Betty Ginette
Awards Radar recently had the opportunity to interview Art Directors Guild Award nominee Brandon Tonner-Connolly, the production designer behind season three of Reservation Dogs. During our email correspondence, Tonner-Connolly discussed how meaningful the show is to him and to the cast/crew, how he designed a 1940s boarding school, his collaboration with local Indigenous artists, and much more.
Co-created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, Reservation Dogs depicts the lives of four Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma. Season three is the final season, and the Rez Dogs are stranded in California, where they have to navigate their way back home. This season is full of road trips, unexpected fathers, boarding schools, rumors, revenge, healing, and more.
Keep reading to learn more about Brandon and his work.
Congratulations on your ADG Award nomination! How does it feel to be recognized for your work on Reservation Dogs?
Brandon Tonner-Connolly: Thank you! It feels great, mostly because I know so many people put their hearts and souls into this show, and I love that their work is being acknowledged.
When I found out, after breathlessly calling the rest of the crew, the next people I reached out to were the artists we worked with from the community, the individuals who made it all possible. Each conversation was a reminder that the relationships built in the bubble of production life didn’t end at wrap. I wanted to continue to honor them, so I asked Johnny Diacon, who painted an iconic buffalo mural in our final season if he would paint a canvas miniature version some of us could wear on our lapels at the ceremony. It’ll be a reminder of the origins of the show’s success, the people at the heart of everything Reservation Dogs has been able to accomplish.
Can you share a bit about your background and how it led you to become involved with Reservation Dogs?
Brandon Tonner-Connolly: I grew up loving movies but had no idea how to get into the film industry. As a kid, I would watch the credits on the screen and wonder how you got lucky enough to spend your life making movies. I ended up going to school for film criticism and theory, thinking I would make esoteric, small documentaries and essay films that no one would ever see. I think the only time production design came up in my classes was when one professor told me that if they hated a movie but had to watch it in its entirety, they would try to pick out unimportant details to distract themselves, like the lamps.
My first day working on a set after graduation, I met the Art Director, who explained the profession to me in detail. I was immediately hooked. Designing combined my love of intense research, visual storytelling, and uniting people around a vision. It allowed me to express the emotions of the narrative through the sets. The idea that I could not only live in but create the world of a film was, and is, exhilarating.
Because of that background, I’ve mostly worked in features, but a friend called and asked if I would be interested in meeting for an FX show they were producing. I watched the pilot and talked to Sterlin and immediately knew it was something I desperately wanted to be a part of. I was already a big fan of Sterlin’s films and the chance to tell a continuing story with him and help create the whole world of Okern over an extended time period was thrilling.
In episode three, ‘Deer Lady,’ you created the 1940s boarding school. How did you approach the research process to ensure cultural and period accuracy for this episode?
Brandon Tonner-Connolly: It was challenging because it’s such an emotionally charged, historically significant environment to recreate. In keeping with the groundbreaking nature of the show and Sterlin’s writing, these types of American boarding schools haven’t ever really been seen on film/TV. We felt such a massive weight of responsibility to get it right and to be historically accurate, which would help convey what the awful, dehumanizing experience was like.
So, we started with vast amounts of research. I got into the process weeks before we even started officially prepping. We looked at every photo we could get our hands on from every boarding school from the late 19th century to the mid-20th. We took a trip out to the historical archives in Anadarko, OK, to meet with people there and gather images. Tafv Sampson, the show’s set decorator, contacted Denise Lajimodiere, the author of Stringing Rosaries, a history of Plains Boarding Schools, and Denise came on board as our consultant, answering our many, many questions on everything from plates and spoons to bedding and desks. When we asked Denise about corporal punishment or depicting other types of abuse, she told us, “Whatever you show onscreen will not be as bad as it was in real life.” We had to be mindful of the emotional toll all of this took on everyone in the art dept, some of whom had family members who had been in boarding schools.
I also worked closely with the Costume Designer, Alyssa Cawthon, to make sure we were all on the same page about what was accurate for what year because we wanted to create a very coherent, fact-based world. We ended up picking out the most relevant references and made a guide so everyone could refer to it throughout the process.
Danis Goulet, the director, came in with amazing visual ideas, including giving the episode a very 70’s horror aesthetic with long lenses and a palpable sense of dread. We talked about Luca Guadanigno’s Suspiria and a few other films as color palette references. Establishing a color palette was important because all of the research was in black and white, and we wanted to make sure we were really giving the episode its own identity. I think the genre aesthetic was a nice way of making the incredibly weighty subject matter a little more digestible, so it felt a little more fantastical or like a dream than a gritty doc, and it also set this episode aside in its own very separate universe.
Then I went out and scouted with our Location Manager, Chris Kucharski, and we settled on Bacone College. Once we had the location, I picked out a few design elements from the references that I wanted to add to the spaces, like a hardwood floor with a style of the period and a very high gloss so it kicked back some moonlight during the night scenes and added to this mythical aesthetic. I also wanted to add wood paneling to the walls to give everything a deep, dark feeling. We wanted to incorporate small details wherever we could, like small decorative crosses on our plinth blocks that edge out the wood paneling. Our Art Director, Matt Hyland, was a real hero, and we had an amazing construction/scenic team led by Aaron Maier, our construction coordinator. They were able to build and install the flooring, paneling, and a million other details in this very large space under very challenging circumstances. For the classroom setting, the only available space had completely raw walls down to the sheetrock, and I had very specific ideas about what the room should look like based on the references. Again, the art dept crushed it by building out all the walls with a combination of paneling and chalkboards (which, probably to their annoyance, I insisted was very accurate to my research down to every detail).
Once we finished building the sets, Tafv and her team came in and absolutely nailed all of the set dec details down to the pencil boxes and map cases in the classroom. They scoured Oklahoma and the Great Plains to find pieces that worked for the period and our vision and brought everything to life.
What values did you prioritize when creating the show’s environments, and how did you work to ensure they were reflected in the design?
Brandon Tonner-Connolly: I think one of the unique aspects of the show is that, in addition to considering what the cameras would capture, we prioritized how the cast, crew, and others from the community would experience the spaces we were creating. How we did something became as important as what we did. If something would be meaningful to even one person in the community – how we sourced an item, a detail we included in a set, a family history we could allude to visually – we had to make it happen. The idea pushed us to create an even more fully realized, authentic world because we felt a responsibility to make environments that resonated first and foremost with the people who were trusting us to help tell their stories.
One example of this is Mabel’s House from season 2. Reading the script, we knew Elora Danan’s grandmother, Mabel, would pass away in her bed surrounded by community members sending her on with song, prayer, and ceremony. We also knew many of the actors in the room with Mabel would be elders from the community, like Wotko Long and Dana Tiger, who had gone through similar experiences in their own lives. The emotional gravity they brought to the scenes would blur the lines between re-enactment and reality, creating something that transcended fiction. The dynamic offered us the opportunity to create a richer, more purposeful space that resonated with the people involved and helped foster a sense of intimacy.
We asked people on the crew if they had something belonging to a departed loved one that they wanted to contribute to the scene. The prop department’s Neosha Pendegraft gave us artwork created by her mother, Shan Goshan, a known Cherokee artist who had recently passed away. The casting department’s Loren Waters gave us photos of her grandparents. Tafv’s aunts provided their late mother’s “hunk wall,” a faded collage of myriad Bon Jovi and Marlon Brando clippings kept in her laundry room for over thirty years. For some, it became a way to honor a loved one who hadn’t had the gift of passing in the comfort of home surrounded by family and tradition.
As word spread, more crew members contacted us with remembrances of life – photos, letters, jewelry – and it became a beautiful process of piecing those objects together with custom graphics and set dressing to create the story of Mabel’s life. The final touch was the prototype of a custom Pendleton blanket titled “Not Alone,” eagerly loaned to us by Yankton Sioux artist Joe Chamberlin, who grew up with many of the elders in the room. Joe himself would pass away three months later, never seeing his blanket roll into full production, but having it on Mabel’s bed surrounded by everyone’s deeply cherished pieces was an honor for us and everyone present.
Another value we tried to emphasize is specificity. We constantly asked ourselves: What about a set or a prop made it specific to the world of Reservation Dogs and the community it represented? What opportunity did each space present to create something that belonged in no other world and on no other show but ours? Keeping those commitments in mind ensured we designed, built, and dressed spaces that spoke to the very precise cultural niche we occupied.
For example, the Maximus character and his living spaces in season 3. The concept is something recognizable – a crazy conspiracy theory hermit living off the grid – but we wondered what we could do to make it specific to our world. Instead of “aliens,” we focused on Star People. We researched what that concept meant in Indigenous culture and spoke to elders and others in the community about their understanding and the tales they were told as kids. We delicately wove all of it into the sets in the form of swirling Star Charts and symbols that, when observed closely, depicted the stories we were told. We also incorporated the artwork of Harvey Pratt, an Indigenous Oklahoma artist with an amazing body of Bigfoot art that spoke very clearly to our world. Harvey had been a forensic sketch artist with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation before launching a project where he interviewed people who claimed to have seen Bigfoot and incorporated their descriptions into his paintings. Our favorite piece, The Gift, featured an Indigenous man meeting a family of Bigfoot characters in the woods and presenting them with an offering.
Can you tell us more about your collaboration with local Indigenous artists, from artist Johnnie Diacon and long-time activist Casey Camp-Horinek?
Brandon Tonner-Connolly: The local artists we collaborated with, and the community in general, were the heart of the show. I think the IHS (Indian Health Services) set is a prime example of how fortunate we were to work with so many amazing artists from the community. For the exterior, we collaborated with Yatika Starfields, who came in and created a mural satirizing the idea of Western medicine being gifted to Indigenous people. We also collaborated with Ben Brown to create a Spirit Anatomy poster, which offers a glimpse inside the Spirit character, revealing the culturally significant objects that make up his life force. Many of the framed paintings in the hallways are reproductions of artwork by Tafv’s Grandfather, Will Sampson.
This last season, I pitched what I thought was an absurdly unsubtle idea of adding a buffalo mural to the break room space, and we were honored to have Johnny Diacon come in and create an astonishingly beautiful, subtle piece of original art. Elora Danan and Leon sit in front of it in “Friday” S3. Johnny painted it on a Saturday, so the set was deserted and quiet, and the experience of listening to him tell stories about his life while he painted this amazing scene will stay with me forever. I feel really lucky to have been there.
Casey Camp-Horinek was kind enough to let us dress a shawl she had worn at the Wounded Knee protests in the home of her character, Irene, which added even more depth and intimacy to the space.
What were some of the most memorable moments for you while working on Reservation Dogs?
Brandon Tonner-Connolly: It’s a challenge to narrow it down, but two moments loom especially large in my memory.
On the first shoot day of season one, the call sheet had a banner announcement for a “Blessing Ceremony at Call.” At 8 a.m., the parking lot of our Tulsa location, a strip mall clinic we had turned into the IHS, was filled with the usual trappings of a film set: trailers, catering tents, frayed nerves. But the entire cast and crew (both on and off-set personnel) were also gathered, arranged in a loose circle around a smaller band of Indigenous community leaders, elders, and Sterlin, the creator and showrunner.
Wotko Long, an elder who would pop up as a variety of background characters over the next three seasons, welcomed everyone to Muscogee Creek land. Legendary Seminole and Cherokee artist Dana Tiger, who would also appear on the show, sang with a local Indigenous drum group. Sterlin spoke, telling us that while we were making a comedy, we shouldn’t forget how many years of suffering led to our ability to joke about it – how Native Americans have always appeared as either props or villains and how this would be the first show to let them tell their own story. And, most poignantly, how every Native American in the cast and crew was there because one of their ancestors had found a way to survive.
I’d never started a show in such a meaningful way; it contextualized the work we were about to do and invested it with purpose.
The second moment was a little later in season one when Sterlin screened the pilot for the community at the Circle Theater in Tulsa. Watching it with an audience on the big screen was a very moving experience. I had seen it many times before on my laptop or at the office, but I hadn’t heard people laugh at certain moments, or gasp at certain moments, or respond with joy or tears at certain moments. Experiencing that and talking to people afterward, it really hit me more so than before that this show mattered to people in a deeper way. It mattered to people who watched it and saw their story for the first time, which I always took as a major responsibility for me and the rest of the people in the art dept to put everything they had everyday into getting it right.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during the production of the show, and how did you overcome them?
Brandon Tonner-Connolly: There are always the standard challenges of time and resources, but we did face one especially unique obstacle in this last season of the show.
A day before we were supposed to start loading in the sets for the Boarding School, there was a catastrophic fire in the building that housed our construction, scenic, and set dec shops. The building’s structure was almost destroyed in the blaze, which meant much of the historical dressing was gone before it could even reach the set, not to mention dozens of kits and personal tools that were lost in the middle of production. Things that hadn’t been burned were soaked by water from the firehoses.
Thankfully, no one was hurt, but it was quite devastating, both logistically and emotionally. I think a lot of different crews would have accepted it as a major setback and compromised the work, but our art dept never skipped a beat. We had a big team meeting, we all listened to how everyone was feeling, and we made the decision to move forward to do our best work without looking back. Production continued without a costly change in schedule (no small matter for a show like ours), which was a testament to the sense of responsibility everyone felt toward the story and the series in general. That’s one of the things I’m the proudest of from the whole experience: I’ll always be able to look back and say I was part of a very special team of people who came together with one goal in mind: to tell these stories in the rich detail they deserve.
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