sets, there were so many sets and layers within sets, it took over my psyche. We had approximately 110 sets and locations, and 20 or more studio sets. The lab in the water tower was comprised of eight different separate set builds, both in studio and on location, exterior and interior. It had several different looks. It started as an abandoned water tower, and then there’s a scene where it’s renovated. Following this, there’s a scene where it’s the operational lab during the moment of creation. Finally, there’s the destruction scene and the aftermath. The same goes for the tower lobby. When you come in, it’s run down but intact. And then later on, it is post explosion, and it’s winter when the creature goes back and finds out his true story of creation and how he came to be.

All of the “Frankenstein” sets had to be carefully orchestrated and planned out to tell those stories. We ended up shooting it in order, because we were making changes that we couldn’t go back on. It was also helpful to be in story order as much as we could for the actors and for Guillermo while directing.

Production design of “Priscilla” by Tamara Deverell.

Kirill: How was “Priscilla” for you?

Tamara: It was great, it was a breath of fresh air. It was really nice working with Sophia. It was like working on a memory poem, in a way. People ask me how I replicated Graceland, and I both did and did not. I did what I considered to be Priscilla’s actual memory of Graceland when she first arrived. Then we evolved it with two distinct looks for different time periods.

When Priscilla lived at Graceland, it was not the Graceland of today. So when people ask if I visited Graceland, I say that I didn’t as it wouldn’t have served a purpose; it’s so different in our movie. We wanted to be this poetic memory. Memories are strange things. When Priscilla first arrived there, Sophia wanted this feeling of a white, creamy wedding cake. That’s what I wanted to evoke in the space.

We did want to make it feel like Graceland. Elvis had this crazy 15-foot-long couch, and we custom-built it. I purposely made it very tall because Jacob Elordi is such a tall man. I did have the blueprints from the original Graceland, and I extended the ceiling height to accommodate Jacob. So we heightened that couch a bit for him, and when Cailee Spaeny, who played Priscilla, sits on it, her feet are dangling. We thought carefully about a lot of things that we could control in that movie, because we didn’t have a big budget for that. It was certainly no “Frankenstein”.

We cobbled it together. It’s amazing the things you can do. You don’t have to have all the money in the world – just some clever and creative choices and a thoughtful colour palette. We had a wonderful cinematographer, Philippe Le Sourd, he had worked with Sophia many times in the past. Sophia is not used to shooting in studio sets, but we had to shoot in the studio because you’re making Graceland. You’re not going to find that anywhere. And she found the whole thing quite magical to see this set come out of nowhere. It was a beautiful film, and I was very proud of it.

We built Priscilla’s little teenage bedroom and the family home that would have been part of the U.S. Army base in Germany. We built onto the front of an existing Southern plantation style building for the exterior of Graceland, which I had used many years ago on “The Feast of All Saints”. I remembered the mansion, which is how we found it again. We built a facade onto the existing exterior of the house to make it look similar to the real Graceland. Again, poetic notions and poetic license freed us up to give the essence of Graceland without actually being there.

Tamara Deverell on the water tower lab set in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Do you feel that people look at these stories differently when it’s something from within their lifetime, perhaps an expectation that it needs to be more true to the form?

Tamara: It looked enough like Graceland to get the idea across, and I think people understand that this is a different time period in Graceland. It’s not the Graceland the way it was when Elvis left.

We built Elvis’s bedroom, and there are not many pre-existing photographs of it. I had a sense of where it was in the house, and I replicated that. I went on a little bit of research and thought about my feelings about Elvis. I knew that in the later period, he had leather upholstered doors for soundproofing, and we replicated those, for example. Elvis is king, and we had royal blues and golds and blacks in there – but masculine and dark. You find some things about Elvis while making the movie – that he had blackout blinds because he used to sleep till two in the afternoon. Back then, the remote-controlled blackout blinds were not common, but Elvis had them, of course. We played up with some of those facts that were there.

Kirill: Last time we spoke, you talked about people wanting access to entertainment in their own homes, and how the pandemic accelerated that trend. Do you want the viewers to watch these big stories on the big screen, or should the industry meet the viewer where they are, so to speak?

Tamara: Movies should still be seen in a theatre. It’s a very special place to be because you’re sharing the experience with people. It’s really one of the few places where you are told to turn off your phones. When you’re watching TV in your house, your phone is right next to you. People are so addicted to their phones. Going out to a movie is still a date night thing. It’s still a place to go.

There’s nothing like seeing a big movie on a big screen. You can have the biggest TV in your house, and it’s still not going to be the same experience. The sound is better. The darkness puts you in the mood, and you are sharing this experience with other audience members. That being said, I live in the country, and there is no movie theatre here [laughs], so I’m quite reliant on my TV now.

It’s becoming more and more difficult to see movies, as movies are struggling to be made. Guillermo was doing a Q&A session recently, and somebody asked him why he got Netflix to produce it. And he answered that it’s not like the directors are sitting there with people feeding them grapes, and studios and networks trying to lure them to come and work with them. You’re struggling to find somebody who will support you, and Netflix actually supported “Pinocchio” and “Frankenstein”, and let him do what he wanted. That kind of support is the reason why he went to Netflix. They were gracious. They didn’t interfere with our process. I didn’t have to respond to any notes from them. Guillermo wasn’t told what to do. They said, “Here you go, make your movie, and we’ll support you”.

On the water tower lab set in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: What separates great artists from mere mortals, so to speak?

Tamara: Artists are mere mortals [laughs]. As for what makes a great artist, it is honesty and the human touch. Whether you’re doing something out of fibre art or making a movie or writing a book, the question is: is it coming from your heart?… your memory and your humanness? That’s what art is about. We’re about being humans.

This is the core of the ongoing AI debate. I use AI all the time in small ways in Photoshop. It’s there, but I’m in command. I’m not using it to tell my stories. Artists are storytellers in whatever form they take. That is the only thing that we can do as humans.

Kirill: Do you feel that some people cannot break through because they cannot expose themselves fully with their vulnerabilities and insecurities and honesty?

Tamara: It’s a struggle, not just for artists, but for everybody, to expose your vulnerabilities. Are artists exclusively expected to be able to expose themselves? In a way, yes. You’re putting yourself out there, but there are many ways of doing that. You can do that as a business person. You can put yourself out there and say, well, this is my business, and I want to run it this way because I believe in the environmental causes, so that’s how I’m going to run my business.

It’s hard to put yourself out there, especially as an artist, because you’re exposing your vulnerability. Maybe that’s why I struggle with it, because I don’t want to be vulnerable, and I need to to do my own artwork [laughs]. That’s why I think it’s easier for me to work for other people, creating their artwork. When I work with Guillermo, I’m doing his movie, not mine. I’ve been learning this over the last year, it’s really difficult to put yourself out there, to be honest and do something that is going to satisfy you, but also something that is going to speak to people. It’s not a popularity contest. Some artists try to be popular, but really what you’re doing is trying to be honest and bare your soul.

Sketch of the after-fire math of the lobby stairs in the water tower in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

Kirill: Getting to “Frankenstein”, what do you feel is the secret behind the longevity of the character and the story? Why does it have such a powerful grip on our imaginations?

Tamara: It’s really a story about men playing gods, and a parenting story about a father and a son. For Guillermo, that was very much a personal journey that he went on, first reflecting on his relationship with his father and then examining himself as a father.

For me, it’s a great tragedy, and the story speaks to me as a woman, as it’s about men who play gods. You see that time and time again. It’s the wars that we have… It’s the conflicts that we have. Victor Frankenstein creates this creature as an act of his own ego, not as an act of pure creation. He’s made a child, and then he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s the worst father ever [laughs]. And the fact that the creature forgives him at the end is amazing.

It’s a haunting story of father and son, a story of creation, and of playing God. It has all kinds of religious signifiers. I’m not a religious person, so that doesn’t really speak to me, but I connect to the human emotion of creation and then destruction, of trying to find a connection and forgiveness, which is what happens at the end of the movie, a sense of moving on.

Sketches of the lobby stairs in the water tower in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

Kirill: Do you feel the story wouldn’t have the same impact either without the second part or having the parts switched?

Tamara: The whole movie is told from Victor’s point of view, similar to Mary Shelley’s book, which is told from the captain’s point of view in a series of letters. In the movie, even the creature’s story is told from Victor’s point of view, and then from the creature’s point of view. It’s a strangely layered story, but it’s Victor Frankenstein’s story.

The compassion of telling the creature’s tale is his resolve, as he’s dying, that the creature was “goodness” and was worthy of being created. Victor recognizes that he just missed the boat in terms of his respect for what he created.

Kirill: I can see how you can say that he’s the worst father, because right before he lights everything on fire, he tells the creature to say one different word to change his mind, and even as the creature says Elizabeth’s name, Victor goes on to burn the whole place to the ground.

Tamara: But he does have a moment of reconsidering. He runs back. He has a moment of doubt. But it’s just a moment [laughs]. It’s too late for him.

Floor plans of the Frankenstein villa library in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

Kirill: You said this movie took two years to make. Can we start with where you went to scout the locations and what you settled on?

Tamara: Guillermo was still writing the script during my first 2-3 months. I reread Mary Shelley’s book. I reread the partial script that Guillermo had. And I started looking at locations. We had scouts all over. We were looking in South Africa. We were looking at Croatia, Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, England, Scotland, and Ireland for locations.

That was a lot of work. I honed them down, and then I would show Guillermo, and it seemed like our best bet was to focus on the UK, because we did want to be in Edinburgh and Glasgow, as that’s where part of the story takes place. And some things ended up as builds, like the Frankenstein Villa that was comprised of five different locations, including a studio set. It wasn’t easy getting exactly what Guillermo wanted in one place.

The other big thing I was doing during those first months was heavy research. We couldn’t find a ship that worked for our story, so I had to build a ship – so I had to learn about shipbuilding and the types of Arctic exploration ships. Some of the research was online, some was at museums, and some was going to look at real boats. I went to a maritime museum in Halifax. I went to the Cutty Sark in London. I went to the Glendell in Glasgow.

Then you have the technology of the Victorian and the industrial revolution of the time that you see in the steam pumps that we used in the lab. The story is at the edge of reality and fantasy. Guillermo pushes the fantastic, and I push the historical – and somewhere in there, we get what we want, which is a great union of minds. It’s a great way to work for both of us.

After the location scouting, we decided to stick with the UK. There were possibilities everywhere, but the UK seemed the most sensible. That’s when I began the second part of my journey, spending time with Guillermo as we scouted, along with our concept artist Guy Davis. We saw the Wallace tower in Scotland and other similar towers that inspired us. Guy and I would be sketching at night and coming up with ideas for the abandoned water tower that became the lab. Guillermo and I would look at certain stones on certain floors of all these different places.

You find certain tile patterns and certain colour tones, you get a feel of the tone of the cobblestones in Edinburgh, and you bring it to the sets. I went to Preston Mill in Scotland to see a real mill house, but we ended up building the mill house for the blind man based on a medieval building I saw in the Czech Republic. It was a bit of a different journey than your regular film.

Floor plans of the Frankenstein’s Edinburgh apartment in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

Then I started getting my crew together, and we started drawing the lab and the ship, which were our two biggest sets. There are a lot of complexities in the lab build. We had the top pinnacle where he climbs with the lightning rod, which was one set. The level below where Harlander falls through the chute that runs through the whole water tower was a separate set. I was scared that somebody was going to fall into the hole. It wasn’t as deep as we have it in the film, as visual effects were added to elevate the visuals, but I was always worried that some carpenter or painter would hurt themselves.

The tower design followed to suit the story. Guillermo needed the beat of him going up. He needed the beat of them falling, and he needed the chute to go all the way through to the creature’s cell, which would have been below the ground. We were doing schematics to figure out what the relationship of all the spaces were in the tower, including Victor’s quarters to the side. Maybe the audience doesn’t need to build the whole map in their head, but I felt that it was helping us to know where we are in each scene.

Kirill: Going back to Frankenstein’s villa, you mentioned that it was five different builds. How much went into Victor’s bedroom?

Tamara: That was actually his father’s bedroom, and we called it Leopold. There was a scene that was cut out of the film with Leopold and younger Victor in that bedroom, and maybe someday Guillermo will do a cut and put that back in. I designed it as Leopold’s bedroom. We had a big stunt sequence in it, and that’s why it was a studio set.

My challenge was to bring all the elements of these different locations together. Going back to five locations, the bedroom studio set was the first one. The second one was Gosford house for the main exterior and the main foyer. Then we had Wilton House for the grounds. Guillermo loved that house, and he was excited to shoot at the grounds and the family cemetery with the big gravestone that we built. Then we shot Burghley house for the mother’s bedroom and the bow room with its beautiful murals. Wilton and Burghley are both outside of London, but 2-3 hours in different directions. And the last one is Dunecht house in Aberdeen, which is a private family residence that had never been filmed before. We shot the father’s big library there, and that scale and length were exactly the cinematic language Guillermo wanted.

Sketch of the Frankenstein villa library in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

When I was doing the bedroom, I was trying to take elements from all of these different locations to bring them into the world. These locations work together, as there is a certain similitude between them. I would take the wood floors from one, the marble from another, the murals from the third one. The pink marble was from the foyer of Gosford. I photographed the murals from Burghley and Wilton, and used them in the ceiling. It brought it all together.

On the set of Frankenstein’s Edinburgh apartment in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: What about Victor’s lab in the city?

Tamara: I called it his Edinburgh apartment because that’s where he lives at the time. He does the medical lecturing in that round hall, which was a studio set. Then we go through the streets of Edinburgh and Harlander meets up with him, and then they go up to the apartment, which is another studio set. That apartment was one of the first ones we’ve built. It was crooked, it had big skylights which were a challenge and an opportunity for our cinematographer Dan Laustsen.

I did my research, and I had a photo collage of different buildings and different elements that I liked. I showed them to Guillermo, and then started doing floor plans and elevations. He loves the length. We had the same thing with Lilith’s office on “Nightmare Alley”, which is just long. He’s constantly getting me to push the length, because it frames so beautifully. Victor’s apartment is a long set.

We were looking at Bernie Wrightson’s work, who’s sadly no longer with us, and his widow came and visited us on the sets. In a way, we considered him posthumously one of our illustrators. He did a fabulous series of Frankenstein drawings – some of which Guillermo owns – with all these details of the lab bottles, the hanging balls, the equipment and just this melee of stuff in front of the windows. We were paying homage to Bernie’s work in that apartment, and it set the tone for Oscar Isaac playing his character.

Bernie Wrightson’s illustration of Victor Frankenstein’s lab.

Kirill: After a few productions with Guillermo, are you used to the amount of cadavers and other things that are supposed to look at least somewhat repulsive?

Tamara: It’s not really my thing, but it doesn’t bother me. When I was art directing, I worked with David Cronenberg who does a lot of body horror, and that is much more disturbing in a way.

There’s a picture of me on the set of that water tower lab romping around with a leg when we were setting up the creation scene. But it’s just body parts, and it’s not really about that for the story. For Guillermo, the creature was a work of art. When Victor Frankenstein was making the creature, he wasn’t making a Volkswagen [laughs]. He was making a Porsche. He was making a beautiful art piece. He wanted it to be perfect, which mirrors a point that he brought up earlier in that lecture hall. Mike Hill who did the prosthetics worked on that aspect of the creature. He’s beautiful. He gets beat up, but he’s not gory.

Kirill: How much of the water facility exterior is built, and how much is extended in VFX?

Tamara: We built the base of it with those big scrolling feet, which I called the Sphinx feet, up to about the crown above that beautiful hand-carved door. Then VFX continued to build the tower all the way up. It was a massive build, about 130 by 130 feet at base, and about 30-40 feet high.

Sketches of the water tower base in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

Kirill: What about the lower level where the creature is held? Did you build the whole thing?

Tamara: Yes, we built the entire thing. When he’s escaping and he goes down a chute, we built the chute. And then when you see his body come out and tumble down, that it was a miniature.

Guillermo insisted on building miniatures instead of doing VFX. We had four miniatures built altogether for that by José Granell’s Magic Camera Company. As we were building the base of the tower and the interiors, he came with his scenic artists to replicate and match what we were doing for those miniatures. When the body comes out at the end of the chute, there are two gargoyles there that we were considering to build, but it made more sense to build them as miniature. And then of course, VFX has a hand in bringing it all together with atmospheric effects and other elements.

On the set of the water tower lab in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: What about those big batteries? It’s an interesting mix that you mentioned between the fantasy and the historical accuracy, and his benefactor probably has access to the latest and greatest technology available at that time.

Tamara: We built them. They’re about 15 feet tall and on wheels, because they had to move them around the floor to get out of the way of the camera. Guillermo likes to shoot a lot on a crane, so there’s always a crane moving through. Everything I build has to move. That whole Medusa in the lab moved out. She was on wheels and moved out, so they could get the crane in.

Guy did some original concepts for those, and then we started modeling them in 3D. It’s one of the most complicated sets in the movie. That Y-shaped crucifix table that the creature is on was incredibly complicated.

Those battery towers had to have smoke and steam and pipes and valves, and it all had to work for when Victor is in the moment of creation. They had to be lit, going from green to red. The battery shells are supposed to be glass, but we ended up using plastic, and we put that green color in the plastic. But we did want it to feel like thick old glass, so we did multiple tests with different materials to get that thickness. Then it had to glow red, so lighting had to be involved with lights in the inner core, which would have been filled with battery acid. We didn’t fill it with liquid, but it had to feel like we did.

There’s an interesting part about the battery that falls into the creature’s cell. They were just too big to fit inside that hole, so we cheated just a little bit by using a slightly smaller one to collapse in. That was a physical sequence. We had it dropped from the ceiling of the studio through that hole and crash. They were maybe 10-15% smaller than the real ones, and now you know my dirty little secrets [laughs].

We went through a number of prototypes as we were building them to get the copper tone right. We were building out of wood and painting them to look like coppers. My references were big brewery copper vats and things that existed in the period, because I wanted that historical accuracy part of it. I wanted it to feel like this could exist. It’s fantastical, but it could have existed at that time. I was obsessed with that.

As we were drawing each part, I would ask myself if they could have done this. Could they have done those surrounding rings of glass? Could these batteries be operated by some sort of a steam engine? And then at some point I had to let it go, because it just got too much. But I did try and base it in some kind of mechanical reality.

And then the icing on the cake was our set dressers doing all the pipes and the vales. Those guys worked hard, and made each one look slightly different, and it really brought it all together.

The ship exterior in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: The last big thing that you’ve built was the ship. Was there an interest in finding an existing one, or was it clear from the beginning that you would build it?

Tamara: I looked at real ships, and none of them were the right period. There’s a movie ship in South Africa that you can rent, but it wasn’t the right era. It was slightly earlier. We could have changed it, but by the time you send the whole crew there, you may as well build your own ship.

We had the freedom to decide on what we wanted on our ship. It has iron plating, which echoes the creature. These iron plates are sort of Frankenstein’d onto the ship, which was specific to an Arctic exploration ship. The whole thing was built on a giant gimbal. When the creature rocks it, it’s actually turning the ship and everybody’s tumbling around to a specific degree that we had to decide by doing animatics with Guillermo. Stunts were heavily involved because we had people flying off.

We built the masts to a certain height, and we had a truss system to allow for all the rigging for stunts, for the lighting, for the grips to do blacks, to do green screen, blue screen. Then the VFX carried the masts up to their full extent. We built the entire ice field around the ship in a massive takeover of our studio parking lot. We looked at doing it where we had built the carnival on “Nightmare Alley” which was this parking lot field of an agricultural fair – and that’s where we ended up building our water tower. We looked around at building the ship inside, but there was nothing big enough to allow the space to do the ice field and to get the shots Guillermo wanted. Then we looked outside the city, and eventually it felt like the most convenient place was right in front of the studio. We built it there, and we lost our crew parking, and we had to bus people in as they were parking down the street.

It was a technically challenging build, but a convenient one logistically. If the weather was not in our favor, we could go in the studio and shoot in the captain’s quarters that were built inside. We doubled up that entrance hall into the captain’s quarters. One was on the stage and one was on the actual ship.

For the ice field, we started with a metal base structure, and continued with outer layers of Styrofoam and silicone to create those bigger pieces. And the last layer is real ice and snow.

Sketches of the ship in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

Kirill: How much time does it take to build a ship these days?

Tamara: It was about 4-5 months altogether. We started drawing it around April and building it in August. You start building as you’re still drawing, and pretty much everybody in the art department ended up having to draw some aspect of that ship because we got into a time crunch. Once we got the bulk of it there, we had a lot of little things – the steering wheel, the skylights that they get crashed into, etc. There were a lot of little details.

We were connected with Jim Dines who’s an actual sailor and shipwright, and he does ships for movies. He came over with a team of people to do all the rigging on the ships – all the stuff that really makes it look like a ship in my mind. He advised us on where the binnacle would go, and where the steering wheel would make the most sense, and the same for all these different elements. And once the assistant directors heard that we had this sailor doing work for us, they asked him to do a boot camp for all the extras who played the Danish sailors and show them what to do on a ship. When our extras are in the background, they are actually doing things that they should be doing on a ship. Our guys knew how to wind a rope, how to fix the sail, and how to do the rigging [laughs].

Sketch of the medical theatre in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

Kirill: And you mentioned that the lecture hall for Victor’s hearing was a set build as well.

Tamara: Yes, that was in a studio. We did look around, and there is a tiny Victorian-era medical lecturing place in London, but it’s so tiny. You couldn’t swing a cat in it [laughs].

We did have a scene that didn’t make it into the final cut where Victor meets Harlander in the hall, and they start walking through the halls. We were going to shoot that in Glasgow City Hall, which had all the same mosaic tile that you see in the lecture hall, all the same woodwork, the banister, the railing pieces, all those details. All those details are taken from the Glasgow City Hall to match throughout the scene, and then it was cut [laughs]. But the fact that we had some beautiful pieces of inspiration to go from made that a special set.

Guillermo loves circles. When you work with him, the geometric circle motif is automatic. You have the big circle window in the lab, the Medusa across from it, the circle of the vortex, the circle of the medical lecturing theatre all together, the circle in the ship – it’s a repeated form that, for him, is so important and evocative of the circle of life. The beginning is the ending, it’s the Ouroboros, it’s the thing that goes around and around, it’s Victor becomes the creature, the creature becomes Victor. That’s what I ask myself when I work with Guillermo – where can I put a circle?

Red elements in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: What is the significance of the color red for Victor and for the story?

Tamara: Very important for Guillermo, and you’ll see the use of red in all his films. We had it in “Nightmare Alley”, with Molly, the girlfriend of the main character, who was wearing a red coat. He used it in “Pan’s Labyrinth” and all his other movies.

In “Frankenstein,” the red was the signifier for the womb and the mother. Part of it was Kate Hawley with costumes, with whom I worked closely. It starts with the mother wearing the red, with the red veil. And when the mother dies, she has this red ruching fabric around her in the coffin, which we see later repeated in Elizabeth in the red of her bonnet, mirroring the connection between Elizabeth and the mother in Victor’s mind. You see it with her wedding dress in the red of the blood. You see the red blood handprint on the mother’s back when she goes into labour and dies in childbirth.

Then we created a red bed, which is the mother’s bed that Victor takes to his apartment and later on to the lab. You see the red in the battery towers in the lab, and that space feels like entering the interior of the human body. Victor wears his mother’s red gloves as an adult, and it speaks to him as a character.

Sketches of the medical theatre in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

Kirill: Out of these two years, what was the most challenging day?

Tamara: There were so many challenging days, and it’s hard to pin it down. The lab was the most challenging and the most rewarding. I felt a bit like Frankenstein because I was concerned about what I was creating. Those sets were so dangerous, and I was concerned every day that somebody would get hurt. Thankfully, nobody was hurt on the lab set. You’re dealing with big sets with lots of moving parts, and it’s unnerving. As a woman and as a mother, it gets me unsettled.

Kirill: As a piece of advice to the younger generation of filmmakers, why should they push to make as many physical builds as possible, and not go for green screens and visual effects?

Tamara: One reason is giving the space to the actors. I’ve seen actors walking on a green screen set, and not able to deliver the same quality of acting.

The other one is how it looks. It’s the way the light hits and the paint reacts to that light. When I’m doing a set, I’m thinking about making a painting. When I’m working with Guillermo, Dan and Kate, all of us together are trying to make a visual masterpiece. Every frame of it should look like a painting – and you cannot get that with green screen, no matter how hard you try. I just don’t see it. I know there are great things that are being done, but you see it in wide shots, and you see it in tight shots. When our camera goes tight on young Victor’s carved ivory figurine with the pregnancy elements, you can’t recreate that on a computer.

It’s all about the human touch, and how light reacts, and how you’re going to get that cinematic magic by lighting a set. Now, I’m not saying you can’t do that with a location. There are great locations that give you the same magic. We did both on “Frankenstein”. We found locations that were historic, and even though we couldn’t touch the color, it worked for us, especially with the way we lit it. All the lighting was single source lighting from outside the set. Dan doesn’t light from inside the set. You’re painting with light, and you can’t do that in a green screen environment.

On the set of the icefield in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: You mentioned generative AI a few times. Not looking into the future of how it might turn out down the road, but how do you want people in your industry and artists in general to see it?

Tamara: I’ve played around with it, and I would never use it to design a film. It is utterly ridiculous. You don’t have any backstory. You don’t have any human element. You don’t have any understanding of the world. There’s no nuance.

I had this conversation with our VFX coordinator once while we were waiting in an airport. He said he did an experiment where he typed in “Post-apocalyptic staircase to nowhere” to see what AI would come up with visually. He got 300 images back, and out of those there were maybe one or two that were vaguely inspiring for him, but not even. He said it was a waste of his time, as he can go and create something of his own. Our VFX people are digital artists who are hand painting. They’re not just pushing buttons on the screen.

If I’m writing an article or a brief, and I put it through ChatGPT to get an idea of how it could be improved, that’s a handy tool. I’m not going to deny it. And the same thing with Photoshop and its blending tools – those are handy tools that we should use and be in command of. But it’s absolutely berserk to start with an initial concept or idea and go straight to AI, which I understand some designers do.

You cannot be a storyteller, and be using AI and having it tell the story. It doesn’t have your memory. It doesn’t have your feelings. It doesn’t have your human emotion.

Sketch of the lobby stairs in the water tower in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

Kirill: Last two questions about your favorite things. What would you consider to be the golden standard of production design?

Tamara: The one that I keep going back to in my head, and I went back there with “Frankenstein”, is the musical “Oliver!” from when I was a kid. That was so well done and magical for me. Back then, I didn’t understand what the art department did, and I know that now that they built these sets and this crazy Dickensian world, with all the aging and the rotting wood where the orphans are housed. I always go back to that. It was a pinnacle for me of the kind of sets I like, and when I was doing “Frankenstein, I thought a lot about that movie. As a little kid, it really shaped my world.

Kirill: Out of all the places that this particular movie, “Frankenstein,” took you to, what was your favourite place to eat at?

Tamara: It’s a place in Edinburgh, The Palmerston, with local Scottish food, but a new age culinary twist to it. They had amazing sourdough. Scotland is not known for great food, but this one was outstanding.

Production design of “Frankenstein” by Tamara Deverell, courtesy of Tamara Deverell and Netflix.

And here I’d like to thank Tamara Deverell for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of production design, and for sharing supporting materials. “Frankenstein” is available for streaming on Netflix. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Sam: My name is Sam Bader and I production designed “The Testament of Ann Lee”. I grew up in the middle of the country, St. Louis, Missouri, and starting at a very young age, I found myself doing oil painting and figurative drawing. I had a lifelong fascination with cinema, and as I was growing up, it was that golden era of TV with “The Sopranos”, “The Wire”, and later on “Breaking Bad”. Those were my formative years, the lexicon of culture in my brain from music, books, movies and video games.

I went to college at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and I was circling around the film school without ever having taken a major there. My paintings attracted the attention of some of the producing students who were doing the thesis projects, and I was asked if I wanted to pitch to production design. I knew notionally what that meant, and I had certain intuitions about how to approach it, and I’m pretty proud to say a lot of those intuitions carried forth. It was reading a script, breaking it down, pulling references, doing drawings, trying to figure out the structure of what you have to build in terms of staff, as well as graphics and construction.

I had that experience when I was about 22 years old, and I was gravitating in the direction of the film industry. Having come from a place where there was no real industry knowledge of what that meant, I followed the proverbial North Stars. Out of college, I was lucky to intern at Indian Paintbrush, where Wes Anderson’s whole team worked, reading and writing script coverage. That was still miles away from what I would end up doing, but I made good friends with the people who ran that day-to-day office. They put me in touch with a phenomenal production designer named Adam Stockhausen, who hired me as an art PA.

That’s when I moved to New York, and I wasn’t totally sure what I was going to do. I had a painting studio. I was working a construction job for set building. And Adam hired me to be on “Bridge” of Spies as the art assistant in the design office. I clasped at that quite firmly, and you could draw a pretty linear line from that point in 2014 to now. I stayed in the art department, and gradually – and then suddenly – went from having not ever drafted or done graphic design or organized databases of reference imagery, to doing all of those things over 7-8 years.

Once I was in that seat, I knew I wanted to be a production designer. There’s a tradeoff between striking out on your own in indie productions and staying in the big art departments. You can go out into the world, design little things on your own, and climb that ladder. Or you can stay in the “incubator” of these massive art departments with white glove teams, some of the best draftsmen, concept illustrators, graphic designers, getting to be on the floor, seeing how bigger construction and scenic teams make these worlds. I stuck to the latter pretty narrowly for the first half of my now 12-year career, and would jump out and design a commercial or design a $600,000 indie feature – trying to have one foot on both sides of the line.

And then, around 2020-21 I got to leap up and be an art director in full, which meant managing construction, managing scenic, overseeing all the designing, all the drawing, working with a production designer. I got a ton out of that. On some of these projects that I art directed, the overall budget for just wood and paint and foam exceeded the cost of a lot of middle indie features. That helped me fortify a level of knowledge and gain an amount of confidence that I am grateful for.

There were moments when I did question it. Should I be out just designing indie? Am I losing nine or ten months doing a TV series or a studio feature? But looking back on it, all of these things really harmonized for me around the time Mona asked me if I wanted to design “The Testament of Ann Lee”. I could not have done the work I did and managed the team I did, had I not really cut my teeth in that arena.

Mood sketches for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: How do you see the role of the production designer? What do you feel are the bigger misconceptions about it from the outside of the art department?

Sam: I think a production designer stands at the crossroads of the directing side and the producing side. It’s a little cheesy to say, but you are designing the production. You’re not just designing the film. You are working with producers to frame out the scaffolding – financially and logistically – of how you’re going to achieve this film with the money and the time you have.

If you were to ask the average person what they thought a production designer did, you’d get an answer about having the sets, the paint finishes, the furniture, the aesthetic, and the visual through line of the whole film. That is certainly true, but the misconception is the extent to which you have to shave down the contours of this whole machine, in terms of staffing and locations and budget and timeline to make it work.

You have to be able to draw and illustrate and communicate ideas on paper. And you have to be able to pull abstract ideas out of yours and the director’s heads, and communicate them to a vast group of people who are all coming with their own sensibilities.

Another misconception might be that everything that you see in front of the camera was touched by a designer. On a very small movie where you are doing everything, that might be more the case. But on most films, you have to ingest imagery, ingest information, ingest ideas from a director, and then communicate them to other people with the trust and the knowledge that they too will interpret and produce their version of what they think it is. And then it’s your job to absorb all of what you’re being shown, and know how to tweak it, and edit it, and understand the extent to which you should tell somebody that something doesn’t work at all. You steer the art department and your artists to make them motivated and inspired to do their work.

Production design renders for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: Is it a little bit of a blessing and a curse that once you become a production designer on these bigger productions, you’re also an accountant, you’re also a people’s manager, you’re also a nanny, that you’re a master of all crafts, but can’t have enough time to dive into the artistic side of it as much as you would like to?

Sam: You only have so much time, and then there’s the time you’re willing to devote on top of the hours you’re technically in the office. A constant tension for me is that the day gets populated with the former. You’re an accountant, you’re making schedules, you’re being sort of a people’s therapist.

I constantly have these ideas kicking around in my head. I came from a drawing background, and I’m sitting here right now in my office with a straight edge and a pencil and markers and Photoshop and all these other tools. I used to sit in those seats and do those other roles, so I am comfortable to find an hour to pull in a location photo or pull in someone’s white 3D model and paint something, even if it’s quick and loose.

Everyone is different. I can compare it to making a painting. You don’t start by literally taking a pencil and drawing every eyelash until you have a beautiful iris and a pupil. You sketch gesturally. You sketch out the contours.

I’ve built a level of comfort where, depending on the director and their level of comfort, I can show something that is rough, as long as it has a good idea and good character. It keeps the ideas flowing. It gives a person something they can sink their visual teeth into and chew on. I’m not going to silo myself into an office and spend three hours making a beautiful image. Even on bigger productions like “The Testament of Ann Lee” and the thing that I’m working on now, you have money and time, but it’s still never quite enough to spend 12 weeks with people to just draw everything out.

It’s very fluid. I oscillate pretty rapidly between going into a producer’s office to talk about a schedule or how we’re going to get the cost of a bill down, to eating lunch and drawing something, to walking into my art director’s office in the art department to show them a rough version of something.

Production design renders for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: I was looking on your website and I loved how you say that you build vibrant, layered and authentic worlds. What does layering mean to you, and why is it so important?

Sam: On “The Testament of Ann Lee”, it was layering in terms of the research and the history and understanding the logic of different spaces and how they interplayed in a pre-photographic time. You have to interpret paintings and drawings and text of the era. That’s one kind of layering.

Layering has multiple meanings. One example is building up the Lee family home, the textile mills, and the workshop. There was a version of the script prior to my jumping on where people went to a workshop to work and they came home. Then we did some light historical reading, and we learned pretty quickly that this is a pre-industrial time. There weren’t warehouses and factories. They didn’t even exist for another 40 years. The 18th century is quite unfamiliar to most people, and it was familiar to me at the outset.

You internalize how cities functioned, and how spaces interplayed with one another, and what Christchurch meant relative to the marketplaces where people would go every day. Then you end up with something that’s narratively and spatially very layered.

Then you have layering of bottom underpaintings, large artwork, big furniture pieces, and drawing in all the details. I don’t like walking into a set where somebody puts three obvious pieces of art up. Such sets only have these little contained moments. My sensibility is more of vérité. I want to know that when I walk into the dwelling of a family of five in 1750s Manchester, it feels real. This space needs to feel dense. It needs density in its layers.

Then, of course, you get into the realities of time and money. You can’t cherry pick every last little stitch of what goes into a set to make sure it’s absolutely perfect. You start to make judgment calls with Mona Fastvold the director and Will Rexer the cinematographer. Where is the camera going to be? Where are the lights going to be? What needs to feel like a shape in silhouette, and what is really going to be lovingly swept across?

It’s the creative side where good designers deeply understand how to communicate on a shorthand with costumes, directing, cinematography, and even editing to a certain extent.

Production design renders for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: This next question is something that I’m struggling to find my own answer to, which is about nature versus nurture. Do you feel that some people have this almost divine spark in them that makes them great artists, or can anybody be nurtured or trained to be – maybe not amazing – but great at art?

Sam: That’s a big question. I think an artist exists within most, if not all, people. And then, in order to be a great artist, you have to be able to harmonize a certain amount of neuroses. You need a healthy amount of self-doubt in you. You need to keep questioning and striving for something that’s closer to perfect. You need to have a level of comfort and time to get to sit with your thoughts and to self-examine. And in almost a psychoanalytic sense, you need to be able to see yourself in what you want to say with more clarity.

The term art itself is one that I’ve been hearing since I was a young child. I’ve oscillated a lot on what it exactly means to me. Anyone can pick up a pencil and a sheet of paper, and spend 15 minutes and produce something that is technically fitting the loosest definition of art.

Great art is an extension of something in your soul, a wound, a certain question you’re trying to answer that is, on some level, unanswerable. I don’t think that art’s job is to answer questions. It’s to pose them in the most vibrant and inviting way.

Kirill: Alanis Morissette is one of my all-time favorite singers. The thing that strikes me about her and some other artists is how painfully open they are about their own insecurities and their own struggles. I would never be able to talk as openly to the world about myself as some of these great artists are.

Sam: I agree with that. If you talk to a person who spends their time thinking about and enjoying art, and you ask them what their favorite pieces are – whether they’re songs, films, or paintings – and you peel back the layers of any of those, it exposes a vulnerability. You said insecurity, but I would rather say vulnerability.

In a psychoanalytic sense, analysis is the process to unearth those core insecurities and vulnerabilities, and make peace with them, and feel comfortable wearing them more than you would otherwise – almost like taking off a shell.

In the context of “The Testament of Ann Lee”, you look at Mona who is the auteur – the writer and the director, and Amanda, whose performance is so raw and so vulnerable and so daring in terms of how she was willing to be depicted. This film absolutely fits that criteria.

Set design for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: Looking back at these 12 or so years of your career so far, what do you feel are the biggest technological changes that you’ve seen in your field?

Sam: 3D printing is definitely one. The fidelity with which you can pump out a piece of detail, like a cornice or a piece of crown molding – that is incredible. I’ve taken a little time to tinker around with AI tools that are at the front of people’s minds. We haven’t used any AI on this film, as we were a little bit before the generative toolkits came in.

Another thing that comes to mind is the speed of things – the speed of download or upload time, how quickly you can generate live lighting renders. You can open a V-Ray render, stick some lights in, move through a space, put on a headset, bring a director in, and let them walk into a pre-visualization of what is going to be built. It’s a huge advancement in how aggressively you can move through this process. Cameras have gotten smaller, easier to cool, and more affordable. Software and hardware on the design side have gotten more affordable.

It’s no secret that we utilized pretty much old analog techniques throughout this film. We had a matte painter who’s been doing this since the ’70s, and he did our matte paintings. But what excites me about that is not making a movie in the exact manner one would have in 1982 or 1967. It’s more about creating assets by hand, with the soul and warmth and texture that I don’t think the best renderers can match. Then those can be scanned in, collaged out, de-focused, photogrammetried, and turned into something that is old, but new.

In any new technology, the medium is a vessel of the old, to paraphrase McLuhan’s quote. I love celluloid and I love painting. And I love that you can bring those things into a digital space and create something that’s a little bit new.

Kirill: Getting to the movie, what drew you to its story?

Sam: It’s the challenge of that pre-photographic era, and the task of understanding what a passage of time from the 1740s to the 1780s would mean in the context of a feature film. We’ve seen many films that are set throughout the 20th century, and everybody has a distinct and siloed sense of the aesthetic of each decade in the 1900s. But when you get to the 1700s, it’s so much murkier, because it’s so much further back in time. I was drawn to that.

I was drawn to Mona’s confidence. I was drawn to a film that depicts an egalitarian existence, and leads with a message of community and finding harmony through existence among nature and living off the land. It’s not really utopia, because in the back of our head we all know that it can’t ever be achieved. And ultimately, the promise of the Shaker movement can never be fully realized.

It does tie back into the art conversation. Perfection does not exist. You can strive to get as close to it as possible without ever touching it. That spirit resonates and pulses throughout the script, particularly towards the end, and I was drawn to that.

On the sets of “The Testament of Ann Lee”. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: How do you do research these days into something that is a couple of centuries removed from us? Is it the traditional route of libraries and museums, the digital route of archival websites, or a mix of the two?

Sam: I do a mix of the two. You try to find these threads you can pull on. The provenance of the image is who the artist was and the circle of people they were working with. You find an image that is right for some reason, and the more you understand who made it and where it came from, the more you build out a web of different artists.

I started at the New York Public Library in the old picture collection. It’s an arcane room of filing cabinets with a giant six inch binder of a directory. You’re going through what they have on England in the 1700s, 1710s, 1720s, etc – and it’s the New York public librarians who cut out illustrations, woodcuts and photographs, and put them into these old manila envelopes.

I walked into the Schwarzman Building on 42nd street with a little home scanner and a laptop, ideally early in the morning where I had a little bit of table space, and I went through everything. I pulled and scanned old survey photographs and drawings from that era. I do free association, ingest anything and everything that feels like it might have a home, and I have an InDesign document open while I do that. I build out the scaffolding of a film where each spread is a set. You break down a script, and any time there’s an environment that has to be designed, it gets its own folder that I later populate with those scans.

On films where I’m relying more heavily on photography and contemporary artists, Instagram is a great place. I’m resistant to just picking the most obvious dozen artists or photographers of a time. I want to find something no one’s seen before. The reality is that, to a large extent, the references flow through draftsmen and illustrators and set decorators and graphic designers. What comes out is, in some way, a representation of the imagery they were seeing. So the more niche and obscure sources I can find, the better the end result is. It goes back to that layering and that density.

I like a layered and dense library of images that I want everybody to spend time in and understand how to navigate. There’s a certain element of being a librarian or a clerk in that filing process.

Kirill: What color choices did you make? What colors did you want to focus on, together with the director and the cinematographer?

Sam: We knew that Manchester wanted to be murkier, darker, more earthen and more muddled. Within that, I found a palette of burgundy, maroon, olive drab green and sage. It’s a home amidst what was a lot of old wood, because we wanted it to feel like it had been there for a very long time.

And the ship almost tells you what it wants to be. To use Mona’s phrase that I can remember really well in our first meeting, you spend all this time in these small, cramped, confined spaces with clutter and people. Then the movie cuts, and you’re in the wide open sea, and it’s horizontal landscape and it’s blues – ocean blues and sky blues – and the beige of the sails. There’s not much to unpack beyond what it would necessarily be by virtue of it being a ship.

Then, when we got to the New World, we wanted it to feel more freshly sawn, newer. Mona and I arrived at one of those moments where I knew that it was going to work out, where we both arrived at Vilhelm Hammershøi, the Danish painter. We took his muted powder blues and yellows, against darker black and charcoal tones.

For the Shakers, it’s a little more nuanced than simply the ship. It’s about these structures existing harmoniously with nature – subtle greens, browns and taupes that don’t fight the costumes too much. We embrace the reality of that environment. We did not want to take very many liberties with the Shaker aesthetic because it’s so well established. We ended up with measured, dusty and more muted palette tones.

Set design for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: Going back to doing vérité approach, how do you find the balance between staying true to the time period and elevating the storytelling for the viewer?

Sam: There’s so much great symbology in the Shaker art, the gift drawings, the spirit messages, and even some of their village views. There’s a lot of published work on how they drew the land. I knew we couldn’t make a film about the Shakers without finding a subtle and organic way to incorporate those into the design. The tree in the meeting house is a flourish that we decided on quite deliberately because we loved that kind of naive hand that they were made by.

When it comes to the Shaker side of the film, we adhered quite religiously to it with a few exceptions. The mill that gets burned down has symbological ties to cave paintings. You have fringe followers of this movement out in the backwaters of Massachusetts. They might have painted something along that style on the walls. That is the biggest way in which we took liberties. Other than that, we really grounded ourselves in what the reality of the Shakers were.

Kirill: You’re filming in Hungary, while hiding not just Hungary, but also everything modern, to make the viewers see Manchester and New York in the 1700s. How did you approach this?

Sam: By virtue of how we put this production together, we largely sidestepped any real risk of being too close to contemporary Hungary. We also built a few medieval and Mancunian sets in our backlots. We used signage, dressing, layers, and fabrics, adding some messiness to it, and coupling it with the magic of the matte paintings as a tool to orient us spatially. Those added enough intrigue and density so that, to my eye, we don’t feel lost in something familiar.

We built a very ambitious amount of sets for what we had in terms of time and money. It was a trick of finding hospitable structures that we could own, where we could tear down everything that’s not load-bearing, completely clad, redo the floors, redo the ceilings as much as we could. And we coupled this with the knowledge that we were going to be using the real Shaker villages in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

The magic I think is really how do the matte paintings establish a world for us? How do they orient us to the tighter work of tracking with people and streets? The set decorating side and the prop side are challenging here. There’s so many great 19th century Central European locations. If you wanted to do 1890s Paris, you can find a perfect location where you would not have to do much to bring that to life. Our set decorators Lauren, Mercédesz, Krisztina and I were meticulous in what we could pull in from England. We were looking at what we thought looked of that late Tudor and early Jacobian world – and then we built the rest.

They build things marvelously in this country, and they paint marvelously. One of the benefits of being here is they do it in an efficient and cost effective way. You can lean on that here for this budget in a way you couldn’t elsewhere. We built much of the Shaker furniture that we shot here.

Set design for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: When the camera shows the streets of Manchester and the streets of New York, how would you break it down into what existed, what was decorated and what was painted?

Sam: Much of the architecture below the middle line of the frame existed. It was heavily painted, roads were added, furniture was added, signage was added. Then, above that middle line for most of those frames, it’s on the illustrative side of the painting.

For the streets of New York, like the intersection of Broadway and Broad Street, we had a great backlot that had the right bones. We clad it, painted it, and did storefronts and signage. And then, 3-4 meters up were those colonial Georgian window panes, casings, pendants, and parapets. I love composing those deep background moments. I know the ship was in the South Street Seaport, and I understand that they walked up towards the central artery of New York at that time. It’s that layering that tells you quite quickly where you are relative to where you just were.

Production design of “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: What about the ship that takes them to the New World, above the deck and below the deck? Was that built on set?

Sam: Partially. We shot on a real ship in Gothenburg, Sweden, that we took over. We pretty much cleared everything out. They had these massive, two ton cannons. It was a constant negotiation. How much can we broom these out of our set, because there are balance and weight considerations. The below decks is a museum with stanchions, projector screens, and wayfinding signs. We cleared it, and did all the furniture, all the hammocks, all the netting, all the fabrics. We cladded all of the infills along the ship and along the deck so that William [cinematographer] could move that camera around because that ship never left the dock. It was sitting there, and we did some background replacements.

For the dense flooding sequence, we went into some old wooden structures in one of these backlots, cladded it, added our architecture, dressed it, and did the whole flooding rig. A lot of that stuff you see towards the later part of the voyage, when it starts flooding, that’s all a pseudo build.

We did a lot of hybrid building. We built the Shaker meeting house facade completely from scratch. We built the house that burned down completely from scratch. But most other things were a subtle combination of finding a good base layer to start to construct on top of. You save a lot of time and money by not having to have a construction crew erecting tons of scaffolding. That stuff can take weeks, and it’s weeks we didn’t have. We were quite deliberate with what we chose to build.

On the sets of “The Testament of Ann Lee”. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: What was the location of the big church in Manchester where Ann Lee and her followers go to proclaim their new religion?

Sam: That was about 30-40 minutes outside of Budapest, on the Pest side. It’s a Roman church built around the 13th century. We extended the outside with the iconic Christchurch architecture, but everything you see inside is existing, with exception of the soft goods, the pews and the altar. It was a really great starting place.

Kirill: I also loved the prison cell where they take Ann right after that church sequence.

Sam: That was in a place called Komárom which is an early 19th century fort up near the Slovakian border. We shot the infirmary in there, which is a set I personally adore. We put so much detail into all of that dressing. That’s where we did the prison exterior and interior. In general, we pared those sets quite aggressively into the smallest number of locations.

When William and the rest of her followers go up to the windows and you see that central holding courtyard, that was the same location, about 300 yards away from where we found those great prison cells.

Kirill: What were the most challenging set, the most challenging sequence, and the most challenging day for you on this film?

Sam: The most challenging day was waking up at 2:30 in the morning to do two or three flights from Budapest to Gothenburg to meet an art director in Sweden, to walk the ship, to give the notes, and to do some drawings in an office, only then to fly back out the next morning at around 4 AM to be back on location. We had a few rounds of those deeply challenging days, just from a time standpoint.

The most challenging set to find a location for and to realize was the meeting house, because it was so specific to the choreography, and finding that scale was hard. We went through many iterations of budgeting where we were trying to build it from scratch. We wanted to build the full meeting house – interior and exterior with the great vaulted ceiling and all the other things. Then you look at the numbers, and all of these ancillary costs ended up showing that it was not feasible.

And then we found this old concrete warehouse, that was a drop space for junk on this farm. It had a beautiful old wooden vaulted ceiling. Once they told us we could completely clear it out, and we could knock out every single wall that wasn’t load bearing, and clad it into the deck and the floor and the beams and the windows and the peg rail and all that – that was quite challenging. We also needed to interrelate that to the wholly constructed facade of that narrative space where you are constrained as you move windows and doors around to create a harmonious composition.

That ripples out to the build that you’re doing. And it also has to maintain the specific proportions that all the Shaker meeting houses had. It was a lot of drawing and redrawing. You find that you can only get this window this close before there’s a big cement beam, things like that.

Set design for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

The labor mill that burned down was easy to conceive of, to an extent. But then we had to keep borrowing resources from it to finance the rest of the major sets in the film. As a result, we kept cutting the budget of that down and coming up with ways to find old salvage barn wood. We don’t have the ability to have scenics in a shop doing aging for 20 days. So we kept the Hungarian team there, and one of our set designers was there full time. It was about 2.5 hours away from all the other locations, and she had to go live out there. I would make it out there 2-3 times a week to give notes and to see it. Those were equally challenging sets.

For the sequence, the Townley home in Manchester where most of the dancing takes place is probably one of the most filmed sets in the movie. The movie spends about 20-25 minutes in there. There was an appetite to be able to flow in and out of spaces, and be able to peek around corners, and have this door open. We found a good location for it, but embracing the full scope of that world was a challenge to figure out.

Kirill: What would be your elevator pitch for why this movie must be seen on the big screen?

Sam: It should really be seen on the big screen, and it should really be seen from a print. There’s a softness to celluloid being projected that is irreplicable through DCP or through any kind of streaming. There’s so much chiaroscuro in this film, and yet we didn’t just treat it as negative space to disregard. There’s so much subtle texture and information that you really feel when you see the full moving picture.

The legacy of musical historical epic is such that it is a more elevated experience to be in a room with a group of people. It’s such a unique film. It’s such a captivating experience that transports you into that world. Experiencing that in a sizable room full of dozens or hundreds of strangers absolutely elevates that experience.

I want everyone to see the movie. I would deeply encourage anyone who can to go see it from a print. The next best thing would, of course, be just being in a room full of strangers experiencing this striking story.

Set design for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: There’s a strong tendency to affix labels to every story, that this one is a drama, and this one is a musical, and so on. And it feels like “The Testament of Ann Lee” wants to defy these traditional labels. Should it be viewed outside of the “established”, so to speak, genre boundaries?

Sam: Yes, and it’s one of the things that makes this such an exceptional film to be coming out right now. We are in another swing of the pendulum, where I hope audiences are softening their understanding of what these delineations mean. We’re in a time where people really want to play with that.

The bold and remarkable and celebratory thing of this film is it shatters it. You could try to talk about it through the prism of genre. Maybe it’s a gothic historical opera with miasmatic dance. There’s a sexual component, but it’s not a romantic thing.

It is a wholly unique brainchild of somebody who certainly was not thinking about any of their projects through the prism of a film. You can call it a period film, but that is such a sweeping label. It’s a safe out, if you want to not be constrained in any way. I don’t see it as a period film. It’s a sort of a neorealist, pseudo art house, but with mainstream appeal [laughs]. It’s an amalgam of a lot of things.

Going back to one of your initial questions, what makes for bold and unique art? Everything is derivative, but the more you can pull from all of these different art facets of yourself and your sensibilities and your taste and your lexicon, and the more cleverly you slice out these collage pieces and compose a film object, the more novel it becomes. You watch certain films and you know what they owe their vision to. I think it’s very hard. People mentioned “Andrei Rublev”, “Barry Lyndon”, “The Tree of Wooden Clogs”, “All My Good Countrymen” and some of the Czech new realist stuff. To a certain extent, those things are so obscure in the minds of many film viewers, but also it’s really none of those things either. That’s part of what makes it such a kind of bespoke object.

Kirill: That’s a beautiful thing about this art form that you don’t need to be pigeonholed into any particular expectations.

Sam: And you do your best when you really shirk those. The more you can put any anxiety about how it’s going to be perceived aside, the more you can venture out and do something like this.

Set design for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: You briefly mentioned generative AI. How do you see it today – a curiosity, a tool, a threat?

Sam: Anyone who takes the position that it’s going to come in and produce art that moves people is drinking the Kool-Aid. I know that it is a threat to the bottom lines of people who are trying to earn a living doing this. And even if the tools don’t fully supplant the human hand, they probably will be used as a leverage for people in power to cut down the amount of time they pay somebody to do something. In that sense, they are a threat.

But I do look at the magical thinking around AI in 2025 much like the magical thinking around crypto and NFTs and more formerly the Internet and what it was going to be. You can go back and read media or watch interviews, and so many of those things have just bore out to be inflated, intoxicated perspectives.

It’s all at once alarming and not alarming. I’ll quote our great director – it’s a typewriter, not an author.

There is a thing that really worries me the most about AI in the context of film. I was an art PA making the lowest rate, doing a lot of clerical stuff, doing lunches and all. That’s where I started, and I am concerned that the streamlining of some of these tools will push productions who are already looking for ways to do things more affordably to eliminate or limit those roles. This is almost more of a threat in the post-production or in the VFX world, than it is in our world, but it is a concern in the physical production side.

You’re not putting a topsoil down to produce the next crop of great people who had to do a version of what I did. That makes me extremely worried because then you’re cauterizing off the bottom and you’re not allowing blood to flow. Of all the speculation swirling around about AI, that makes me quite concerned.

I’m a humanist and an optimist at heart. I think that people want to help people, and even if these tools become compelling and efficient, humans will want to keep giving work to other humans. That element is so absent from so many of the debates I hear about AI.

I don’t know what art is, if it’s not born out of a very human need to express. We’ve been heading in this direction culturally for a while. Look at “Crime and Punishment” from Dostoyevsky and “Moby Dick” from Herman Melville. My God, does finishing a book like that leave you in a very different place than where you went in?

I didn’t come from a culture of literati artists. I had to find my way there. There are a lot of cherished people in my life for whom art does not occupy as big of a space as it does for the people who are in this room right now. And so, the extent to which most people don’t see that as the job of art sets the groundwork for all of this slop to fill in the middle, and people can build an economy around it that more or less functions in the same way.

The other side of it is that a new generation of artists will in some way learn that they can train a model to produce bespoke and novel things – almost like the way hip hop and sampling blew the lid off of music in the ’70s and the ’80s. Maybe this will be the new debate to grapple with as we discuss what is art.

Production design of “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: In this context, I’ve started thinking about some of the best stories in the film world, like “Godfather” or “Forrest Gump”. I don’t see how a machine, in any shape or form, can arrive at the level of storytelling in “Forrest Gump”.

Sam: I don’t either. There are moments in those films that hit you right in your gut. Maybe it can get close. Maybe it can look and feel and sound very much like those films. But I’m yet to be convinced that anything that is pumped out of a model will make me feel the longing I felt when Forrest could never get Jenny, and that interrelates to the jilted lovers that I had in my childhood. You have to stimulate some part of the viewer’s or the reader’s soul. And I have a hard time seeing how that’s going to happen.

Kirill: What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were starting out?

Sam: Don’t feel that you have to be formally educated on how to use these complicated and scary looking software systems like AutoCAD or light renderers. Take four hours a day on the weekends and on the holidays to just learn it. Use YouTube or any other place to learn. Don’t act like those things are unacquirable. That would be a material bit of advice.

The other one would be that all of the painful and difficult things that befall you will leave you better in the end. As long as you’re a good person and you operate honestly, your career will endure. Don’t catastrophize the rejections or the failures because they are the things that fortify you.

Set design for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Kirill: Now to your favorite things. What would you consider to be your all time favorite films from the production design perspective that have shaped you, or have left you speechless, or have defined your field?

Sam: I saw “There Will Be Blood” when I was still in high school, and I didn’t know what I was watching. I was fortunate enough to get to shake hands with Jack Fisk the other week. The amount of intentionality, authenticity, and that coherent believability to everything you’re seeing blew my hair back.

Looking back further, and these films found me later, I would take “Barry Lyndon” and the work that Jacques Tati did on “Playtime”. It’s amazing what they built for that film. Kubrick gets at something quite deep and literary for me., and the work that Ken Adam did on “Dr. Strangelove” was phenomenal. Spielberg’s “Hook” has lived in my head for a long while now.

Another one that I don’t invoke as much these days was the moment when “The Royal Tenenbaums” trailer came out on TV. I knew straight away that I needed to see that movie. That early-middle Wes Anderson work is astonishing.

Kirill: A couple of years ago when all these video AI models started coming out, everybody was “reimagining” different movie franchises in the style of Wes Anderson, and yet nobody was acknowledging that it took the human mind of Wes Anderson to define that style to begin with. There was nothing generational there, only regurgitative.

Sam: It’s completely regurgitative. It’s a gumbo. It’s putting a lot of things in a blender and then drinking whatever comes out.

Kirill: Gumbo is good when it’s done well, but not like how these models are doing. Those are like gumbo made by somebody who has no sense of smell, sight, or taste.

Sam: Exactly.

Kirill: And speaking of food… Out of all the places that this particular movie took you, what was the best cuisine or the best dish that you’ve had while making this movie?

Sam: Oh, that’s easy. There’s a Middle Eastern restaurant in Budapest called Goli. I’m back in Budapest now, and I probably go there three times a week. They take cake, handily.

One more would have been getting proper ramen in Gothenburg, which is hard to find here in Budapest. They also have these nice restaurants by the dock with pickled herring, cabbage and potatoes, deep in its flavors.

Production design of “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

And here I want to thank Sam Bader for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of production design. I also want to thank Kara Kitchell for making this interview happen. “The Testament of Ann Lee” starts its theatrical release in United States on December 25. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the next major release of Radiance. The two main themes of this release are:

• Expanding on the foundational work of the previous release around color tokens
• Stability and bug fixes

Let’s get to what’s been fixed, and what’s been added. First, I’m going to use emojis to mark different parts of it like this:

 marks an incompatible API / binary change
 marks new features
 marks bug fixes and general improvements

Theming

• Modernizing the API of outline painters, unlocking the ability to use thicker strokes, multiple nested outlines, custom gradients, etc.
• Revisit the lifecycle of panel-based renderers to take advantage of the new color token APIs
• A more targeted and flexible way to configure button shapes
• Tweaking the API for painting focus indication
• Tweaking the API for configuring the menu search widget
• Add component token overrides driven by system color tokens
• Add surface and outline painter overlays
• Add surface and outline painters for luminous glass look
• More flexible logic for positioning the window title pane text
• Align visuals of sliders to those of progress bars
• Fix padding and alignment of combobox arrows
• Fix issues with setting custom window title pane buttons provider during app initialization
• Fix crash in scrollable tables

Components

• Fix the sizing logic of command button popup icons under large font sizes
• Fix the text color of ribbon keytips under some skins
• Fix paddings around command button popup icons
• Fix issues with scaling the ribbon under large fonts
• Fix content alignment in the color selector popup menu
• Fix visibility of ribbon keytips in decorated mode

Radiance focuses on helping you make elegant and high-performing desktop applications in Swing. If you’re in the business of writing just such apps, I’d love for you to take this Radiance release for a spin. Click here to get the instructions on how to add Radiance to your builds.

It’s been three years since the last Aurora release, and today I’m happy to announce its next major update.

It took a bit of time to get here, but I’m hoping it was worth the wait. The first main addition in this release is the full-featured ribbon container that provides the functionality of the Microsoft Office command bar. It supports regular and contextual ribbon task groups, regular and flow ribbon bands, application menu, taskbar, and anchored command area. It also supports flexible and configurable resizing of the content for ribbon tasks, ribbon bands, and individual ribbon content pieces.

The second main addition is the full alignment with the changes that went into Radiance in the last year. Aurora 2 uses the Chroma color system from the Ephemeral design library, which builds on the core foundations of the Material color utilities.

It introduces APIs for system tokens – info, warning, error, and success – that can be applied to any element in the UI hierarchy, like shown here for the “Sign In” button (info styling) and “Delete account” (error styling), seamlessly adapting to light and dark skins:

In addition to streamlining the painter APIs, this version adds new surface and outline painters that emulate the appearance of a 3D glass object lit from straight above, as can be seen here under the Mist Silver skin on buttons, combo boxes and other components:

Among the many other, smaller improvements in this release you will find:

• Surface and outline painter overlays – static and dynamically animated
• New determinate circular progress indicator component
• New color selector command button component
• New generic scrollable container
• Generic support for custom commands and popups
• Support customization of window title pane buttons
• More presentation options for comboboxes
• New option to mark command button panel group labels as sticky for scrolling
• Full support for radial gradients in transcoded SVG images

The next couple of years are shaping up to be quite exciting for both Aurora and Radiance. If you’re in the business of writing desktop Compose apps, I’d love for you to take Aurora for a spin. Stay frosty for more features coming in 2026!