Turn on HBO and you’ll see a slew of big-budget worlds, from the oceans of House of the Dragon to the mean streets of Gotham in The Penguin to the far-off planets of Dune: Prophecy to the tattered landscape of The Last of Us. Transporting viewers to these worlds requires the ability to build something brand new while paying homage to beloved IP.
The production designers tasked with that responsibility rely on extensive research, solid knowledge of tone, and their own creative interpretations.
“We’ve all worked in these different milieus and done that research. That’s the starting point,” says Dune: Prophecy production designer Tom Meyer. “When you have that background it gives you the footing you need to abstract and tell our stories. We’re offshoots and we have a tone we’re trying to work in, but ultimately we’re trying to build our own worlds.”
The stakes are especially high when a project has a passionate fandom with high expectations and extensive knowledge. The aim is to evoke emotional connections similar to those provided by the original source.
“The Last of Us is based on a game, so that world is somewhat defined,” says Don Macauley, who heads production design on The Last of Us.
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“Satisfying the gamers can be a struggle to a certain degree. But our first point of reference is the game, and then whether we lean into an element of the world or not depends on the situation the characters are in. We want to stick closely to the game, but we also want to do better than it.”
The Penguin production designer Kalina Ivanov took the canon that DC fans have followed for decades and expanded it into the poorer slums of Gotham.
The production filmed in New York, and she focused on bringing in arches and other gothic elements in Queens, the Bronx and Yonkers to set the show’s tone and feel.
“We are down on the ground and in the streets and so we carefully avoided Manhattan,” she says. “We also brought in 40 tons of dirt to create that world.”
In Dune: Prophecy, Tom Meyer reverse-engineered the look of Denis Villeneuve’s two Dune films, based on Frank Herbert’s novels, to go back 10,000 years before the films take place.
“Herbert references 10,000 planets and there’s dozens featured in the books,” he says. “As a designer we have to give an identity to each planet so the audience can clue into it, and even if it’s a planet from the movie world, we have to create what it looks like years and years before.”
House of the Dragon designer Jim Clay faced a similar challenge: The series is set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones. His team began with the established Red Keep interior set from the initial series, and developed it into a Machiavellian-inspired world of distrust and fear under the rule of the Targaryen family. Then there’s Harrenhal Castle, the largest castle in the Seven Kingdoms. Clay and his team had the chance to reimagine those visuals with the castle’s reintroduction in Season 2.
“It’s this enormous, ruined castle built by a deranged mind and a place where you felt ill at ease,” he says. “I read a lot of T.S. Eliot at the time and wanted to create this sense of time and past and present and future all merging into one. Are you living your past? Are you witnessing your future?”
Production designers say they need to be involved in a project as early as possible to strike the right balance between fealty to source material and imaginative expansion. The prefer to start their work when writers are still outlining.
Meyer says even bullet points are helpful to help his teams do research, create sketches and build ideas. Then they hand those ideas back to the writers, who use them to enhance their stories.
“You have to collaborate, and that’s liberating, because that’s how you get something new that you haven’t seen,” Meyer says.
All of the worlds involve elements of CGI.
“We overlap 100% with the visual effects department. It’s a water-tight collaboration,” says Clay of House of the Dragon, where certain sets are constructed specifically to work with CGI dragons and other effects. “My brief has always been to root the built world in reality, and then that allows us to get away with stretching the envelope so it’s believable but unfamiliar.”
Macaulay says that for The Last of Us, his team does most sets and big builds in 3D models shared with post.
But the production designers also base their work strongly on real locations that give their worlds a sense of lived-in groundedness.
For The Penguin, Ivanov was inspired by pre-Renaissance Italy. For Dune: Prophecy, Meyer was interested in how a post-technology world would look, and imagined old Greco-Roman ruins to create a primitive futurism where brick and mortar are no longer the building materials of choice. For The Last of Us, Macaulay sought out images of nature taking over in places that have been abandoned.
Once they know generally how their worlds should look, they face the vast challenges of bringing them to life. Obstacles range from weather to budget constraints to last-minute alterations and pivots. But these challenges lead to creative wins that keep them passionate and excited about their work.
One of Clay’s biggest challenges on Season 2 of House of the Dragon was the river battles. Macaulay remembers seeing The Last of Us game creator Neil Druckmann get emotional while touring the space museum set. Ivanov will never forget creating a 4,500 square-foot abandoned trolley station that connected to original architecture. And Meyer delights in building immense sets that the actors could get lost in.
“We all strive to achieve film-quality worlds,” he says. “It’s like when you hear an actor say they become their character when they put the costume on. Our sets allow actors to hopefully achieve a higher level and execution, and forget they’re on a set. That’s the really satisfying part.”
The Last of Us, House of the Dragon, Dune: Prophecy and The Penguin are streaming on Max.
Main image: Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced in The Last of Us. Photo by Liane Hentscher/HBO