Jack Fisk - 'Marty Supreme'

29:10And suddenly she was reliving my experiences of being hit by the car. And I was about 14 when that happened. And the scene came out beautifully and it was a very daring scene at the time you know because she had to worry about her parents in texas you know other actors and people but you know today it's kind of nothing but it it gave courage to all the other girls to you know to you know to participate in it and it was early on in the film it really helped everybody see what film we were making but also the depth of Sissy as an actor and how far she was willing to go. Totally. The next year was, I guess, the final, after all this lengthy gestation, the release of David Lynch's first feature, Eraserhead.

30:02It's interesting because I found an interview you did in like 1981, and basically there was a thing where you said that you and David found from an early age that you liked being together but it wasn't necessarily a good idea to work together because you both had you know your I guess your own sensibilities obviously years and years later with uh the straight story and Mulholland Drive that would change and you would design for him but back with Eraserhead. I guess he's designed his own sets and all that, but you were still present in a few ways. I mean, it sounds like you and Sissy helped to finance that.

30:43And also you were called off the bench to, uh, to act in it, right? David was working on this film for five years. In the meantime, I was advancing as, as an art director. I don't have the patience that David had the idea of working on for no money for five years. I, I couldn't survive. So I started working, but I started getting a lot of films. I mean, it would just go one to the next, and I had more money than I could, you know, spend. And David was my best friend, and so I just started, like, signing over checks to him so he could keep making his film. It wasn't that much. The film didn't cost, I think it cost$50 ,000 or something, but David, he not only paid back every cent, but we made money, you know, as investors.

31:28But Alan Splett was going to play the man in the planet. Now, Alan Splett was his sound man. He got sick or something happened. He wasn't around. And David said, can you do it? And I remember I just started to grow a beard and I had about a week's worth of beard. And he said, well, I got to mess up your face a little bit. And so he got some plastic out and put it on my face. And we shot the scene. Sissy worked that day as a clapper. I went home that night to Panga, and all this plastic is stuck to the stubble of my beard. It wouldn't come off. Because David, his past is in fine arts where you're doing sculpturing.

32:07You use whatever material you can. It had nothing to do with actors or removability. Anyway, I remember sitting in a tub with hot water and just trying to shave my beard below the plastic. As it turns out, it was all well worth it. One thing I wondered, I guess at the beginning for Malick with Badlands and even Days of Heaven, it was more, which we'll come to in a second, Days of Heaven, but like it was more narratively logical, I guess might be a way to put it. But with David from the beginning with Eraserhead and then with Malik more recently, are you always – even when you're involved in one way or another with a project, would you say that you always understand what the story is that they're trying to tell?

32:53Or can you work without necessarily following – like kind of getting exactly what they're – because I'm not saying it pejoratively. But like I'm not sure that I could explain what Eraserhead is about or To the Wonder or the more recent. Malik stuff. So I was wondering if you always get it. No. I try. Yeah. And Dave and I have a lot of similar reference points, you know, Philadelphia. And I mean, his house, the house in Rayside, I think it's 2416. Well, he lived at 2416 Poplar Street or whatever the, Girard Avenue, I think. He was, while we were in art school, his girlfriend and wife became pregnant.

33:38And I know like, oh, my God, what am I going to do with my career? Now I've got to take care of a baby. And I think a lot of that influenced Eraserhead. And I first saw Eraserhead at the New Art Theater in Santa Monica. And I was shocked at how much personal information was in it. But at the same time, what a world he had created. And I remember talking to David many years ago. I said, David, you're really a great production designer. You've been creating these worlds. and I think he thought of him as an artist to me, never thought of the term of production designer, but he's probably the best.

34:13And yesterday Rick Carter sent me a, Rick Carter's a wonderful production designer, he sent me a video clip from the internet of David talking about production design and it was so right on about what we do. But you don't as an art director or production designer, you don't come in and sort of design the film. you create the world that the film needs and that comes from the script and the director and the characters i like films with characters in it you know sometimes when the films get too abstract you don't know what to do yeah because there's no reference points you know that you don't know their age doesn't seem important where they came from doesn't seem important and all that stuff and those are tools as a designer you rely on to create the world when you're not being approached by someone, a filmmaker who you've previously worked with, how do you decide whether or not you want to do the film?

35:08Is it the script? Is it an endorsement from somebody else who's worked with that person? You know, I imagine it may vary from time to time, but generally, you know, especially these days, I'm sure everybody in the world wants to, every filmmaker would love to have Jack Fist design their film. But so how do you decide whether or not it's something that's worth your doing? You know, a lot of times if I haven't, I'm not familiar with the director, I start watching their films. Sometimes it comes from the script of something that I would like to do with a period. And more often it's the energy and passion of the director.

35:42Like when I met Alejandro Nierutu, I recognized the artist. I recognized the passion and how he was going to approach the film. And I wanted to be a part of it. It's that way when I met Josh Softee. You know, Josh called me three years before making film and started telling me about, I'm going to make this movie about Ping Bong and I want you to do it. And I started watching Josh Softee films. And then Uncut Gems came out. And I go, this guy is very good. Then he called me at the farm. He goes, I got the money and I got Timothee Chalamet. Let's make it. And I was so excited. I was a little wary of working in New York because I hadn't worked there since a few scenes of Phantom of the Paradise.

36:24But I went up there and he's got such a close-knit group of friends and they accepted me as if I had been a part of him for many years. So I was like included in this family of energetic filmmakers that all wanted to make Josh Softee's film. You know, Ronnie, who co-wrote the script and edited it, been working with him for years. Eli Bush, the producer, been working with him for years. I think they all grew up together. And Josh knows everybody in New York, and everybody loves him. And so I was kind of honored to be working with him. And I felt a little crazy because they're the age of my kids.

37:07But Josh would go, you're the youngest person I know. That's it. And the other day he said, I told somebody you were eight. I said, well, you forgot to zero.

37:18We'll certainly zero in on Marty Supreme in a bit. But I wonder if we can go back to 1978, which is when Days of Heaven, I guess this would be your second time with Malick, when this one comes out. Because it seems like in some ways this is where you solidified the kind of production designer that you would go on to be with the idea of I'm going to give the filmmaker something that can be shot 360 degrees inside, outside, every option. I know that you said you were thinking about those things with some of the earlier ones. But I mean in this case, the Victorian mansion is almost as much of a character in the film as the three people in the love triangle.

38:03And I want people to just – just to set up the movie set in 1916 Texas. You guys shoot this in Alberta, Canada where you would return years later for other stuff. But can you just share the origin story of that house? because I think it is, in some ways, it's not the most elaborate or crazy thing that you've done, and yet it's so integral to that film. It turned out to be kind of iconic. But when I first met Terry on this film, he called me into his office. He gave me two books on harvesting wheat, and he showed me a picture of a Belvedere from 1896 with a family sitting outside. And he goes, this is the kind of house I want him to live in.

38:44So it wasn't a ranch house. It was, you know, in New England, Coast Belvedere, where you look out the sea, out the ocean, which worked great with the wheat because it was like an ocean. And he had this idea. He said, I want you to build the house like a theater set so we can fold it up, ship it to the next location. We'll shoot until they harvest the wheat. Then we fold it up, ship it to the next and work our way north. I was thinking, you know, I hadn't had a lot of experience, you know, building theater sets. Although I did work in the theater for a year, but we were doing different types of stuff.

39:17And we started looking for locations. By the time we found the first location that had acceptable wheat, we were already in Canada, and that was the last stop. You know, like North America was ending, and we wouldn't shoot it that year. But we found a great field owned by the Hutterites, and there was a ranch next door, so next to the field was some property we could rent to build our house on. And I remember talking to Terry and the Hutterites out there, and they said they would let us shoot there. He said, but we're harvesting this field in six weeks. We've got to do that. This is our livelihood, and there's no ifs, ands, ands, and buts.

39:58And Terry said, well, I need to shoot the house with the wheat for two weeks before you cut it. So I started thinking, well, that's four weeks. I said, well, we can do a suggestion of the house in the background, you know, or build one wall. No, I also want to be inside looking out at the weed. And I was 27 and didn't know that what he was asking was impossible. So I remember that evening flying back to L.A. to get my clothes and talk to some carpenter friends. There were like six carpenters that had been working with me on films in L.A. And we all flew back. The only wood we could really find were two-by-fours and plywood.

40:38So that whole house is built out of different dimensions of plywood. We put some telephone poles in the ground and fastened it to it. And the Hutterites would come up and sort of go, well, there's no way you can do this in four weeks. And you want some dandelion wine? But not only did we get the house done in four weeks, but we got the three barracks behind it in a barn. And got steam tractors prepared. and stuff. The Hutterite kids I hired secretly, or I thought it was secretly, to come up on Sunday to help us build because they were all pretty handy with their hammers and stuff. So they built the three barracks.

41:19My six friends built the house. And the farmer who owned the land gave us a D10 cat to make a road so we could get the lumber trucks in. And I remember we had never used the D10 cat and we never built roads, but we built a road. The first lumber truck came in turned over because there was a soft spot in it and uh and then we had to look all the wood up the hill by hand but uh every piece of that was the exterior stuff was done with plywood except the glass and the windows you know when i look back i wish i'd had more time more money you know more materials i also realized that we have to do this or terry's not going to get to make his film and my excitement about this film is always like to give the director what you're like enablers to give him what he wants.

42:04And Nestor Alamandro showed up. He was so excited to see Wooden House. I don't think in France they have that many wooden houses standing out in nowhere. The producer, who I love, Harold Schneider, hated the house. He thought it should have been a ranch house, you know, with burlap drapes and stuff. But it was iconic. And Terry, his approach to it, bringing in the biplanes, you know, shooting the animals. And we built this little gazebo out there with the wind blowing the fabric, and he once again used voiceover, which I've heard directors in the past saying that's just such a crutch, but it wasn't.

42:39It propelled the story. And he found Linda Manns, and he worked with her and incorporated what she could do into the character, and then he added this great music. I mean, it's a magical situation, and I've never met a stronger director or a smarter person. The thing I want to say about Terry, though, he's brilliant, but he talks to you like you, as smart as he is. He makes you feel good but feel inadequate at the same time because I go, wait a minute, I'm not. Well, I'm wondering, so you're coming off of, among other things, Badlands, Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, and Days of Heaven in a period of five years.

43:21a month again it's not the whole list and yet we get to two years later you do design a movie heartbeat 1980 yeah and then for the next 18 years did not design another film until terry came out of his hiatus that he'd been in since days of heaven 20 years for him with thin red line. Now, I know that you were, first of all, starting your family, I believe. You were also directing. There's a number of films in there. I think probably most notably Raggedy Man with Sissy. This is 1981. There's several films in that period that you directed, but it's just interesting that at a time when you were probably as hot as anyone could be as a production designer, you took a time out from designing.

44:11Yeah, I remember Brian De Palma wanted me to do a film right after that. And I said no, you know, and he and Patty Norris called me and said, you got to do it. And I go, no, I want to direct. And if I keep taking these films, I'll never get to direct. No one will take me serious. And, you know, thinking back and with what I learned doing it is that I didn't really want to direct, but Sissy wanted me to direct. and when I was directing I missed the freedom of designing I love creating worlds I could make so many great decisions like okay we'll take lunch at 11 today we'll go here we'll do that and I have this uh I found that sense in this kind of ADHD mind but I don't do so well if I have to go in a straight line so I'll do this and I'll do that this and that but I can make all these decisions and it was just real comforting.

45:05We'd also purchased a farm in Virginia and we were raising horses. One time we had 55 horses. Wow. And we had two daughters and I wanted to be with my daughters and I wanted to see if we could make this farm go. But every year the Academy Awards come up and you're sort of reminded of film and I'd see it and I'd kind of miss it. And then I was thinking at one point, my daughters don't even know what I do. And our oldest daughter had gotten a part. she was in a film called Babysitter's Club Melanie and Mayron directed Melanie was an old friend and cast her in that and then she got cast in a film in Ireland called My Friend Joe so we all went over there and Skylar's had amazing balance since she was a kid and could walk a high wire and in that film she was a high wire artist but a kid she was 12 years old and at the wrap party of that film in Dublin this film credit came up and he goes, well, I hear Terry Malick's making the Thin Red Line.

46:05And suddenly I got real jealous and I sent him a telegram and said, Terry, I've just recovered from days of heaven and I'd love to work with you again. So that 20 years it took me to recover. Had you guys been in touch during this year? No. Not at all? No. And I met him a couple of weeks later in Los Angeles at a party at Tony Bill's house. And we started walking on the beach and he said, I'd like you to go to Guadalcanal. I've written a script about Guadalcanal, but I've never been there. I want you to go in with, you know, with a young cinematographer and just shoot it so I can see what it looks like.

46:39And I went to Guadalcanal and we shot the heck out of it. And I fell in love with the Melanesians. They're originally headhunters, so they look fierce, but they're just so kind. It was a strange country and there was a war there i mean after the war started we invaded it you know i think six months after pearl harbor and then it became a training base and my father who flew p-38s was in new guinea was just like a thousand miles away but i know he had been there you know and i actually found a p-38 about 15 feet underwater and was able to dive down to see it and touch it and then i found another one in the jungle that was just too difficult for the people who collect salvage to get it out.

47:29And so I really felt a presence with my dad. I was excited about the Melanesian people. And then I found that they had a choir. I think they were Episcopalians. Terry's Episcopalian. I said, Terry, you've got to come to Guadalcanal. And he did come with his wife, Eki, and he met the Melanesians. And like me, he fell in love with them. And later he made recordings, released a couple albums of them singing. But the studio was going, you cannot shoot in Guadalcanal. It's the malaria capital of the world. And I remember we were sitting in a bar one night outdoors on the shore, and there was a mosquito on the table, and I smacked it, and blood came out.

48:15And we go, oh, no. You know, everybody had malaria there. But Murray Boyd, who's no longer with us, was an Australian location. He said, I think I can find similar land outside Port Douglas in the Daintree area. And so I flew from Guadalcanal with Terry to the Daintree area above. And we found some land that we thought might work, but it was a cattle ranch. And the ground was all trampled down and eaten and pooped on and stuff. and we made a deal with the owner to move his cattle to another ranch and we came in with helicopters and seeded and fertilized this thing and then waited. And the seasons are reversed there, so we were there like in January, February or December, January, but that was their summer.

49:05And the stuff grew beautifully. And when we showed up to shoot in March, you know, the stuff was four feet tall and we were trying to figure out, or I was trying to figure out how you shoot it without trampling it. and Terry came up with this idea of a kilocrane. And it has an 80-foot arm, and he used it like a dolly. So you could follow the soldiers right through, but you wouldn't be making any marks and you wouldn't have any equipment. And Terry likes to shoot natural lights. We didn't have bulks of generators and cables and all that stuff. So it worked out beautifully. That's great. Now, just to, I guess as a bit of an aside, But like for a lot of – for the vast majority of us, you being a big exception, he's this mysterious guy because he never does interviews.

49:56He's never photographed. He never shows up even to his own movies, premieres. Or if he does, he sneaks in at Cannes and things like that. What is that about? Like what's he actually like and why is he so averse to being appreciated? it terry is the humblest person i know you on his films i never say a terry malik film he always talks about our film he's just uh the way he is he doesn't like to be photographed he doesn't like you know to do press and i understand it because right now we're in a season in hollywood where everybody is promoting their films and i keep thinking how nice it would be if they just pick five films that everybody liked every year and gave them an award.

50:40Why do they have to pick out the one? You know, some of them have a budget, I think last year or two years ago, $6 million. You know, and the year before it was$200 million. You know, it's like, it's weird to compare work. You know, if you're a designer, if you design the same film with the same amount of money in the same amount of time, then maybe you could judge one as better than the other. but they're all so different. And we should just think of a way to appreciate them. The problem is that award season has become such a moneymaker for so many people that it won't change. But is that what his reservations are?

51:20No. He just doesn't want to be around people. You know, Terry started as a philosopher and an artist, and he's more confident. I can't even pretend to know what's going on behind his head. And a person wrote a book just recently on Terry. Bleasdale, John Bleasdale. Yeah, and I've talked to him many times. And he sent me a copy of the book, and he said, have you read it? And I said, I read about 10 pages, but I felt like such an invasion of his privacy, I couldn't read it. And he understood, but I still feel that way. You know, there's things about Terry that I want to leave them to Terry. I don't want to dissect him and bisect him.

52:01I don't want to look at him. And I love him like a brother. younger you know less brilliant brother but but i like being in his presence yeah he's something about him is reminds you to be better well and you guys certainly have brought out great things in each other and i know that one of the things that maybe is not you know a film that's not as famous or discussed as badlands or days of heaven or thin red line is the new world and yet you have said that that one was a big turning point for you. And I know that with that one, you know, where you're essentially having to recreate Jamestown in the 17th century, like it's not the first, maybe not even the first example, but it is an example of you saying, I am going to not just make something.

52:50I'm going to make it with the tools and in the ways that the people would have made it at that time. Right. Yeah. I was trying to make a documentary about Jamestown. I ran into a problem with this documentary idea when I talked to an anthropologist there who'd worked with the Indians of the area. And I wanted her to help me, you know, create the village as it might have been. And she said, well, if you make Pocahontas, nine years old, naked and bald, I'll help you. I said, there's no way we can do that. Every other way, you know, we hand carved the canoes and we really used our own canoes we built we built the fort in 30 days but we had hydraulic equipment helping us you know which they didn't have I had a lot of theories on the fort since I was a kid and I spent some of my youth in Virginia and that's all you study in the 50s they built a replica of the fort and I was always critical of it because they'd use big boards and stuff and and so I started researching I read all the Jamestown Chronicles and I met Dr.

53:52Kelso who discovered the fort in 1992. It was underneath a Civil War fort, and he started excavating and finding out that it's different than we'd always thought. You know, we were working from a French drawing that, you know, a guy had done, and it looked like there was a flag on the fort, but it could have been a garden. You know, it's like nobody really knew, and there were round things in the end, but were they really round and tall? And I studied other forts that they were building at the time in Spain and France. And he worked with me closely and told me everything that they had discovered, so I was able to incorporate that.

54:30I remember at one time I had built a saw pit right near the water, and he came over and he goes, why did you put it there? And I said, well, I thought if they wanted to send wood down, it would come down the water. It might be nicer working in the saw pit, which is a horrible thing, you know, if you had the breeze coming off the water. And a couple weeks later he came back and he said, I found evidence of a saw pit at the real Jamestown in almost exactly the same position. Wow, wow, wow. So, and then at one time we were doing some fire in the fort, and we'd done it with Waddle and Dobb. And he said, can I bring my students over to see it after the fire?

55:08And he came over, and he went through the rubble of the fire, and he was pulling out these weird-shaped bricks, but they were actually pieces of clay that had been pushed in between sticks. and he was so excited because it was exactly the same stuff he was finding in Jamestown. So that's made it really exciting for me. It's when I thought about my job as history and how you're trying to preserve history. And I failed on Pocahontas, but I tried to use all the building techniques that they use. On Hog Island, there were some tall cattails and stuff, and that's what they cut for all the roofs. So we would go to Hog Island and we'd cut cattails.

55:47and we shot on the Chickahominy River, which is just beautiful. We found a place where they used to build ships where the water was about 60 feet deep right at the edge of the land, and so we could bring in our period ships. Luckily, we got from the state. They had three of them. We brought one down from New England, and they allowed us to paint them because they were painted up for an amusement park type thing. It just worked out beautifully. You're like a historian and detective and all these things in one on top of being an artist. It's amazing to think about how many kind of hats you have to wear to do what you do.

56:25And there's so much to cover, but I'm going to try to condense because I know we're running short on time. But I want to have to note your two Paul Thomas Anderson collaborations where there will be blood in 07 and then five years later, the master, which it seems like, correct me if I'm wrong, we're kind of opposite experiences, right? because there will be blood, you had to, sounds like, build everything, whereas the master, you had to convert existing locations into what you needed them to be. Is that fair to say? Yeah, locations are a tool that we have and just as important as building. If you can find a location, it might give you hints to stuff.

57:06It might guide you in directions you've never thought of going, and it could make the film better. but you have to choose the locations for the story and for the world you're building. They were kind of opposite films, but Paul called me when I was working on The New World. We were in England at the time, and I wasn't familiar with his films, so I started watching his films and found out he was just a great filmmaker. He decided he wanted me to do his film, and I was really excited. I met Paul at the Burbank Airport a couple months later, and we were going on our first location scout. and we got an airplane flew to texas went to marfa and there was a 50 000 acre ranch there that had a railroad tack on it we need a railroad track and i thought it was perfect then the studio said well see if you can find it in new mexico because they have a better tax rebate or something tax rebate and that's the sort of the horror yeah to me but we went to new mexico and it was just too nice it was too gentle and the bushes were all fluffy and round and stuff and and we decided we wanted to shoot in Texas.

58:10And I remember talking to Daniel Lupe, our producer, and saying, you know, we've got so much here. It looks the way Paul wanted California to look, where everything could hurt you and it wasn't, you know, wasn't civilized or built up. I think we can save money. And I work with a really small art department of three people. I work with David Crank, who was an art director that worked with me on The New World. I met on that. And with Ruth DeYoung, who had never worked on a film before, but was a friend of my daughter's. Now, Ruth DeYoung last year did Oppenheimer, and now she's got the Odyssey coming out.

58:42She's one of the top designers in the world, and we're best friends, and her family lives in Virginia, near where we live. Her sister has a bakery shop. Her father was a graphic artist that helped design some albums for my daughter Skyler, who's the singer, and we're just all very close. But it's so wonderful to see this breakout. When she came on to the Paul's film, she didn't know anything, but she knew everything. You know, I say some of the stuff's innate. I wasn't taught production design, but I feel it. And she just, her emotions and reactions and everything she did were, you know, were perfect.

59:24And so we were able to work with a three-man art department and a part-time set designer. And I like to work that way even today when I can. When I get in trouble is if I get too big in art department. Too big, yeah. But it's amazing how much you can do with a relatively small. I mean, on that one, there will be blood, 50-foot mineshaft, right? 100-foot oil derrick. This whole, just the scale of these things is unbelievable. I mean, and prior to that, I'm trying to think, like, what could you have known before you prepped for that and did your research and stuff about building an oil derrick or things like that it's it's kind of incredible that you're able to get take on almost any kind of a challenge that's what excites you about taking a job is something that scares you and that seems impossible when i met paul we got along instantly and then i went back to his studio and he shared all of his research with me and photographs and stuff.

1:00:27I drove out to Kern County to a museum there and I found a blueprint, or it's actually a print of a drawing for Derek from 1896. And I just used that. It cost$2. I bought it and we built from that. I've also found some video of two men building a Derek. I mean, it was something that they did often and it wasn't real difficult. But you get some weird assignments, right? Yeah, you hope so. Well, how about like in between those two PTA movies, you're back with Malick for Tree of Life. And I believe the assignment, one of the assignments on this, aside from let's get a small town with it. And then you, I believe, not even at his request, bring in the literal tree.

1:01:15But how about for listeners, how about this assignment? We need a room that's upside down in a swimming pool for a scene so a baby can swim out of the door. And it's, I mean, like, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Well, first you have to find the water. And then you have to build the room so that it doesn't float away. And then I got some kids to do drawings and stuff that we put on the walls that look like a kid's room. And they found a baby that they could get down, let go, and he would just go up toward the light. So we turned the room upside down so that the door pointed toward the surface.

1:01:54And, you know, he also had in there a clear coffin. There was an old figure from early times floating in the water. I find that a lot of times Terry knows exactly what he wants, but he doesn't tell you exactly what he wants because he wants to see what you'll come up with. Interesting. And I try hard as I can to surprise him and to come up with something even better than he might have thought of. But it's not possible. That's amazing. He's so far ahead. We go look at locations, and it was like he had been there before. And he probably had. Very briefly, if I can, just the last few. And I could ask you about each one of these all day.

1:02:39But just to be fair to you with time, it sounds like from everything I've read, there could not have been a more challenging shoot than the revenant way long like something like a year and a half i think unbelievably grueling the amount of space you had to cover the terrain freezing all these things uh you have to convey that this character that leo's playing is going hundreds of miles in different places that he's actually moving so you can't just it's not easy to fake that in the same geography. I could just go on and on. And I wonder, and then on top of all of that, the cinematographer who might be the greatest of our lifetime, this is Chivo Levesque, who's done Malick and him with you, right?

1:03:27I've been six films with Chivo. Six films with him, I think, more than anybody else. But his thing is, he only wants to shoot with backlighting, right? Which also people can, shouldn't forget, is going to affect your job. So I wonder, was the revenant the hardest? You know, it was the scariest because I came close to some grizzlies. Oh, jeez. And your life could end. Oh, my God. And a couple of times I was out looking for a location. Alejandro and Chico found this location where a stream had gone through a little corner of the woods. And he said, I would love to have a location where the whole woods is flooded.

1:04:05I was hiking by myself, walking down a stream, and I saw water flowing out of the woods into the stream. And I walked down further and went in, and it was like a peninsula, but a tree had fallen on the farther side and reverted the stream through the forest. And it was exactly like Alejandra, excited. So I went around and explored it. Some places it got really deep. It was very cold, snowy and stuff, but it was getting dark. And then I remembered my car is like a mile away, and I'm in an area where grizzlies live. And they run 35 miles an hour. You can't get away from them, and they're hard to reason with.

1:04:55And I didn't carry bear spray because I didn't know if it worked, and I didn't want to get them more upset. And I was suddenly a mile from my car, and I was trying to figure out how to get there quietly, safely, and I made it. But I was scared the whole way. But we've had grizzly bears come down to our food tent or the truck where we were feeding people, looking for food. Robin Mounsey, the greatest location person I ever worked with, and I were investigating location. And while we were walking across this field, about 75 antelope come running right toward us. and i go that's so weird they run toward you usually you know they see you and they run the other way and we walked up this hill after they passed and then robin said i want to see if there's an exit you know out of this area over there closer to the highway and so we start walking over there and i look in the snow and there's some big paw prints and i said robin who's from canada isn't that a grizzly track he goes yeah i said but i just want to go up no no let's go back they tell you don't run yeah so we're walking backwards and we keep seeing tracks we were following that bear stupidly unknowingly and the reason the antelope had run from us is because they were scared of the grizzly they weren't scared of us oh my god and it just uh i always feel like i have a guardian angel and uh luckier and you know but i mean even Even if it wasn't a grizzly, it seems like with the revenant, you could have frozen.

1:06:31You could have just... Oh, one guy did, not on our crew, but there was a hiker that froze to death. There were people that were killed by bears. You know, all the time we were there. I was often in locations where you didn't know how to get out of. You worried about water, you know, ice breaking. I learned to build, you know, I had a knife with a piece of steel and I could build a fire with it. I carried firewood in my car at all times in case I did get trapped. extra clothing and blankets uh you just approach it differently wow but was it was exciting and and i loved it and we there were a lot of gifts and you're right about every day the location had to look different or you weren't moving and uh i just alejandro appreciated that less too if i insisted on it i would say it's unbelievable and and also i i will just say who can forget i think this was part of your portfolio on that were the the buffalo skulls too right oh yeah we built those buffalo skulls we had to erect them in like one day so it's always like you know the production designer you're you're trying to figure out how to do stuff yeah i mean just recently in new york was figuring out how to cover up all the graffiti all the modernization and make it look like it did 75 years ago with marty yeah before we talk about marty supreme Marty Scorsese very quickly, Killers of the Flower Moon.

1:07:52Somehow you've both gone many decades of successful career without working together. Here you come together for this one where it's going to be out in essentially Osage County, right? And I think that this is one where just if there's one takeaway maybe for people or one thing to ask you to talk about is just, again, the level of how your research can crack open a whole – it can unlock the whole movie. I mean, really, I know that there had been the book, which had a good amount of research done for it. But there were things that you found about Molly and other things, right, that had not been known before.

1:08:31You know, ironically, I got that information from David Gann's research. I started going through all the probate hearings and trials. And Gann, at the end of his book, said, I never found Molly's house. But I imagine it was out on the prairie and it was a good size and stuff. Well, in the research, I found four of her houses. One of them was in Grey Horse and still existed. It had vinyl siding on it or metal siding on it now, but it was very small. It also, from his book and from the belief of the Osage today, is that their grandparents lived in these mansions. And I went to Fairfax, which is the main town, and there were no mansions there.

1:09:12There was one that was built in 1938, but in the 20s, they were small houses. they were craftsmen or smaller. And in reading the research, the lawyer asked Molly, he said, do you have your own house? And she said, no. And he said, well, where do you live? And he said, I live with my mother. And where's that? In Grey Horse Village. So I looked, and we have a plot of what land she had in Grey Horse Village. And I talked to this historian there, Osage, he was 78 at the time. and he said oh yeah I know that house and he directed me to the house and I met the people next door and the sister the woman who owned it now because the the family had lost it because they weren't using it and his sister was in her sister was in the hospital but she said you know you can look in the windows and stuff I don't think you want to go in there because there's fleas and you know she had cats and bed bugs you know whatever it was but it was so small there was no way you could shoot in it and then I started reading more about, you know, her husband wanted to buy a farm because he wanted, he was doing some scheme with the other character to sell cattle back and forth, but they wouldn't let him do it because he didn't have any land.

1:10:30So they bought the bush farm, which was right down in Fairfax. It's about 400 acres. So I went to that farm and I talked to the woman there and the house that they lived in, which I later found a picture of, had burned down in the 40s. and so I knew but the description of land and everything worked perfectly with you know all the court notes and then Molly after a year she didn't want to be out in the country so she moved three blocks away into the town and bought a house at 6 in Elm that house happened to be for sale when I was there I called the realtor got in there and it matched all the description of her application to the Osage Indians what she wanted to do the house She wanted$1 ,000 to put a sleeping porch on.

1:11:17She had a list of things. And these people were millionaires considerably. But they refused to let her buy a radio because it cost$400 at the time. They said, you don't need it. She wanted a new car. They said, your car's fine. So as rich as they were, they didn't have access to their money. And other people did. And it disappeared. Hundreds of people could have been implicated in the deaths of Osage Indians, but they weren't. They weren't by the FBI who was paid to come there by the Osage. They didn't come on their own and the government wasn't paying for it. They were, I think, paid the equivalent of$250 ,000.

1:11:52When that money was gone, they left. And they only brought two people to trial or three people to trial. So there's a big story about the Osage untold. But it's interesting that when I would talk to people, Osage today, and I met one that was a purebred Osage. Boy, they had a white wife. that was ending. But they keep thinking that their parents were living in mansions. But you look in the town, there's no mansions. Not the case. But what they did do is they collected china. They loved china and furniture and stuff. And they would go on trips around Arkansas and Kansas and stuff and buy china and send it back.

1:12:34But the fact that you know this stuff and that you're able to find it out and that you think to look into things. I mean, this connects it with the Marty Supreme research that, I mean, I'm reading that you found blueprints and things of a ping pong club from 1952 or whatever that nobody's thought about in half a century and all this. I mean, I guess in some ways the question is a viewer is not going to know that – what's this place called? The Lawrence's. Lawrence's in Manhattan. So a viewer is not going to know if it's exactly right and yet it's still important to you that it is. Why is that?

1:13:10Well, you have to start somewhere. And my approach on Marty especially was to make a documentary. I started with that building. It had been torn down. There were tax records. They'd taken pictures of every building in New York. I found that building. I think Josh may have found it before I did. But then I started reading about it and the history of it. Before it was a ping pong parlor, it was an indoor golf course. and when it was indoor golf course they had done paintings all around landscapes of trees and hills and stuff so you would think that maybe when you're doing i imagine it was more like miniature golf that you would feel you're out in the country even though you're on the second floor of a building in new york you know with the city all around you and it becomes exciting because those clues lead to other things and at some point you go well do i want to go with the truth or Would it be the story better served or something else?

1:14:06But I always like starting with something, and it's the truth. You know, and looking under layers and see what kind of paint they used in the old days. That's amazing. Lawrence was a good example because that was kind of where I started because it seemed, you know, reading Marty Reisman's book, how it was an important part of his career. I mean, he started going when he was 12 or 13 and then became a world champion. Last 30 seconds, if it's all right. This is what we call it, just sort of the rapid fire. Just first thing that comes to your mind, if we can. Is there a sort of film that you haven't yet made that you'd like to make?

1:14:46Yes. Will you tease it? A film? Well, in the sense like a genre or something. Yeah, I would like to do People in the Future. Futuristic, okay, cool. which filmmaker who you've not worked with would you most like to work with wow i don't know yet sorry no all good did you and pta ever discuss doing one battle after another i actually uh went with paul to look at locations for one battle after another and i remember when we finished he said i said do you have a script he says i've i've just got to put it together it's like folding the laundry you know he's got it all clean you just got to fold it it took several years after that and i think the script evolved in that time i think that maybe i didn't show enough enthusiasm because it wasn't immediate and but i love paul sure he's a great filmmaker i know that you've occasionally as technologies evolved like with i think some things in killers like if you have to extend a block or something you will you will use cgi you'll work what CGI will be incorporated into essentially that's part of the production design.

1:15:56Yeah. Is AI something that you've learned about and could see yourself ever wanting to incorporate into production design? I'm open to it but my daughter is so against the amount of water used to cool the data centers that I cannot talk about it in my family. I play with it. it's uh it's kind of crazy and i assume that it will become a part of our lives but we have to do it conservatively and not just do everything who's the next jack fisk is there an up-and-coming production designer who you're most impressed by well ruth is one of them yeah and and i'm working with a younger designer now uh megan mcclure okay who came on and saved me and helped me on marty's film she's actually doing some production line at the moment but you know she's going to work with me on the next film and and she reminds me so much of ruth that's great least favorite aspect of your job i guess it's sort of keeping records of all the finances and stuff it's so contrary to way i work sure most favorite aspects of your job you know the most favorite aspect is when i walk into a a set a world that we've created and i am transported to that time It's happened a couple of times.

1:17:14Once in Water for Elephants. Yes. When I went into the tent at night and the lights were on, they were period lamps and the tents were flapping and the smell of all the animal poop. I said, I'm in 1930s. That may relate to this next one. If you could have preserved one set that you designed, which would it have been?

1:17:38Well, I don't know because I'm geared to let them go. So I don't think of saving stuff because what do you do if you save it? It's temporary and you've got to move it. So I found a great freedom when I started working in film. As I build it, they shoot it, record it on film, and then we get rid of it. Last one. If someone's teaching a college course on production designers and they can only show one film to illustrate the work of each of the greats, which would you want it to be for yourself? What would sort of most encapsulate what you do at your best? Wow. I don't know if it can be encapsulated in one film.

1:18:20I love variety and stuff. What I've always tried to do is get the art directors out of the office and onto the set. And when I worked on Marty, I asked him, please come down to Orchard Street. A lot of them have never been on a set. you know it's become an office job and i've never thought it was an office job on the revenant i didn't have an office until the second half of production because i didn't need it you know i want to be out there and and ruth is the same way and megan is the same way uh that's what i would like to teach people is our job is not an office job we're building stuff in reality and we've got to be there to look at it.

1:19:03But I'm also attracted to films that are, you know, that have sets built in nature. I like building houses outside that you go inside and outside, and it's all part of the set. And some people are not used to doing that. Well, I can't thank you enough. This is such a treat and unbelievable career to have so much to talk about. So thanks for making the time. It's been lovely. I could talk for an hour.

1:19:34Thanks for listening to Awards Chatter. We really appreciate it and would really appreciate you taking just a minute more to subscribe to the podcast and to leave us a rating and review on your podcast app. And to follow us on Twitter and Instagram, where our handle is at Awards Chatter. On those platforms, we announce upcoming guests and provide details about special live recordings of the podcast that you can attend. Until next time, thanks again for tuning in.