Legendary film designer recalls his greatest hits
Jack Fisk, the legendary production designer, has been down a lot of roads in his life. He goes looking down back roads for movie locations and hillsides on which to plop down mock houses. He has been to the Solomon Islands for “The Thin Red Line” and the Canadian Rockies for “The Revenant.” 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 Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978). He erected the oil derrick of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” (2007). And he built Mollie Burkhardt’s Osage home for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
“Killers of the Flower Moon,” which entailed re-creating the circa-1919 Oklahoma town of Fairfax, expands the wide swath of American ground, and history, that Fisk has covered. And it earned Fisk his third Oscar nomination, a capstone to a career crafting roughhewn onscreen worlds with such fine-grained dimensionality that you feel as though you walked through them.
That’s partly because you — or at least the actors — 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.
“We build everything so it can be shot from 360 degrees,” Fisk said in an interview from his home, a horse farm where he and his wife, Sissy Spacek, live in Albemarle County, Virginia. “And directors take advantage of it. I love not narrowing down their options too early. They can move. And when the actors get involved, it’s much more organic.”
Fisk initially came to Hollywood with an idea of painting billboards. After latching on to filmmaking, he has helped designed all kinds of movies. “Carrie” (1976). “Eraserhead” (1977). “Mulholland Drive” (2001). He has worked on nearly every Malick movie. But what he’s best known for are his homes.
Fisk recently recounted the stories behind a few of his most enduring constructions.
For Malick’s 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 southerly 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 Edward Hopper-like landscapes.
Fisk, wanting to please Malick, decided to build the whole thing.
“I think a lot of it is just I was new to the business. I didn’t know you could not build the whole thing,” says Fisk. “Also, I had done one other film with Terry at the time, ‘Badlands,’ and I realized how fluid he was and uncommitted. He never uses storyboards. He doesn’t even really look at drawings. He likes to show up and just feel it. More than any director I’ve worked with, he’s concerned about the light.”
“Days of Heaven” 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.
Fisk’s father built foundries, and, as a 10- or 11-year-old, Fisk began to build his own forts while growing up in rural Illinois. (For “Badlands,” he made a three-story fort in the woods in a single day. “Terry shot the heck out of it,” Fisk says.)
But Malick’s 2005 film “The New World,” 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. “I sort of approach these films like I’m making a documentary in a way,” 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 his deductions were proven right by the simultaneous research of archaeologist Bill Kelso, who directed the Jamestown Rediscovery Project.
For Anderson’s 2007 mad epic, he walked across 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.
“I love it when you’re on foot with a director-writer and the story starts to visualize for him,” Fisk says.
“We suddenly know how many steps it is to get to the church from the derrick. It starts to become real.”
An inherent part of production design for Fisk is building in service of the characters.
“Daniel-Day Lewis 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,” Fisk says.
Fisk didn’t need to build any of the homes for Malick’s cosmic 2011 coming-of-age drama, based loosely on the director’s own childhood memories growing up in ’50s Texas. He located a community of the right kind of period homes in Smithville, about 40 miles southeast of Austin.
“I added windows and skylights for lighting purposes. But they were houses that existed,” 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 weren’t right so that Terry could walk into that 5-acre backlot and shoot pretty much anything.”
One dramatic exception: the giant live oak tree that Fisk brought in. Malick hadn’t requested it. “But it seemed important — you know, ‘Tree of Life’ — that there was a tree in his yard,” says Fisk. He found one on a ranch outside of town. Then came the stressful and complicated job of moving it — all while, Fisk remembers, Malick kept a nervous distance, fearful that a movie titled “Tree of Life” would fell a great oak.