The Daily: The Sunday Read: ‘The Genius Behind Hollywood’s Most Indelible Sets’

My name is Noah Gallagher-Shannon. I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.

This week's Sunday Read is a profile I wrote for the magazine about a guy named Jack Fisk

and his work on the new Martin Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon.

Jack is the master production designer behind many of Hollywood's auteur directors, from

Paul Thomas Anderson and David Lynch, to Terrence Malick, Alejandro Inaritu, and Brian De Palma.

Production designers are among the most important, but often underappreciated people on a movie

set. Jack's job is to be the visual conduit for the director, to manifest the physical

realities in which these films exist. And so, Jack is responsible for finding locations

for the film's backdrops, building the sets, and populating those sets with furniture,

props, and anything else that might help kind of speak to the thematic elements of the movie.

But what makes Jack such a legend in Hollywood is how he's able to bring the American past

back to us in such a fully immersive and imaginative way. To him, too many period pieces these

days just feel kind of smoothed over. Everyone's a little too clean, the buildings look a little

too gleaming. And so he tries to show how imperfect and messy the world actually was

back then, through unexpected details. That could mean building a hundred foot tall oil

derrick for there will be blood, or a Victorian mansion for days of heaven, or a 17th century

fort in the New World. And for Killers of the Flower Moon, which was shot on location

in Oklahoma, Jack basically built an entire replica of the town of Fairfax, atop the very

real town of Pahuska. Killers of the Flower Moon is the story of the Osage people who

were forcibly removed to a reservation. Around the turn of the century, oil was discovered

on the reservation, which made the Osage some of the richest per capita people in the world

at the time. But then, some of the Osage, one after another, began mysteriously dying.

And what emerges is a conspiracy among their white neighbors, their friends, even their

family members, who are targeting the Osage for their oil rights.

Oftentimes, we think of movies as taking place in sound stages, or using CGI. But Jack

is really interested in building full-scale replicas of buildings, often with everything

in them but electrical and plumbing. And that's what he's done for Killers of the Flower

Moon. Jack is obsessed with a certain kind of historical

veracity. He rigorously researches the lives of characters in a time period, trying to

find something that no one else has found, something that will draw us into the world

and make it feel vivid. Sometimes, Jack would literally rip the carpet

out of a building, or peel back a few layers of paint. And all of a sudden, there'd be

hardwood, or a beautiful green paint from the 1930s. And Jack would go, that's fine.

That's great. We don't even have to do anything. Jack has this method-like approach to building,

almost like he's getting his carpenters and his painters into character, to imagine that

they're from the 19th century, or 17th century. Back then, they wouldn't have used levels.

They wouldn't have been able to use a tape measure. And you know, in the case of a big

movie production, where you have maybe hundreds of different carpenters and painters, that

can be a pretty demanding managerial task, to get everyone into an imaginative headspace.

But Jack, despite being in his 70s, is famous for his physicality. He's very hands-on.

And so he'll be up there hammering nails right alongside his carpenters.

In June, I flew out to Virginia to Jack's farm, where he's lived since the 1970s with

his wife, who, by the way, is the actress Sissy Spasic. They live in this beautiful

Civil War-era farmhouse, that Jack's meticulously remodeled room by room over the years.

The more Jack and I talked, the more it became evident just how central historical accuracy

was to his whole artistic ethos.

Most films we go in kind of knowing the story. We kind of stay at a certain level. We don't

go deep. And because it's everything we know and expect, then something throws you off

kilter and you go, wait a minute, I got to look at this. I think you can get deeper

into it, or you see it, it's like you're seeing it for the first time.

At one point, as we walked on his farm, he explained the reasons why he went to such

extreme lengths to find, for example, the exact furniture the Osage used. And I really

got the sense that he was world-building in his private life too, the same way that he

does on the screen.

Why spend the time? Why not just pick out some furniture that looks pretty close?

Well, because we could get this stuff, and why not do it like it was? The more real

I can make it, the more I get excited. You know, I'd always try to do something real

if it can, because why not?

Well, there's got to be better reasons than just why not, right?

Why? Okay, if somebody drives a car, would it be better just to have any car you liked,

or would it be better to have a car just like the one he drove? What would tell you the most

about the character, no matter what it looked like? If it was one he actually drove, it

might give you more clues to that character. If it was the furniture they had to use or

were attracted to, and that's what they live with every day of their life, it might tell

you more about that character, that they were living with that. They weren't living with

this art nouveau piece that you found at a prop shop, even though it might look better.

So here's my article, The Genius Behind Hollywood's Most Indelible Sets, read by James Patrick

Cronin.

Cajica Avenue cuts through the town of Pajasca, Oklahoma, roughly north to south, forming

the only corridor you might call a business district in the town of 2,900. Standing in

the middle is a small TV and appliance store called Hometown, which occupies a two-story

brick building and hasn't changed much in decades. Boards cover its second-story windows,

and part of the sign above its awning is broken, leaving half the lettering intact, spelling

Home.

The space inside, in the language of the planes, is humble. Its ceilings are low, its walls,

its panels, its floors carpeted in tight-woven grids. If it weren't for the giant inflatable

University of Oklahoma Sooner's mascot in its front window display, the store would

be easy to miss completely.

One winter day in February 2021, Jack Fisk stood before Hometown with Martin Scorsese,

explaining how beautiful it could be. For much of the last week, he and Scorsese had

been walking around Pajasca, scouting set locations for the director's 28th feature

film, Killers of the Flower Moon.

The film, which is based on David Grand's best-selling book, chronicles the so-called

1920s reign of terror, when the Osage Nation's discovery of oil made them some of the richest

people in the world, but also the target of a conspiracy among whites seeking to kill

them for their shares of the mineral rights. To render the events as accurately as possible,

Scorsese had decided to film the movie in Osage County. It would be a sprawling, technically

complicated shoot, with much of the undertaking falling to Fisk. Unlike production designers

who use sound stages or computer-generated imagery, he prefers to build from scratch

or to remodel period buildings, and even more than most of his peers, he aspires to

exacting historical detail.

His task would be to create a full-scale replica of a 1920s boom town atop what remains of

2020's Pajasca.

The concern for the two men that day was where to build a pool hall, a set critical to the

film as several pivotal scenes between the antagonists, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and

Robert De Niro, unfold there. A nearby vacant building, formerly a hotel, appeared to capture

the exact scale and mood Scorsese imagined, a vaulted space with columns and tile flooring.

But Fisk voiced hesitations. He'd already spent several months in Osage County, touring

buildings and studying land surveys, and he thought the hotel wouldn't look right.

For one thing, the columns suggested a multi-story building of a type then rare to small towns.

He also wanted the space to evoke a conspiratorial mood. A pool hall full of plotting power-hungry

men should have windows facing the other proposed sets on Kika Avenue, which would be transformed

into a period thoroughfare. They would want eyes on the town.

Fisk made the case that hometown's space and location gave them exactly that, an atmosphere

of menace. A former painter and sculptor, Fisk considers his job not merely the designing

of authentic period backdrops, but the creation of a film's visual language, a series of

subliminal whispers to thematic elements, a character's taste in home decor, the personal

history that selects a bedside photo, the temperament that informs a paint choice. He

thinks of his art as one of believability, a nearly invisible composition of landscapes,

buildings, paint, and props that, when projected on screen, absorbs the audience in a world

that they know instantly, intimately, is real, though they've never seen it before.

Building hometown would be ambitious, but Fisk suspected that the building concealed

a few helpful surprises. Based on its height, he figured the ceiling was a drop, hiding

a more soaring space. Another tell was the plastic sign, which signaled there might be

a hidden clear story that, once exposed, would bathe the room in natural light. After discovering

that both hunches were true, Fisk laid out for Scorsese his vision for the space. He

would uncover the original hardwood floor and plaster the walls in an aged olive green

before filling the room with a dozen 1900s Brunswick pool tables. As much as possible,

the room would be dressed with furniture and fixtures sourced from antique stores and

museums rather than more conventional prop warehouses, and constructed with period materials,

like the slotted screws more commonly used at the time. Even the dirt in the street outside

would be carefully mixed to be appropriate to pre-Dust Bowl, Oklahoma.

But the strangest and most imaginative aspect of Fisk's plan involved integrating yet another

set inside the pool hall. As Fisk explained to Scorsese, he wanted to make one side of

the hall a barbershop, installing half-inch hex tile and a line of chairs and mirrors.

The script called for two sets, but Fisk immediately pictured combining them when he read it. It

was an idea that came not from research, but something more personal. A memory.

When Fisk was growing up in rural Illinois, his mother took him to get his hair cut in a pool

hall, he said, a curious wrinkle of small town life that conjured for him the mysterious and

fascinating province of men. Especially in period films, Fisk likes to find ways to rekindle historical

backgrounds, gone cold from familiarity into the warmed textures of human life.

People pay more attention if they're seeing something new, he says, seeing a facet of reality

they haven't seen before. Fisk later pulled up the fire maps from Osage County and discovered

that of the three pool halls in the area at the time, two had barbershops. Scorsese required no

convincing. Though the filmmaker, now 80, had never worked with Fisk before, he handpicked the

designer, granting him extensive creative latitude for expressly this sense of vision.

Since the 1970s, Fisk has been one of Hollywood's most sought after collaborators, legendary among

auteur writer directors for his ability to help them realize their most ambitious projects.

He has built boundless, intricately conceived worlds for Terence Malick, the thin red line.

Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood, David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, Alejandro G. Iniritu,

The Revenant, and others. He is the artist filmmakers hire to bring the American past

to the screen at the impossible human scale it once existed. Jack belongs to one of these now

rare species of filmmakers who understand film from an almost renaissance like tradition,

Iniritu says. He knows photography, nature, architecture, drama.

When Scorsese began planning Killers of the Flower Moon, a lengthy process in which the

director radically revised the script from a story centered on the murder investigators to one

following the victims, Paul Thomas Anderson told him, you have to get Jack.

But Fisk, who is 77, can be notoriously difficult to entice to a film.

Since 1970, he has designed relatively few. At one point, he took nearly 20 years off.

When Scorsese approached him, Fisk was excited by the opportunity to collaborate with the director,

but also by the chance to excavate a world rarely depicted on screen.

The film takes place in a sliver of lost time, one wedged between more familiar depictions of

Native Americans in the 19th century and the well-worn imagery of the roaring 20s.

Bringing this moment of cultural collision back to life would represent as sweeping a

challenge as Fisk had ever faced. The story unfolds in about 40 sets, as varied as Masonic

lodges, Osage funerals and federal courtrooms, spread over a million acres and costing about

$15 million of the film's $200 million budget. The sets would represent a kind of culmination

of Fisk's career-long obsession with reclaiming the rough contours of American history.

More than any one aesthetic vision, he has sought over a half-century to scour away the

visual cliches that Maher films, seeking beneath them the vivid wood grain and forgotten colors of

the past. If Fisk's name isn't recognizable to most Americans, his imagery has shaped our

collective understanding of what a modern historical epic looks and feels like.

His signature is the 360-degree construction of the outdoor set, believably inhabited and painstakingly

aged, marrying an anthropological eye for period detail with a rough, huge naturalism that can

edge, at times, into the slippery atmosphere of a dreamscape. For, there will be blood,

he erected a 100-foot oil derrick, following turn-of-the-century blueprints so that it might

take on a more ragged, credible shape, planting it atop a barren hillside that framed it against

the sunset with painterly flair. In the Revenant, Iñárritu's drifting, magic-inflected survival

epic about a 19th-century fur trapper, Fisk scouted snow-buried valleys deep in the Canadian

Rockies, throwing up post and beam forts in settings so sublime that the film exudes the

mind-silencing cold of the character's icy journey. But Fisk's work is perhaps most unmistakable as

the backdrop behind the films of Terence Malick, whose swirling, voice-over-driven narratives

find grounding in Fisk's elemental settings, ocean-like wheat fields, serene jungle villages,

a mother's kitchen at twilight. It's a fusion of styles the two filmmakers began exploring in

Badlands 1973, the open-road thriller where Fisk met his wife, the actress Sissy Spacek,

and have continued over four decades. As interested as Fisk is in historical authenticity,

his work with Malick and others is driven by a desire to build

four character and through character, designing sets that manage to convey in the manner of

poetic compression a film's emotional core. Malick rarely writes a conventional script,

and Fisk never shows the director any designs, an improvisational partnership that seeks to

capture fleeting aspects of human existence otherwise hard to render through conventional

narrative. Grace, transcendence, communion with nature. On set, Malick refers to Fisk as my eyes.

Fisk has a background in the fine arts, but he considers himself more strictly speaking a worker,

the conduit of someone else's vision. As a production designer, he is in charge of

manifesting a film's reality, interpreting the fluid laws set by the director and script in

order to bring its world into physical existence. A designer must not only come up with all the

textures, colors, and moods of this world, but also figure out how to engineer it all on budget,

marshalling a machinery of illustrators, prop makers, location scouts, and set decorators.

A movie's magic often comes down to how well a designer can trim a script's price tag in

labor and materials without sacrificing its aesthetic. Noirs of the 1940s are cross-hatched

with shadows partly to conceal threadbare sets. It is a vast undertaking of dramatic invention,

one that aspires to be seen, though never noticed. When people say they love a film's

cinematography, what they often mean is its design, what they see within the frame rather

than the way it was captured. Until recently, no tidy educational pipeline existed to produce

this skill set. Designers tended to emerge from whatever field corresponded to the demands of

filmmaking at the time. In early Hollywood, most were painters, hired to illustrate literal backdrops

on massive rolls of canvas hung behind the actors. As camera movements became more dynamic,

so did the artwork, expanding to include full-scale replicas and miniature models,

the provinces of architects and sculptors. During the studio era, backlots and prop shops

supplied an interchangeable conveyor belt of artifice, with each studio employing a

head designer to curate a kind of house style. Once the French New Wave and others pushed

production outdoors, embracing unvarnished cityscapes, designers also became anthropologists,

hunting for spaces that evoked the right reality. Even the title production designer itself is an

expression of one designer's ever-expanding duties on one film. David O. Selznick gave it to William

Cameron Menzies after he conceived and constructed several groundbreaking set pieces in Gone with

the Wind. Much of this history, Fisk only learned recently, when Scorsese gave him a copy of Menzies

biography, The Shape of Films to Come. Unlike many of his contemporaries who worked their way

up through the art department, Fisk doesn't describe himself as a film obsessive, and he's

careful not to watch movies while he's designing. I always thought of a film as an original piece,

he says. The same way an actor metabolizes dialogue and stage directions, Fisk aspires to

render a director's vision into what he thinks of as a vast environmental sculpture.

What draws him to a project, he says, is a frightening sense of scale, the chance to lose

himself in the impossible. Fisk's extreme commitment has endeared him to directors and crew alike.

Nearly every filmmaker I spoke with emphasized the sheer range of his physical talents,

landscape architecture, finished carpentry and portraiture, often executed in the same set.

But equally important are his imaginative depths.

There is something spiritual in the essence of Jack, Iñorito says. Part of his job is to

serve as a medium between what a director can't quite articulate and what a crew needs to build,

a gap he often bridges by simply doing it himself. As Lynch told me, he will do all the research

and make sure it's this and this and this and then build the thing, and if they saw the wood

this way he would go saw the wood that way. Jacqueline West, an Oscar-nominated costume

designer who has worked with Fisk on nine films, including Killers of the Flower Moon,

recalls that when she met him he was hammering square nails into a set by himself on a weekend.

He's very method, she says. When Scorsese began developing Killers of the Flower Moon,

he'd long admired Fisk's work from afar. But initially he hired another designer,

Dante Ferretti, with whom he made Gangs of New York, The Aviator and several other films.

Then Covid shut down production and Scorsese began brooding over the direction of the film.

In early drafts it followed Tom White, an FBI agent then slated to be played by DiCaprio,

but Scorsese and DiCaprio worried that the framing privileged the wrong vantage.

So Scorsese rewrote the script, moving the film into the perspective of the Osage,

but also that of their Killers, with DiCaprio switching to play a key conspirator.

It was a shift that transformed the film from a murder mystery into something less familiar,

a narrative that tracks the deepening grief of the victims right alongside the manifest

deceptions of their supposed friends and family, forming an agonizing portrait of complicity and

greed and white supremacy. For Scorsese, Fisk now seemed like the natural choice to guide the film

to its historical reality. Jack has a deep sense of the American past, the way things looked and

felt, he told me. In a way, he was the only possible choice for this picture. But when

the two men met, Fisk stopped short of proposing any ideas. He prefers that his vision of a film

be sparked by a director's, he says, which in this case turned out to be relatively straightforward.

Marty wanted to have it historically correct, Fisk says. That's how he connected.

With both men nearing 80, the film represented as rigorous a project as either had ever taken on.

For Fisk, it meant not just excavating a historical period,

but also the most minute details of real people's lives.

I didn't want to reinvent the Osage, he told me.

Fisk grew up moving between worlds. His father, a pilot in the Pacific Theater in World War II,

died in a crash when he was three. And after that, his mother married an engineer who ran

foundries all over the world. The family moved nearly every year. Illinois, Michigan, Virginia,

Pakistan. Often isolated in a new place, he channeled his inquisitive energies into art projects

and building elaborate multi-story forts. In Alexandria, Virginia, Fisk fell in with another

artsy student at his high school, a boy named David Lynch. Like Fisk, Lynch had moved a lot,

and the young men bonded. Jack and I ended up being really the only two guys in that whole

school that were interested in being painters, Lynch told me. They enrolled at the Pennsylvania

Academy of the Fine Arts together, but they were happy to paint all day and avoid Vietnam,

renting a dilapidated house across from the city morgue. I had one floor, David had a floor, Fisk

said. We took an old coffee pod and made a water heater out of it so we could wash our hands and

face. A break for both artists arrived when Lynch was invited to study at the American Film

Institute in Los Angeles in 1970. Fisk had little interest in filmmaking but hitched a ride anyway,

figuring he'd find work painting billboards. Always sort of thought I would be an artist,

you know, with no money and struggling, he said. I remember thinking, I'm going to try this for a

year. He arrived in Hollywood at a fruitful time for outsiders. The waning power of the studios

was making way for the so-called New Hollywood, a young generation of filmmakers influenced by

foreign cinema and eager to experiment. Easy Rider had been made and studios realized they

didn't know what the public wanted, Fisk says. Through Lynch and his classmates, Fisk soon found

work on sets, often because he was the only guy around with a truck full of tools. Eventually,

Jonathan Demme, who would later direct The Silence of the Lambs, hired him as an art director,

a job unfamiliar to Fisk. But it didn't matter. The stripped down vibe of independent filmmaking

suited Fisk, who found he knew just enough carpentry to teach himself whatever a director needed.

They would say, we need a church, Fisk said, and then you either find it or build it.

The simplicity of these directives was energizing for Fisk, not unlike the clarifying terror of

standing before a blank canvas. He had few film references to draw on and didn't know about

conventional film infrastructure like sound stages, prop warehouses, and theater flats.

So he relied on what he knew, realist painting, modern sculpture, building forts.

Union rules often make film sets workplaces of strict hierarchy, with each person tending to

a narrow scope of duties. But as an outsider, Fisk was indiscriminately hands on, doing whatever

needed fixing, an industriousness that quickly endeared him to young directors with tight budgets

and ambitious visions. During the 1970s, he worked on films for several established filmmakers like

Roger Corman and Stanley Donnan and designed classics from emerging auteurs like Brian

De Palma's Carey. When he learned that an AFI student named Terrence Malick was prepping a

50s thriller about lovers on the lam, what would become Badlands, Fisk took it upon himself to

compile reference images. Terry heard about this guy who was researching his film who he'd never

met, Fisk says, and we had a meeting and it went kind of like this. Could you start July 10th

perhaps no set in Fisk's career more vividly expresses the lyricism of his craftsmanship

than the house he built for Malick's next film, Days of Heaven. The plan was simple enough, find a

house surrounded by wheat fields where Malick could stage a love triangle among a farmer and two

workers in 1916, Texas. But as Fisk scouted, he learned that many fields had already been harvested

and that many modern varieties of wheat were too short for the atmosphere Malick envisioned with

the characters buried to their chests. Some of the only farmers still cultivating the tall varieties

that laid in the season were Hutterites, a small anabaptist sect in Alberta. But when Fisk approached

them late in the summer of 1976, he learned they'd be harvesting in six weeks. The shoot would last

two weeks, so to give Malick what he wanted, Fisk needed to build a house in a month.

He thought it feasible if he could erect only a facade with the interior shots filmed elsewhere,

but Malick insisted he wanted the wheat fields visible through the windows.

All told, Fisk would have about $100,000 and maybe a handful of crew to build it.

I was too dumb to know it was impossible, he told me. The Hutterite elders were taking bets that

we couldn't finish. Earlier, Malick showed Fisk a photograph of a Victorian, an image that reminded

him of Edward Hopper's 1925 painting, House by the Railroad. He knew a little drafting from

art school, but the Carpenters couldn't read blueprints anyway, so he relied on models,

bending history and architecture to fit the emotional framework of the character.

Many houses in 1910's Texas would have been plain and single story, as Fisk explains,

but you look outside and you're looking at a wheat field and it's like an ocean.

To accentuate that loneliness, he made the house slender, ornate with high windows, like a ship.

He used telephone poles to anchor the structure against high winds, covering the exterior in

plywood. Hutterite teenagers pitched in along with a few friends and Fisk furnished the interior

with antiques driven all the way up from Los Angeles. Today, Days of Heaven remains a very

personal film for Fisk, in part because it showed him that a simple handmade set could also be the

most cinematically elegant. He realized that building an entire structure instead of a facade

gave a director the freedom to explore and shoot from any angle, which helped pre-empt,

costly, time-consuming modifications, while the open windows also saturated the photography

with natural light and a sense of depth. At the same time, the relative simplicity of the house

showed Fisk that a set's emotional core had less to do with beautiful design than with connecting

to the character. Without a single line of dialogue, Fisk had managed to evoke the very

heart of the story, a man adrift, searching. Everything Fisk loved about realism in painting,

he realized, not just its observational eye, but also the stark modesty of its subjects,

could be suffused into a set.

When he's not working, Fisk lives far from Hollywood,

on an expansive farm in the mountains of Central Virginia. It's a country of sloping hayfields

veined with low stone walls and forested creeks. When I visited in early June, the weather was

breathless and humid, the mountain outlines shaded by wildfire smoke from Canada, and after

buzzing through a gate and bumping down a rocky trail, I found Fisk standing in the dirt before

his and SpaceX's two-story Civil War-era farmhouse. He had just finished the summer's first hay-bailing

and the rolls lay atop the pastures, like beetles stranded on their backs.

Now in his late seventies, Fisk cuts the figure of a carpenter a few decades younger. He is tall

and broad-shouldered, with a center-part shag of brown hair and a smile that erupts

suddenly across his creased, goateed face, revealing a boyish gap in his teeth. His hands are thick,

and the pointer finger on his left is severed at the knuckle, a result of a construction accident

when he injected paint into his finger with a spray gun.

It was just like a sponge full of gray paint, he said, laughing.

He and SpaceX purchased the farm in 1978, a wonderful, crazy decision, Fisk said.

Though both of their careers were taking off, they loved the miles of fence and roads,

the privacy, the quiet beauty. The couple have now lived on the property for so long,

tending to its growing seasons and shifts in landscape that it has seemed to attune Fisk

to the slower, more methodical rhythms of nature. As we walked through pastures,

he ambled with his hands interlocked behind his back, often interrupting himself to recount

a story about some feature of the terrain. He told me that much of the farm was once part of

a land grant belonging to the colonial explorer Thomas Walker. He pointed to the horizon.

You can't see it right now, but through the mountains there, that was considered the edge

of the wilderness. Fisk tends to seek out films set in natural environments, then push the production

as deep as he can into the story's harshest elements. He described how, during the scouting for

the thin red line, producers argued for shooting in Central America, instead of Guadalcanal,

the South Pacific Island where the film is set. There were limitations to a far-flung jungle,

not to mention malaria. But Fisk was adamant, an immersive sense of place about an environment

so exotic couldn't be faked. During a visit to Guadalcanal, Fisk noticed unexploded grenades

painted yellow rather than the more familiar green. It was a vestige of an earlier design he'd

read about, and one he had already planned to include in the film. A historical detail that

didn't seem real. When he saw it in person, he loved the unexpected vividness, the human messiness

it suggested about the war effort. It was a visual confirmation to him of history's peculiarity.

It is these sensitivities to a film's natural setting, even more than his craftsmanship,

that is contemporary's view with a measure of awe. Piers told me stories of Fisk plucking sagebrush

for a paint swatch and kneeling beside an elephant to coat its leg in a believable smear of mud.

Nearly everyone I spoke with mentioned the austere splendor of Fisk's Marfa Texas set

for their Will Be Blood. When the director of photography, Robert Elswit, arrived on set,

he was impressed by the scale, but also by how Fisk integrated the set into the landscape.

He'd laid out all the buildings in such a way that made it easier for Elswit to control the

natural sunlight, both for interior and exterior shots, while also orienting them so they were

visible in physical and figurative relationship to one another, especially the Derrick, which loomed

over it all. His work, finding locations, finding the places to set work, and his sensitivity to

lighting, to time of day and weather, a lot of production designers aren't interested in the

same way, Elswit told me. He credited Fisk with 90% of the Oscar he won.

Fisk says that he's attracted to working on historical films because, like working outdoors,

it provides him the opportunity to unearth discoveries that bring life back to him replenished

of its strangeness. When I grew up, period films often looked like costume dramas, he told me.

Nobody was dirty. This manicured unreality was compounded by his boredom in school and

disbelief watching the news. He was a teenager when the United States invaded Vietnam,

and his twenties were shaped by watching General Westmoreland say one thing and hearing another

from his friends. It gave Fisk the uncanny sense that beneath this smooth veneer lay another

craggier history. He felt drawn to construction materials and paint colors in particular as

tactile remnants. He could remember how, the first time he visited nearby Monticello, the dining room

was wedgewood blue, but that they later found that that same dining room was previously chrome

yellow. This was the sort of history that truly interested Fisk, the mess of past lives, the

mysteries that lay hidden within walls. Fisk's interest in restoring the original colors of

history often first requires chipping away the layers that conceal it. When Malik approached him

about designing the New World, his 2004 drama about Pocahontas, Fisk was excited about building a

Jamestown replica, partly because he'd long nursed the curiosity about its construction.

Some accounts, including Jamestown narratives and the site replica Fisk remembered seeing,

suggested a fortress made of sod planks.

You'd have to take a log and cut it, Fisk said. Nobody has that kind of time.

He refused to believe that a fort built by ship-weary settlers was anything but an improvised

ruin. And so, rather than rebuild previous renderings, he endeavored to recreate the

conditions in which the fort was originally built. He picked a site just upriver from the

historical one, laid out on a similar estuary, then labored as he imagined a settler might have,

quickly, crudely, erecting 15-foot vertical posts in a time-saving triangle shape.

In the end, it was an awful, irregular structure, one no-carpenter would lay claim to,

but when archaeologists from Preservation, Virginia, toured it, they were floored.

Beyond how authentically bad the fort looked, they noticed designs that conformed to ongoing

archaeological discoveries, including Fisk's mixture of dob, a kind of primitive mortar.

Like a lot of Fisk's sets, the fort embodied a visual paradox. It was historically familiar,

but rendered otherworldly by a nuts-and-bolts attention to detail. When we see it on screen,

it greets us like a gaunt, muddy giant, standing in sharp contrast to miles of clear tidewater

channels and mossy glens beyond its gates. And as the plot unfolds, it reveals itself as

something closer to a jail cell, curdling the settler's bravado into a muted dread that builds

into violence. It's an accumulation of granular detail that speaks to the spiritual undercurrents

of Malik's narrative, a fallen Eden, but also to the ghastliness of being thrust in

bodices and plate armor into the muggy wilds of 17th-century Virginia. Fisk describes the

film to me as a turning point in his career. Though he'd aspired to total veracity, the

effort itself didn't feel like cold recreation. It felt intuitive, imaginative. Over his next few

films, he experimented with ways to more fully envelop the audience in the same sense of discovery

he felt while working, a method-like approach to construction that necessitated a set-wide

commitment. On There Will Be Blood, he threw out every level. Another time, while erecting

indigenous lodges for the Revenant, he instructed his crew to find a stick of the right size instead

of using a tape measure. They start out thinking Jack's kind of weird, he told me. Then they get

into it. They're becoming part of the performance, part of the character.

As we walked, Fisk told me that it was hard to know if audiences picked up on such details,

but that he rarely thought about it. Worrying about the audiences like a painter thinking

about who might buy a painting, he said. What I'm trying to do is create something that looks real

to myself. He once told me how, while building the gate for Jamestown, a massive swinging structure

12 feet long, he said. He said, he'd never thought about it. He'd never thought about it.

A massive swinging structure 12 feet tall and 8 feet wide, he ran into a problem.

I couldn't figure out a way to do the door because it's too heavy. You couldn't make a hinge big

enough. But then he remembered an ancient gate he once saw in Morocco. Built into rock, the doors

swung on vertical pegs stuck into the ground and above. Fisk had no idea if the settlers solved

the problem this way, but using the method felt right, as if he were tapping into lost knowledge.

An audience might not notice every detail Fisk says, but their presence becomes part of a larger

immersive effect, like those subtle ticks of an actor that, taken together, bring a performance

convincingly alive. We think we know the way things are, he says. Then we see something

that's different, and we think we're seeing it for real for the first time.

Later that evening, Fisk and Spasic asked me to dinner, and we drove down a tangle of country

roads to a restaurant overlooking a meadow. So far during the visit, I'd seen little of Spasic,

as she had made herself graciously if warmly scarce. At one point after returning from a walk,

Fisk and I found an artful spread of charcuterie waiting for us. Another time, as Fisk and I

talked on the back porch, she hung her head out the screen door asking if we might want a little

sustenance in her breezy Texas drawl before returning with sandwiches. Now at dinner,

she slid into the booth next to Fisk and asked to be caught up on our conversations,

exchanging teasing banter with her husband.

He's a deep well, isn't he? she said. As we ate, the couple took turns telling me the

story of how they fell in love on the set of Badlands. To prepare for the film, Fisk browsed

thrift stores, imagining himself as Holly Sarges, Spasic's character, letting his hand

on objects that spoke to the wounded woman's past.

I had this little cigar box, he said, and there was a tin soldier with a broken leg,

maybe from childhood, and this clay mold of a horny toad. It was a form of imaginative inquiry

he'd undertaken partly thanks to a limited budget, but one he now saw as vital to his process.

For him, this psychological profiling is at the core of his work, and no question is too trivial.

What did I do last night? Where's my comfortable chair? Even if objects never appear on screen,

finding them helps Fisk sketch the first faint outlines of his designs.

When Spasic arrived on set, she was shocked and delighted to find the drawers full of objects.

It was the first time I'd encountered a designer as character driven as that, she said.

Repressing a smile, Fisk admitted that it was an approach cultivated partly out of a desire

to get close to Spasic. He'd badly wanted to speak to her, but was shy and didn't think he had a

chance. That was a way of communicating with her, he said. In the years since, the couple have worked

hard to balance their careers, often finding ways to work together. Early on, when Fisk needed help

on a job, he'd occasionally hire Spasic to work on set. When Spasic auditioned for Cary,

she worried that Brian De Palma only knew her as a bad set dresser from Phantom of the Paradise.

Once the couple had kids, they tried to arrange their schedules, so one of them was always at the

farm. During the 80s and most of the 90s, perhaps the most productive period of Spasic's Oscar-winning

career, Fisk barely worked at all. He directed a few films, casting Spasic and two of them,

but found the enlarged responsibilities frustrating. He was content, filling his days,

fixing up the farm and raising horses. It was like a second childhood, he said.

The farm soon became a refuge, both for the couple and others. Fisk built homes for their two

daughters, and Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange moved close by for a while, as did David Lynch,

when he was married to Fisk's younger sister, Mary. Maintaining it all had become a daily

meditation for Fisk, one he likened to the Japanese surrealist film Woman in the Dunes,

in which a woman is forced to sweep sand unceasingly.

I'm cutting down a dead tree and I'm like, didn't I plant this 50 years ago? I remember

carrying it out in my hands, he said. It was as if the farm had become a living thing,

one the couple continued to feed through an ever-growing list of projects.

We've created a little world, Fisk said.

When Fisk began designing Killers of the Flower Moon, one of the biggest questions he had to

wrestle with was also one of its simplest. Who was Molly Burkhart? Burkhart in a literal sense

was an Osage woman, played by Lily Gladstone, whose life was upended by a series of suspicious

deaths in her family. One of the first times we see her, she's being ogled for her money and

tenuous health by her eventual husband, Ernest Burkhart de Caprio, who is in every way her

opposite, rambling, suggestible, greedy. But she remained a cipher to Fisk, a woman straddling

two worlds and two time periods, tethered to her Osage roots by her mother and yanked into

a boomtown's luxuries by her husband. If Fisk was going to illustrate her background truthfully,

he felt he needed to find her emotional core. Because Burkhart was a real woman,

Fisk was greeted by an unusually dense amount of research material. In addition to the source

book itself, he was granted access to many of David Grand's research files, including court

records, photographs, and interviews. But Fisk also endeavored to unearth his own primary materials,

conscious that he and Grand were sometimes motivated by different imperatives. While Grand

had turned up a wealth of the most minute details about day to day Osage life, Fisk was often arranging

those details in different spaces or figuring out how to render a one sentence description into a

three dimensional building. When Grand later visited the set, he was shocked by Fisk's attention to

the most easy to miss surfaces. In the pool hall, Grand noticed a wire of wooden beads above the

tables, a scoring system for straight pool, which was the popular style before eight ball.

That's the type of detail I never knew, how they kept score, Grand told me.

One of the most important things Fisk had to discover and build was Burkhart's house.

As well documented as her history was, the exact details of its location and architecture seemed

lost. Many in the production staff and among the Osage themselves assumed she lived in a huge house,

since one of the most publicized details about the Osage was their brick and terracotta mansions.

But Fisk was wary of casting Burkhart's story in generalizations.

If you don't know where they lived, he says, how do you know what kind of people they were?

Determined to find something more definite, he pulled up court records,

zeroing in on testimony that described Burkhart as having never owned a house at all,

instead living with her mother, Lizzie. Following the lead to Lizzie's probate records,

he tracked down a five bedroom home on the reservation.

Though he couldn't know for certain, Fisk thought the house is modesty,

its open floor plan and many bedrooms reflected Burkhart's restraint,

her embrace of her family. Most important, he thought it captured something essential

about the story. Killers of the Flower Moon examines a moment of staggering transformation

as the Osage processed their newfound wealth and its consequences.

The nation had only recently been dispossessed of its land and moved to Oklahoma.

Now, the Osage had oil revenues topping the equivalent of $400 million annually,

a house that wasn't necessarily wealthy but was comfortable,

as Fisk saw it, embodied that transitional confusion, as well as the danger it attracted.

It was like they were playing a card game with somebody, he says, and didn't know the rules.

As Fisk began sketching, situating the house at a bend in a river,

he drew in a low wraparound sleeping porch, where Molly and Lizzie might host visitors

for the annual dances. Outside, beside a brand new stew to baker,

he added a traditional lodge made of saplings and canvas,

where many Osage liked to spend the summer months.

Inside the house, Fisk selected a mottled green wallpaper, reminiscent of grass or leaves.

It was nature trying to get back in, as he put it.

It was a subtle permeability he suffused elsewhere throughout the house,

open windows and cluttered cookware from people passing through.

You start looking at the character and you just kind of build from the character, Fisk told me.

What I try to do with the sets is just find the essence.

We were seated in his office on the ground floor of his house. Like every other room,

Fisk had meticulously remodeled it himself. The walls in carpet were matching palace arms red,

a shade close to ox blood, illuminated dimly by recessed lighting in the crown molding.

On opposite walls, over the couch and fireplace hung the bust of a long horned

steer and an oil painting depicting sheep huddled in a storm. Fisk sat in a finish recliner

and began explaining what he meant by essence. Essence was a function of simplifying a set

down to a visually expressive core. It'll just confuse your eye too much if there's too many

things to look at, he said. A lot of design is taking things out of the frame.

During the final stage of building Burkhardt's house, Fisk often waited until the crew left,

then sat alone in the set, removing furniture and fixtures night by night

until his interpretation of the character spoke clearly.

I've looked at Edward Hopper for a lot, he said, because in putting together paintings,

realist painters kind of simplify the world. They pick out what's important and what they

want to make strong. If some designers worried about a set not looking full enough, Fisk felt

such simplicity got to the very heart of production design, granting access to interior lives.

As committed as his career had been to American history, he was open to designing other environments

so long as he could connect to its characters. Whatever expertise he'd amassed about paint

colors or construction materials, he understood as a tool for clearing away the visual noise

that otherwise clutters our view of historical figures. This was the real reason to make a set

like Burkhardt's house so accurate and yet also so simple. To create a surface compelling enough

to draw the audience in, immersing them in the moment, but crystalline enough that,

as they leaned closer, they caught a glimmer of their own reflection.

As Fisk and I talked, I found myself thinking of a set from The Tree of Life,

a tree-shaded neighborhood of wide lawns and avenues. Earlier, Fisk told me that one of the

few modifications he had made to the set was to remove its fences, and now it struck me why.

Accurate or not, it reflected the film's vision of childhood's vast emotional landscape with the

just wrongness of a memory or a dream. A set should be as real as possible but also universal

enough to allow people in, Fisk says. It allows you to visit, allows you to become a part of

your own history. To Fisk, building a world was about bringing an audience into a life

regardless of setting. It was the sort of delicate attention to characterization that Fisk loved

about cinema, but also felt was rarer nowadays. All you needed to do was look at the proliferation

of fully digitized worlds. It sometimes made him feel as if his whole approach to filmmaking

was endangered. His collaboration with Scorsese made it inevitable that Killers of the Flower

Moon would be discussed as a naturalistic counterpoint to the creep of an assembly line

of manufactured content, as Scorsese put it to me. But Fisk maintained that his objections were

more personal. I would really miss a human element, he said. He pointed out that he did

see Guardians of the Galaxy, the Marvel movie with the talking tree and raccoon and all that stuff,

which I liked. But then he paused, tilting his head skyward as if in search.

What would the raccoon's bedroom look like, he said. I don't know.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.