Daniel Taylor (‘True Detective: Night Country’ production designer) on the ‘nerve wracking’ ordeal of building endless ice caves [Exclusive Video Interview]
“True Detective: Night Country” is set in the harsh cold of Alaska, but the team filmed on location in Iceland. Given the geography of that area, production designer Daniel Taylor was “really hoping” to film inside an actual ice cave for the series. But the “tricky parameters” of the script for this Max series required his team to construct a glorious artificial cavern of ice and light for one of the series’ most memorable sequences. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
The season finale, “Part 6,” begins with Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Navarro (Kali Reis) traversing the maze-like, and seemingly endless, glistening caverns that twist and turn under the surface. Taylor explains that the practical needs of this sequence, including the vast travel distance and falling through a crumbling floor, necessitated the need for a man-made setpiece which mimicked the natural world.
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Light dances around the contours of the ice walls in this scene, and Taylor notes that his team used natural resources to capture an organic shape for the caves. “We laid very thin plastic that had a slight translucency or opaqueness to it,” he describes, “We heated it and then we laid it on a bed of different size rocks. And then once it was hot, it would kind of melt a little bit over the rock shape.”
He pieced together a section of the cave about 12 feet long, and dressed it with frost and ash effects until the lights danced across the surface just right. Then it was back to the shop to create about 100 meters of artificial ice caves, in order to have enough bends and forks for the camera to chart an epic subterranean journey for the show’s two heroes. “It was a bit nerve wracking because ordinarily building an interior with windows and doors, you roughly know what you’re getting into,” admits Taylor. “But undertaking something of that size and scale, that hasn’t really been done before. Not even by the Icelandic community.”
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The threat and power of the natural world became an ever-present element of Taylor’s design, even when characters were indoors. “We were desperate to try and communicate to the audience this level of desolation and the fact that they were so remote,” he explains. Interiors are often densely cluttered, tight spaces on the series. But even though an intense attention to detail was given to those spaces, there is a constant sense of “menace” at windows. “We’re always kind of continually trying to remind the audience that whatever took the scientist is just the other side of the glass,” says Taylor. Whether the outside contained a snowstorm, a garden, or a glimpse of a building, it was all staged in a way to provide suspense. “I feel like a lot of what I came away from this season…was that even though you’re going to build an interior domestic camera inside the space set, you need to spend as much thought about what you do outside the window because that also creates…that feeling, that emotion, that atmosphere.”
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