Jack Fisk’s résumé lists collaborations with an incredible group of directors, among them Terrence Malick (Fisk has worked with the auteur since his debut, 1973’s Badlands), David Lynch (The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive) and Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, The Master). But Apple’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which scored Fisk his third career Oscar nomination, is the production designer’s first film with Martin Scorsese.
“Marty and I started out about the same time, but he was always on the other coast,” says Fisk, who now lives in Virginia with his wife, Sissy Spacek. “I never really met him, but we had a lot of mutual friends.”
Fisk tells THR that he first heard about the events that take place in Scorsese’s latest — the systematic murders of members of the Osage tribe, perpetrated by their white neighbors in order to claim their land rights and wealth — while shooting To the Wonder with Malick in Oklahoma, roughly seven years before the release of David Grann’s acclaimed book about the subject. “When the book came out, I remember sending a note to Terry about it, but it wasn’t his kind of fare,” says Fisk. “I like trying to understand the trials and tribulations of the Indigenous Americans. This horrible thing, where we just invaded America and took over everything from them …”
Particularly fascinating to Fisk was that the film captured the Osage amid a process of assimilation. “The work I’d done with Native Americans [in previous films] was always in their Native structures,” he says, noting that Grann’s book described the Osage characters as living in mansions (which by today’s standards are middle-class homes). After exhaustive research into Osage history and society — and working with Osage consultants in Fairfax and Pawhuska, Oklahoma, where the events of the film actually took place — Fisk set out to bring the past into the present. Here, he looks back on designing three locations for the film.
BILL & RETA’S HOUSE
Like most of the homes seen in the film, this was an actual house in Fairfax that was used for two vital scenes. The first is a tense standoff between brothers-in-law Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Bill Smith (Jason Isbell), both married to Osage women, while the second is a dramatic explosion — organized, in part, by Ernest — that kills Smith and his wife. While the interiors depict the new-money, bicultural furnishings of their marriage, the exterior was just as vital: The production actually destroyed the home for the explosion sequence.
“We asked the owner if we could blow it up, and he said yes,” says Fisk, who notes that the owner agreed to leveling the home and keeping the property for a new build. While there was no actual explosion for safety concerns, Fisk and his team broke down the structure after filming interior scenes. An exposed cellar allowed for a dramatic moment when the body of Smith’s wife, Reta (JaNae Collins), is discovered on a platform above the cavernous hole in the ground. The location also was helpful logistically, as a constructed set wouldn’t have as many materials as a completed house. “A lot of times when you build it, you don’t quite put enough wood in it for reality,” says Fisk, who recalls stepping over discarded nails and splinters on the site. “But this had everything.”
THE POOL HALL
The main street of Fairfax as seen in the film is actually a street in Pawhuska, also located in Osage County. It was on this strip that Fisk found a space large enough to hold the Fairfax pool hall, where Robert De Niro’s William Hale, who spearheaded the conspiracy to murder the Osage, regularly met with his collaborators. “I grew up in a small town in Illinois, and I used to get my hair cut at the pool hall,” recalls Fisk, who found photos of a space in 1920s-era Fairfax like the one from his youth to create Hale’s “command center.”
Fisk enlarged the space by removing the drop ceiling — “suddenly the walls were 12 feet high” — and slowly peeled off layers of plaster and paint from the walls. After discarding the ceiling, Fisk discovered a set of windows above the building’s visible facade covered with plaster. Once removed, the space had much more natural light and a direct view of the passersby outside. “The whole street became part of the set,” says Fisk. “Whenever we shot in the pool hall, we had to bring in 200 extras to walk up and down the street.”
THE COURTHOUSE/JAIL
A Baptist church listed for sale in Pawhuska served as the Oklahoma City courthouse where Hale was tried and convicted of murder. It had recently been renovated and no longer looked like it did during the trial. “Sometimes, if you see things that are different than you think they’re going to be, they seem more real,” says Fisk. Despite a baptismal tub by a window, the scale worked for a model of the original courtroom. Marble columns were constructed, as was an area in the balcony where cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto could light the scenes from above to simulate natural lighting. “We could shoot any time, day or night, and keep the light constant,” explains Fisk.
In the base of the building, below the courtroom, was an old basketball court, which Fisk used as the jail that holds Hale and Burkhart during their trials. “We didn’t have to go into a depressing jail and try to shoot around the activity,” says Fisk, who adds that keeping as many locations as possible close to Pawhuska was a tactical strategy.
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
