WITCH CRAFT

Production designer James North talks Oxford and Cardiff...

ON RECREATING OXFORD’S BODLEIAN LIBRARY

“We were allowed to film in there on a Sunday, but we were only allowed 30 people in there at any one time, we weren’t allowed to have fires and wire rigs and throw people around and stuff obviously, and we’re not allowed to touch any of the books. So the more time we spent investigating it, and the more time we spent there, it soon became quite apparent that the actual filming process was going to be a bit of a ball ache and never going to happen.

“It took eight weeks to construct the set. We fabricated all of it in the end. There’s something ridiculous like 600 metres of book spines. You ended up with 150 metres of real books and then we took a section of real books and moulded them and made fake versions, which are all individually painted.”

ON FILMING AT WOLF STUDIOS

“The best thing about this studio is because the way that Jane and Julie have built it and planned it, it’s been built and planned by TV producers essentially – not just producer-producers, but by practitioners, craftspeople that work in film every day. So rather than it being developed as a studio by property developers in order to make money, this studio doesn’t do that. It feels like the sort of space that you can really make amazing television in, not just rock up and it’s just a shed, which is what we do so often.”