NEW YORK (AP) ā Jack Fisk, the legendary production designer, has been down a lot of roads in his life. He goes looking down back roads for locations and hillsides on which to plop down mock houses. Heās been to the Solomon Islands for āThe Thin Red Lineā and the Canadian Rockies for But America, really, is his territory.
Fisk, 78, has for half a century been building some of the most indelible homes and structures of movies. He crafted the grand Victorian that peers down from above the wheat fields in Terrence Malickās (1978). He erected the oil derrick of Paul Thomas Andersonās āThere Will Be Bloodā (2007). And he built Mollie Burkhardt's Osage home for
āKillers of the Flower Moon,ā which entailed recreating the circa-1919 Oklahoma town of Fairfax, expands the wide swath of American ground, and history, that Fisk has covered. And itās earned Fisk his third , a capstone to a career crafting rough-hewn on-screen worlds with such fine-grained dimensionality that you feel as though you walked through them.
Thatās partly because you ā or at least the actors ā actually could. Though much set design is done piecemeal, with a few facades just for the camera, Fisk prefers to build entire houses on location to give filmmakers and actors the ability to cross in and out of them. To see out the windows.
āWe build everything so it can be shot from 360 degrees,ā Fisk said in a recent interview from his home, a 210-acre horse farm where he and his wife, Sissy Spacek, live in Albemarle County, Virginia. āAnd directors take advantage of it. I love not narrowing down their options too early. They can move. And when the actors get involved, itās much more organic.ā
āItās something Iāve always liked to do just because I like to build,ā Fisk added, smiling.
In winter, work around their house in Virginia had slowed, though Fisk had spent that morning tiling a bathroom for his daughter. Work on the house moves at a crawl, he says, compared to on set. On āThere Will Be Blood,ā he had some 50 carpenters nailing away. āWhen you do it yourself, everything slows down to molasses,ā he says.
Fisk first set out as a painter and sculptor. He attended art school and initially came to Hollywood only with an idea of painting billboards. After latching onto filmmaking, heās helped designed all kinds of movies. āCarrieā (1976). āEraserheadā (1977). āMulholland Driveā (2001). Heās worked on nearly every Malick movie. But what heās best known for are his homes.
āWhere are you going to put all these sculptures? Youāre going to lug āem around or put āem in a storage area,ā Fisk says. āWhen I got involved in films, it was so exciting because I would build it and then they would film it. So there was a record of it. I was just as happy to never see it again. It always looks better when they filmed it. The lighting is there, the set dressing is there, the actors are performing in it. So youāre remembering it in the best possible light. Now, I build my sculptures to look like houses.ā
Ahead of the , Fisk recounted the stories behind a few of his most enduring constructions.
āDAYS OF HEAVENā
For Malickās 1916-set tale of a love triangle on a Texas farm at harvest time, timing brought Fisk to Alberta, Canada. The season was late and more southern farms had already harvested their wheat. In Alberta, Fisk had six weeks until harvest time, and four until cameras rolled to build Malick the house the director envisioned dominating Ed Hopper-like landscapes.
Fisk, wanting to please Malick, decided to build the whole thing.
āI think a lot of it is just I was new to the business. I didnāt know you could not build the whole thing,ā says Fisk. āAlso, I had done one other film with Terry at the time, āBadlands,ā and I realized how fluid he was and uncommitted. He never uses storyboards. He doesnāt even really look at drawings. He likes to show up and just feel it. More than any director Iāve worked with, heās concerned about the light.ā
āDays of Heavenā remains one of the most lushly realized settings in American cinema, soaked in sunset hues and seas of wheat fields broken only by the workers thrashing in them and the mansion that looms above.
āEveryone thought it was all shot at magic hour, which we soon called ātragic hourā because it was so short,ā says Fisk. āBut it wasnāt. Heād shoot east in the morning and west in the afternoon.ā
āTHE NEW WORLDā
Fiskās father built foundries, and, as a 10- or 11-year-old, Fisk began to build forts of his own while growing up in rural Illinois. (For āBadlands,ā he made a three-story fort in the woods in a single day. āTerry shot the heck out of it,ā Fisk says.) But Malickās 2005 film āThe New World,ā about the founding of Jamestown, demanded a fortress of a far greater scale.
Fisk has been called a Method-style production designer for his fidelity to authenticity, often building period sets with period-appropriate tools.
āI sort of approach these films like Iām making a documentary in a way,ā Fisk says.
An obsessive researcher, Fisk dug into the methods that Jamestown was constructed with in the early 17th century. That led him to be dubious of some depictions of a more polished Jamestown with smooth-cut planks. Fisk suspected something grubbier. And sometimes ā like in Fiskās selection of a saw pit location ā his deductions were proven right by the simultaneous research of archeologist Bill Kelso, who directed the Jamestown Rediscovery Project.
āHe came back to set and he said, āI found evidence of a saw pit in almost the exact same location at Jamestown,ā Fisk says. āSo we knew we were on the right track. A lot of history is common sense and people doing stuff as efficiently as possible. A lot of my work is doing a lot of research and kind of leaving it and working from your gut.ā
āTHERE WILL BE BLOODā
Fisk has compared the work of a production designer to be a little like playing God, and a little like being a kid. For Andersonās 2007 mad epic, he walked ranches around Marfa, Texas, before deciding on the knoll where the 90-foot oil derrick would go. For a film where commerce and religion clash with a common frenzy, the church went on an opposing hillside.
āI love it when youāre on foot with a director-writer and the story starts to visualize for him,ā Fisk says. āWe suddenly know how many steps it is to get to the church from the derrick. It starts to become real.ā
An inherent part of production design for Fisk is building in service of the characters. He first connected with Spacek on Malickās āBadlandsā after he had sensitively filled drawers on set with knickknacks that related to Spacekās character.
āDaniel-Day Lewis, as he found wardrobe things he liked, he wore them always. He found a hat in āThere Will Be Bloodā and he just wore it,ā Fisk says. āHe asked us to make him a room behind his house in Marfa that had nothing but the furnishings from the period so he could go in there and just zone out into the time zone.ā
āTREE OF LIFEā
Fisk didnāt need to build any of the homes for Malickās 2011 cosmic coming-of-age drama, based loosely on the directorās own childhood memories growing up in ā50s Texas. He located a community of the right kind of period homes in Smithville, about 40 miles southeast of Austin.
āI added windows and skylights for lighting purposes. But they were houses that existed,ā Fisk says. "I blocked off about five square blocks of houses and took out air conditioning units and metal sheds and put up fences to cover things that werenāt right so that Terry could walk into that five-acre backlot and shoot pretty much anything.ā
One dramatic exception: the giant live oak tree that Fisk brought in. Malick hadnāt requested it. "But it seemed important ā you know, āTree of Lifeā ā that there was a tree in his yard,ā says Fisk. He found one on a ranch outside of town. Then came the stressful and complicated job of moving it ā all while, Fisk remembers, Malick, kept a nervous distance, fearful that a movie titled āTree of Lifeā would fell a great oak.
āThe highway department in Texas shut down a freeway so we could drive on the wrong side of a freeway to avoid a bridge," recalls Fisk. "Then when we got into town, the phone company and the cable TV company and the power company all sent crews out. They would cut the lines, weād send the tree through and thereād be another crew putting them back up. People would be out in their yards in lawn chairs watching this two-mile-an-hour parade going by.ā
āKILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOONā
Recreating Fairfax wasnāt Fiskās greatest challenge on his first film with Scorsese. There were photographs from the time period and plenty of historical documents. (One personal tweak he made, though, was housing a pool hall and barbershop in one location, as he remembered from growing up in the Midwest.)
More complicated was tracing the home of Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). Old court documents suggested she hadnāt owned her home but lived with her mother, Lizzie. That led him to a possibility on the Osage reservation that Fisk took as inspiration but extended with a second floor and a wrap-around porch. Again, he built it in full, with a few holes carved out for places Scorsese wanted to put a camera.
āI love building houses like we did in Martyās film out in the open,ā Fisk says. āTheyāre in the house. They walk outside on the steps. The weather affects them. If thereās rain they can hear it. They know to get any breeze youāve got to open a window.ā
āWhen you look out in 360 degrees, youāre not seeing anything that pulls you out of that period,ā he adds. āIn those houses, we built them so far out into the prairie that we had to build roads to get into them. The only thing that would tell you that youāre not in the period is the camera equipment.ā
Watching āKillers of the Flower Moonā again, itās striking how much of the film lives in and around Mollieās home. Her house wasnāt flimsy, either. It had to last through bad weather and a lengthy production.
āThe sets on that film were built to last the entire shoot,ā Fisk says. āThey were built strong because we were in a hurricane alley and had to build to withstand strong winds. It just made it doubly fun to build it like a real house.ā
___
Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle at:
___
For more on this yearās Oscars, visit:
Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
