Steven Prusakowski
It doesn’t take long for the sense of isolation and terror to hit you when watching True Detective: Night Country. Showrunner, Director and Writer Issa López had this in mind from conception then worked with production designer Dan Taylor to bring the vision to screen. Meticulous attention was given to every aspect of the production from the eerie research center to the terrifying, clue-filled arrangement of bodies.
Dan Taylor sat down with Awards Radar to discuss his work on the series. Below are some excerpts from our conversation or you can listen to our conversation in its entirety below.
In the past Issa López had spoken about how John Carpenter’s The Thing had kind of been in the back of her mind in addition to other films while developing the series. How much did that influence your approach to the design?
Dan Taylor: We spoke a lot about Nostromo in Alien and the Overlook Hotel in The Shining and how that feeling, that sinister feeling, that macabre kind of overarching, unsettling feeling, we wanted the audience to feel when we were shooting inside Tsalal and the ice station. I think that comes across. I do, it’s pretty lonely.
And actually there were a couple of occasions where, you know, I was last man standing in there, all the lights had gone out, um, and we were just doing the final dress and people had cleared back, and you’re kind of walking down the corridor just with torchlight, and it was a really eerie space to be in, and we’d built it, and I was standing in it, and I knew it was a set, and it wasn’t even lit. It just had this really, really kind of eerie feeling when you, when you walked about. I felt like if once all the lights, the camera and the music had gone in, then I think we were onto a winner.
How did you lean into that eeriness while bringing that feeling of isolation to the screen?
Dan Taylor: Well, one thing that we kind of, I, I really wanted to do is make sure that we spent enough time thinking about what we see outside the window, even if the camera doesn’t go outside the window, um, um, to try and to try and reinforce and continually remind the audience that whatever is outside that took those scientists, it’s just the other side of that pane of glass. And, and I think where possible framing, framing a blue window with snow or, or the, or, or a kind of, um, um, uh, you know, a snow storm or, or even just having a tree or some kind of outbuilding where there was snow on it. I think, I think where we, where you could possibly just continually remind the audience to sound that bell that that terror is just literally the other side of the glass, I think really, really helped.
The whole cornerstone of this season is that terrifying tangled up knot of bodies. How did that come together and what were your goals?
Dan Taylor: I think it’s so important that we give ourselves enough time to get this right. Cause if we go off on the wrong foot here, then it spoils the rest of the season. Issa knew basically what she wanted it to look like. I mean, she was very quick to act out the body positions of the various different scientists at starting with the one kind of closest to whatever takes them as the kind of the most kind of crunched over hunched, frightened, smallest, um, a scientist, smallest body shape. And then as we kind of go away, we go into a kind of cheese piece almost. So they get bigger and they stand taller and they’re a little bit more kind of standing up by the back one, not to mention the tangle of limbs and heads and bodies that kind of occupy the distance between the back and the front.
The seven or eight members of my art department down to the ice rink and I took a big photograph with one of my art department members being the front scientist, one of my art department members being the back scientist, and then we understood what footprint this sculpture needed to be, how big it needed to occupy the ice rink, so we had a better understanding of proportion, and scale, and size, how tall was the ice block that they were, they were frozen into.
See all of Dan Taylor’s work and the full season of True Detective: Night Country now streaming on Max.
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