Brocades and Recycled Rooms: Inside the ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Sets
Whether they’re contemporary apartments that give us crucial context about a main character or impossibly fantastic starships and castles that show us the character of a fictional setting, production design transports us to places that just feel right. But it’s often under-appreciated just how quickly these settings come together and how much detail escapes even our ability to pause on any frame. Join IndieWire in spotlighting the production designers and art teams who tackle impressive logistical challenges to do impressive visual worldbuilding.
“What We Do In The Shadows” has made Staten Island a gothic paradise for vampires — or at least an acceptable secret headquarters for Energy Vampires from all over the world — for five seasons now, with a final Season 6 arriving in October. One of the joys of a series that gets an extended run across multiple seasons is that the production team has that many more opportunities to expand the world and play with existing locations. The tone and aesthetic and the key locations are already locked in. The hard part’s done, right?
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Not at all. Keeping a show visually fresh is part of what keeps it interesting. But that kind of series longevity also creates the challenge of maintaining all the spaces the show needs — or might need to return to.
“What We Do in the Shadows” has its main Vampire Residence, of course, and it needs to return that space to its normal look even after Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) falls through the floor or an experiment of Lazlo’s (Matt Berry) goes awry. But the FX series also has to keep track of everywhere The Guide (Kristen Schaal) takes our vampires, or everywhere they stumble into in their various quests for friendship, acceptance, or keeping Nandor (Kayvan Novak) from finding out his Familiar might have more vampire blood than previously believed.
IndieWore spoke to production designer Shayne Fox, who started as a set decorator on Season 1 and gradually expanded her portfolio from curating ornate lamps and baroque fabrics to, on Season 5, designing and supervising the building of vampire-resistant cages and tall belfries for Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) to fall through.
Fox’s work on the later seasons of “What We Do in the Shadows” has to balance the show’s existing spaces and assets and the new locations needed specifically for Season 5, with both needing to come together as part of the half-hour comedy’s fast-moving shoot. Already having standing sets doesn’t necessarily make a production designer’s work easier, but it creative ways for “What We Do in the Shadows” to reuse its vampire horde of dusty rooms and treasures from across time.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: When you close down a season, what do you do to all of the builds and props? And when you open a season, what do you have on hand and what do you need to rebuild?
Shayne Fox: There are so many variables at play. We were lucky enough to get greenlit, I think at the end of Season 3, for two more seasons back to back, so we knew we had a chunk of time. We knew we could hunker down, and we didn’t have to put everything away. We were also lucky we had a lease on the studio so the mansion and the standing sets could stay up — which doesn’t always happen in television.
Some of the things that are in the standing sets are long-term rentals, so sometimes if there’s a chunk between seasons, we have to send them back to the warehouses, or we pay for an extended rental to keep them.
Like for instance, the chandelier in the foyer of the house, we rented that from Warner Brothers in L.A. for the entire six seasons of the show. We would cut them a check every six months for an extended rental, because when we started in Season 1, we didn’t know how long we were going to go. So you just pull things and you rent stuff because the production doesn’t want to pay to own everything. In hindsight, it would have been more logistically and financially intelligent to purchase something, but this is the way TV goes: Nobody wants to buy everything.
So, we rented stuff and then over the years we started replacing things that were rentals with things we found. Like, “Oh, that armoire looks just like the armoire, and it’s $60 bucks. Let’s just buy it and paint it to look like it should.” And then across the street from our studio was our warehouse for all the set decoration and props, rooms full of lamps and sconces and stacks of rugs and mattresses and all sorts of stuff. Pallets of the rooms that we have established previously that we don’t always know if we’re going back to.
Jenna’s [Beanie Feldstein] dorm room from Season 1, we held onto that because there was a slight chance it would come back, so it’s just in our warehouse. Then slowly over the years, we started pilfering things from Jenna’s warehouse pallets because we knew she wasn’t coming back.
We try to be mindful of what makes the most sense to hold onto and what we can recycle. We recycle so much on “What We Do in the Shadows.” I know I could reupholster that couch or I could paint it or we could use it in a scene where a couch needs to explode. So we hold onto things as much as space allows us.
That’s impressive because how much space does a half-hour comedy get to have, even?
One thing we don’t have, especially on a half-hour comedy, is a whole lot of time. We don’t get a huge runway when we’re approaching prep for a season. We don’t ever have the luxury of time, space, and money.
It’s like an Iron Triangle thing.
Yeah, it feels like Einstein, like the time-space continuum. You throw the dollars in there and then it’s like mathematically challenging.
So, for Season 5, we were approaching the design concept and dreaming up everything in Morrigan Manor and there was 5,000 other things going on. That’s the way episodic TV is, you know. You’re prepping episodes, you’re wrapping episodes, you’re shooting episodes, your team is all over the place. It’s not like I had weeks to sit and think about Perdita’s world and ideate this manor. We had to go shoot it in a couple of weeks. We need to figure it out.
Something that occurred to me — and I’m glad we did — was build out as much as we could from the existing spaces. We find that when we’re building sets, as opposed to being on location, it’s always better because there’s usually a lot of stunts or special effects. It’s really hard to do those things on someone else’s property, you know. So I’m trying to push for these complicated sets that stuff has to happen in to be in the studio, but we didn’t have a lot of space and studio sets aren’t cheap to do.
So, we took the Chamber of Curiosities from Season 3 and the Archives Library, which we’d had taking up space, and we used that for Morrigan. We reclad, repainted, repositioned, added walls, took out walls, and added a fireplace. But the drawing room of Morrigan Manor is actually the Chamber of Curiosities space.
Also, for the fencing gym, we did the exact same thing: reclad, repainted, added windows, new flooring, plug this, plug that. And it used to be the Archives Library.
It feels very aligned with the “What We Do in the Shadows” aesthetic, too. Different shows might take different approaches.
Different approaches and different aesthetics and different budgets and different studio spaces and different showrunners and writers. Sometimes, being on location is better because you get the real world in the background, and sometimes shows need to control all of the elements so studio builds are better. COVID had a big impact on how we shot “What We Do in the Shadows” because we couldn’t go out into the real world. That was when we built the Chamber of Curiosities and the Archives Library and a lot of other standing sets because we could control our little hub of people and test everybody. The pandemic affected us that way.
TV shows seem like miracles anyway, but especially under those circumstances. Like, it’s wild to me anyway that shows often don’t have all the scripts when they get started.
Truly, like I often say I’m so surprised we’re able to do anything because of all of the bonkers parameters — just building a shooting schedule is mind-blowing and how you balance all these things like [shooting for] daytime and nighttime and so and so’s not available on this day.
I think in the beginning, we had a smaller budget, and we had to get more crafty and more creative, and that’s how the base look was established of painting furniture and painting fabric as opposed to reinforcing because we didn’t have time or money.
And that just became sort of campy and became its own sort of design aesthetic that we established. We did a lot with paint because it was fast. You could take a $100 chair you find on Kijiji that’s got good bones and all of a sudden we’re adding fur to it, and some tassel trim, and painting the fabric, and then maybe we’ll screw on some antlers, with some big weird tassel, and now it’s something. It’s ridiculous, but you put Nandor in it doing a talking head confessional to the camera, and it just works.
“What We Do in the Shadows” is available to stream on Hulu.
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