![]() ![]() Since Mark’s wife has died, nearly everything in his house is stored in the basement. Selvig’s houses side by side, with Selvig’s half slightly elevated so she can peer down into his life. Production built the interiors of Mark and Mrs. Selvig (Patricia Arquette), a sweet aunt type who the audience knows is actually a cold Lumon boss by the name of Cobel. “The architecture of his place is so perfectly wrong,” Hindle said. When Adam Scott’s Mark isn’t in the office, he retreats into a despairing life in the real world, where he mourns the death of his wife and lives in grim, suburban corporate housing. Then we printed them out and painted on them.” “The paintings needed to look classical but believable,” Hindle said. The show hired the actor Marc Geller to pose as Kier in “every possible situation and pose,” Baseman said, and then worked through a variety of possible artworks based around the hallowed founder. Erickson’s scripts described each painting in detail, and the production team worked with digital artist Hugh Sicotte to design how each painting would look based on those references. One cribs from the pose of the Romantic hero of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog another, seen above, poses Eagan as a neoclassical Christ-like figure casting out sinners a third, which horrifies character Irving, depicts an attack from Optics and Design in a blackened, gory style that draws from Goya. The hallways of the Lumon offices are filled with paintings celebrating its founder, Kier Eagan, in a variety of situations underlining his heroism. They’re so dominant and powerful.” It’s as if the office itself is teaching the innies what an office is. “If you look at those references, it just says ‘work.’ That’s it. “If Lumon is designing a space just for people to work, you’d go back to the ’60s and ’70s,” Hindle said. For his first meeting with Stiller, Hindle put together a look book referencing imposing statements to corporate power like the John Deere headquarters designed by Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche and the Saarinen-designed Bell Labs Holmdel complex ( its brainlike parking lot stands in for the exterior of Lumon’s), as well as the 1967 Jacques Tati film Playtime, set within a massive concrete, steel, and glass set. It’s the womb of the office.’” The table, like much of the other furniture in the office building, is meant to evoke a subconscious, almost nostalgic sense of the idea of “work,” grounded in mid-20th-century design. “I said, ‘What is this table?’” said Hindle. In the show’s first episode, Britt Lower’s character Helly wakes up to her new life as an innie on top of a large table that bends around the shape of her body. (This piece will be updated as more odd corners of the Lumon office reveal themselves.) Hindle and Baseman walked Vulture through the thinking behind the various cursed objects and furniture that haunt the world of Severance. ![]() In designing the sets, Hindle worked closely with set decorator Andrew Baseman and relied on input from writer Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller to capture the particular menace of Lumon’s aesthetic. The result is an eerie yet playful steel-toned work space that befuddles the characters while winking at the audience. ![]() (The innies are, after all, only a couple of years old.) As Hindle puts it, “The managers are raising them in this work environment,” and Severance’s visual design carries forward that sense of “office as haunted playground” complete with influences from mid-century American office design by the likes of Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche and accessories that seem to exist out of time. In Severance, “innies” have no memory of their lives outside of work (the opposite is true for their “outies”) and are treated like “little children,” says production designer Jeremy Hindle, who likens their mysterious, windowless office to a playground. When you agree to sever your consciousness to work at the mysterious conglomerate Lumon, you end up in an empty, hauntingly generic office space every weekday morning. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |